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Fantastic Negrito Rocks Hard: "The Duffler"

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JordanRules6/17/2018 10:23:26 pm PDT

Trump is mostly alone in blaming the Democrats; others prefer to blame the families. “We do not have a policy to separate children from their parents,” the D.H.S. secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, told a Senate committee hearing. “Our policy is, if you break the law we will prosecute you.” The White House chief of staff, John Kelly, told NPR, “The children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.” The Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, said, on the conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, “It’s certainly not our goal to separate children, but I do think it’s clear, it’s legitimate to warn people who come to the country, unlawfully bringing children with them, that they can’t expect that they’ll always be kept together.” In a scene from Sunday’s Globe piece, a defense attorney pleads with a U.S. magistrate judge in Texas, Peter Ormsby, to order a group of immigrants in custody to be reunited with their children; Ormsby turns to the defendants and says, “I hope you understand the reason there was a separation is you violated the laws here.” Look what you made me do.

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In intimate-partner abuse, the battered woman is both the cause and the effect of the violence waged against her; in the violence being done to families at the border, the abducted child takes the battered woman’s place. (Look what your parents made me do.) Another hallmark of domestic violence is the abuser’s knack for gaslighting: the repertoire of lies, distortions, deflections, and belittlements that steadily distort and erode his victim’s sense of reality, tightening the abuser’s control over her. Gaslighting, it needs not be said, is Trump’s preferred mode of communication, and it is encoded in the family-separation policy itself: once their parents have been taken into custody, the children are reclassified as “unaccompanied minors,” their parents effectively disappeared. On Friday, NPR reported on three Guatemalan mothers who were on trial in Alpine, Texas, after D.H.S. flew their children—ages eight, eight, and nine—more than two thousand miles away, to a shelter in Manhattan. “There is no mention in the Border Patrol narrative,” an immigration lawyer told NPR, “that these women had children with them when they entered the United States.” Can you prove this child is yours? Do you even have children? Well, then, where are they?

newyorker.com