I don't want to belabor the point, but outrage is not going to do it. Once again with brio: this nation separated indigenous families and forced the children into schools where they were forced to dress in "white-type" uniforms, forced to give up their languages and dialects and cultures and identities. Even in the mid-twentieth century, children in reservation schools were treated as unteachable animals who were incapable of learning. The first wife of my beloved late husband who passed away in her fifties was such a teacher before they met and she was told that she was there just to hold the children until they were past the age when education was compulsory because they could not be taught anything. I repeat that even today the highest rates of adolescent suicide are among indigenous children.
During the days of slavery, the children of slaves were torn away from their parents and sold for profit on the auction block.
As I have pointed out again and again, as a former immigration attorney with three decades of immigration defense, including the free representation of refugees from the Duvalier dictatorships, evil and murderous father and son both supported by the United States, we have always had a serious problem on our hands, and it has been deliberate, and it has gone on through Administration after Administration after Administration.
This is not the first time we turn away refugees from our shores. This is not the first time we have allowed fascist leaders to poison and manage the seat of power. Grandpapa Bush had his bank closed and taken away from him because he supported the Nazi government of Germany during the Second World War.
So clearly we should abolish these camps but this is not the first time we have had camps or problems with horrific legislation, including the Japanese internment camps during World War II. In the end it has all had to do with gangster capitalism and the profit motive.
May I remind you that the school-to-prison pipeline which affects people of color more than any other group was designed again for the profit of the State against the people, and by people I mean primarily people of color.
When I came to the United States it became quite clear to me that although I looked white in color, because I came from one of the shithole countries that Mr. Trump has mentioned, I was not white anymore but was a POC. I have dedicated myself for half a century or longer to eradicate the poison that is white supremacy and imperialism, after the mother of a classmate in a Florida elementary school in 1960 when I was 11 years old spit on my face and told me that America did not want people such as me.
Yes, we have a problem. But it will not be resolved and it cannot be resolved until we acknowledge the crimes of the United States of Atrocities once and for all and make reparations to all the victims throughout the centuries since the foundation of the nation.
Ultimately this has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans but with white supremacy and racism and profit, let us not forget profit. The school-to-prison pipeline is an incredible profit-making system and is sold overseas as a great investment opportunity. Ask me to tell you about it, I have been offered profitable translation jobs by the industry, which I have turned down.
Prisoners are nothing but slaves, and the state and federal governments in many places are funding their projects and their budgets off the backs of their unpaid slave workers. This is an immorality that no one is talking about. In Pennsylvania where I lived for many years, children were being sent to prison camps again because the prison camps made outrageous amounts of money. And immigrant prisons such as the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia or the West County Detention Center in Contra Costa County in California are great opportunities to turn a buck. The buck is turned by both Republicans and Democrats because the mainstay of the national ethos, if one can call it that, is filthy lucre.
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