Bangor: stop inhuman “zero tolerance” immigration policies

Yesterday there was a protest outside the building housing Senator Collins’ office, demanding she take action to stop inhuman “zero tolerance” immigration policies.

 

Our very own Dennis Chenoy was one of the speakers and he had the following to say:

 

Despite the Trump/Sessions immigration fiasco roller-coaster, careening from one form of human rights abuse to the next with each passing day, certain things remain as true and constant.

 

First and foremost, there is a true Central American refugee crisis. It continues to deliver frightened and vulnerable people, often whole families, to our border. Most commonly their flight is impelled by ghastly levels of gang violence they have suffered.   And violence they would suffer if returned to their country.   

 

That’s why they left. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees and multiple other human rights groups in El Salvador have told us this is true

 

Truth number two: Jeff Sessions instructions to immigration judges —  that the only valid criterion for asylum is persecution by one’s government, and that fleeing gang violence does not count – precisely disregards what the United Nations High Commission on Refugees has declared to be true.  

 

By so doing, by one ruling, he has denied the legitimate refugee status of the vast majority of forced migrants from Central America before they ever set foot in an immigration court, if they ever would. By so doing, he has brazenly replaced the most basic standards of internationally recognized criteria for asylum with a Donald Trump Make America Great Again farce of a justice system. This is American exceptionalism at its worst.

 

Truth number three:    After a flight for their lives, and a harrowing journey, migrants at the border encounter an alternate reality where they are used as pawns in a political game. The game is:  Some Americans must be made to fear, so that a President can appear to be protecting them.   The object of the game: Get the most votes.  The reality of the lives in question: Irrelevant.

 

Fourth, and finally:   To achieve the levels of fear required, nothing is off limits.  As so, we have our highest national figures spewing hate, nonstop.   We have the spectre of so-called “shithole countries” sending us malevolent, predatory, raping, thieving, murderous thugs, conniving women, and even small children who, we are told, are not what they seem.  

 

We have the spectre of migrants who “invade,” who “infect,” who “infest”, who “breed” in our sanctuary cities. If this language of human beings as vermin echoes abominations of the past and gives us the shivers, it should.

 

So, the outrage of the week may be children ripped from the parents arms.

 

Or children incarcerated indefinitely with their parents.   

 

Or an Attorney General’s ruling that violates all norms of internationally recognized human rights protocols.

 

Or a Presidential demand that migrants at the border be denied any due process guaranteed by U.S. law, and be expelled immediately.   

 

But what remains constant, and calculated, is the malice that feeds the fear that’s necessary to dehumanize those who could be our sisters and brothers, or could be our children, and deadens our capacity to love.  That is the evil for evil for which we must have zero tolerance.