On Monday, Donald Trump held the “Salute to the Heroes of ICE & CBP” event at the White House to pay tribute to the officers and agents of the department of Customs and Border Protection and the Immigration Customs Enforcement agency.
Needless to say, it was a shit show.
First, lets begin with the elephant in the room.
Why in the world is there an event praising and honoring the men and women that carried out Trump’s notoriously racist and xenophobic “zero-tolerance” immigration policy? These were the people on the front lines physically separating thousands of children from their parents without a second thought.
Then continued to cage them all like animals behind metal cages.
There is no doubt that there is a huge underlined message in holding this ceremony not even a month after the deadline set by a California federal judge that forced Trump and his government to reunite all the families that they inhumanely separated and treated.
The underlying message here is that Trump does not regret any of the terrible things that his administration did to thousands of undocumented immigrants that came to our southern borders this summer seeking refuge and asylum.
It shows the heartless and racist reasoning that drove the most powerful political leader in the world to unleash a series of racially-fueled attacks on some of the most desperate and vulnerable people in our side of the world.
As Trump stood at the podium praising what he continually referred to as “CBC” and not the correct acronym of “CBP,” almost 600 undocumented children still remain detained and separated from their parents.
As he stood at the podium hundreds of parents are still desperately awaiting thousands of miles away, in the countries they attempted to flee from, for their children after being deported without them.
As he stood at the podium, the American Civil Liberties Union is scrambling to reunite those childrens still separated from their parents and the children whose parents are no longer in the country, a job the Trump administration stated is the duty of the ACLU.
On top of all that, the administration is currently facing numerous allegations of abuse at several ICE-contracted detention centers.
“Only this White House would give medals for taking thousands of immigrant children from their parents,” Tom Jawetz, vice president for immigration policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told the publication Politico.
There is no doubt that this “Salute to the Heroes of ICE & CBP” is just another way to promote his anti-immigrant agenda and rhetoric as we near the midterm elections this November.
“[…] The Trump administration anticipates the midterm fallout from its zero-tolerance border policy very differently from its critics,” the outlet Politico wrote. “The ceremony is ready-made to provoke ire from opponents of the zero tolerance policy, some of whom have called for ICE’s abolition.”
These kind of insensitive, cold-hearted and racially-fueled blows to our undocumented community are what we must remember at the polls this November when voicing what future we want for our country.