For a few days now people, including the president and vice president, have been explaining to us that the horrific conditions in the migrant concentration camps are the fault of congressional Democrats for not providing sufficient funding, so let’s set this straight so we know the actual facts:

Congress has legislatively capped the number of migrants ICE can legally hold and they have funded the department accordingly. They’ve done this purposefully, as per their constitutionally defined powers.

Trump is under no legal requirement to detain the people he’s imprisoned under those conditions. In fact, Congress has directed exactly the opposite. He could, and should, be scheduling a court date and releasing them into the community to be with their friends and families, monitoring as required. As Congress has mandated.

But he’s not releasing them, he’s keeping them in unsafe, sometimes deadly conditions, in order to pressure Congress. He is using human lives as leverage by holding whole families hostage.

When Trump supporters endorse the present regime of migrant detention, they are baldly, openly, proclaiming endorsement for literally abusing and torturing children in order to pressure Congress into enacting policy goals. 

That is a simple, straightforward, transparent, account of what the president is doing.

There is no other way to describe what’s happening. It’s not confusing or complex, they are nakedly doing just this. They know it’s happening, they want it to happen.

They are explicitly willing to abuse, torture, and kill children in service of politics and as Americans, we are allowing this to happen.

We are the monsters now.

What if Congress didn’t authorize any more money to this process? How many more dead, sick, tortured children would be all right with you? What policies are worthy of those sacrifices?

How many abused children is the wall worth? Surely the wall has got to be worth some suffering, right? Can we stuff children five at a time into dog kennels, if it gives us the wall? Can we starve 500 children to death if it brings back coal? How about Obamacare? Can we start throwing kids against the wall and executing them to get rid of Obamacare?

Look at what we’ve become as a nation of “greatness”. See what you’ve become.

You’re the monsters now.

I’m not even ashamed of America anymore, because this is so far removed from any idea of America any decent person held in my lifetime I can’t even connect it to the people around me. I can’t wrap my head around it. We’ve become something so openly malignant, so flagrantly wrong, so degenerate, it feels useless to even address Americans as though we’re moral beings. 

I don’t believe it’s possible to appeal to your compassion or sense of morality. I don’t know how to address your humanity anymore. As far as I can tell, whatever humanity was there, in each of you, has dissolved entirely into a toxic quagmire of terror and rage and blind, subhuman hatred.

There’s no more to say, there are no more arguments to be made.

Because you, me, us, all Americans are monsters now.

Someday this is going to be over. Someday, and maybe someday very soon, people like them, people so driven and debased by their hatred and fear and bile, will no longer be in power. History is going to tell a story, then, and it’s going to tell that story on you. History is watching. The whole world is watching.

Look at what we’re doing, look at what we’ve allowed ourselves to become. Look at what we’re saying, look at what we’re excusing. 

Look at what you’re supporting. 

Look at what we are, look at what you are now.

It’s not the migrants, the Mexicans, the Central Americans. It’s not the Iranians or terrorists or communists or postmodernists. It’s not the SJW’s or trans people or whomever the conservative media is vilifying these days. 

 

Brothers, sisters, WE are the monsters now.