Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Eat Snacks
Here’s something that definitely actually happened:
A government lawyer in DC woke up, put on a suit, drove to the office, poured a cup of coffee, got to her desk, and got to work on drafting regulations which would permit the federal government to *deny snacks* to children in federal custody.
As the Trump administration began to plan a couple of months ago for the manufactured crisis which they were well aware that mass separation of children from their parents at the border would cause, federal authorities had to consider the possibility that that they would at some point run out of or be unable to timely distribute…
…snacks.
To children.
In FEDERAL DETENTION CENTERS.
I can’t stop thinking about this strange little detail from Maria Sacchetti’s characteristically-thorough early reporting in the Washington Post last month on this country’s worst federal domestic human rights violation since Japanese internment.* It’s not even the seventh most important thing revealed in her article, but there’s just something about this which has stayed with me since I first read it.
And I’ve thought of it every day since.
Fascism only works when everyone down the line quietly plays their small part in the greater system, carrying out their assigned role and doing whatever work is assigned to them without questions. Something as simple as delaying snacktime for kids within hours of their forceful orphaning by federal agents reads like the fascist equivalent of the famous ban on brown M&M’s in the Van Halen’s tour rider; there, more than anything, just so that they know that you can be trusted to pay attention and take orders when it *really* matters. If you can keep a Fruit Roll-Up from the hands of a crying, recently-orphaned child in your care begging for food just because someone told you to, you’re probably ready to stand by for just about anything. (See also: recent stories of social workers at detention centers who were ordered to keep distraught siblings from hugging each other, or the horrific stories just now coming out about the routine practice of forcibly dosing kids in ORR care with psychotropic medication.)
The “consent decree” referenced in this paragraph is the Flores v. Reno decision which has been in the news a lot in the past couple of weeks. It imposes fairly strict requirements on the government for when and how it holds children in custody, and it looks like Trump is poised to try to take it on directly to severely derogate its responsibilities.
Seeking regulatory authority to delay snacktime (and what a phrase that is) is certainly not as consequential as the actual act of separating children from their parents, but it’s a chilling detail in its own right.
Once you know that your government has gone to the trouble of reserving the right to make life more unpleasant for children who are already suffering one of the worst things a child can endure…. well, you just can’t not know it, can you?
- Guantanamo Bay maybe technically wins this dismal match-up, as it is on U.S.-owned soil
