The socialist case for the INS?

8.7.18

Scott Jay // The socialist case for the INS?: The current situation cannot hold, but not because caging children is anathema to US politics. In fact there is a long tradition of caging children in the US and separating them from their parents, from the enslavement of Africans (whose family members were often sold and never heard from again) to the genocide of Native Americans, whose children were shipped off to boarding schools through the Twentieth Century. Continuing to today, migrant children from Central America were encaged under the Obama administration, and juvenile detention centers continue to encage mostly Black and Latino children. The most notorious recent example is that of Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old who was detained on New York’s Riker’s Island for three years after being accused of stealing a backpack, later committing suicide after his release.

The Kalief Browder’s that still sit in cages throughout the US will see no relief from whatever reforms come to deal with the current immigration crisis. And the reforms are likely to come. The legitimacy of the US’s racist border policy depends on a change to this disastrously cruel policy. It will likely be changed in order to ensure that Mexican and Central American and other immigrants can continue to be policed and exploited and terrorized, just perhaps with a bit less visible cruelty toward the children.