5/13/22
By Josh Rubin
The news we learned that some folks associated with QAnon had set themselves up near the Arizona border with Mexico in order to intercept minors crossing into the U.S. was horrifying for many of us to hear. The details of their little operation, that they were investigating the relatives of these children to make sure they weren’t pedophiles, even going so far as to visit their homes, were chilling.
But now, after years of involvement with our own government’s procedures for dealing with unaccompanied children who arrive at our border, the most chilling part of it was that, in broad strokes, what we do is not another universe away from what that band of damaged people were set up to do on the American side in the Sonoran desert. That is, what we are doing by separating children from their families at the border, by placing children in institutional settings while we “vet” the families that wait for them, is justified with very similar rationalizations. Namely, that these children are in extreme danger of being sexually molested, and specifically that they are being trafficked for that very purpose.
It is not to say that such a thing can’t happen. We know, we have all read stories about child molestation and incest that indeed seem to have happened, and it is a horrifying thought for most of us to contemplate. But what is not well-established, what does not even appear likely, is that these children are more vulnerable than our own US-born population. In fact I think that, as in the case of criminal behavior in the migrant population, the rate of such incidents is considerably lower than our own, homegrown rate.
When I was at Tornillo and got a chance to talk to the people hired to work there, they told me that they believed that if the children languishing there for months were freed to go to the homes they traveled long distances to reach, they would—and I use the words they used—“be raped.” This belief, fostered by their employers and by the institutions that we entrust with the care of these children, is the final fallback for those that find themselves, despite their intentions, imprisoning and traumatizing children already especially vulnerable to the nearly certain abuse of confinement and isolation from their loved ones.
Our guilt goes further back than that. It goes back all the way to the historic and current havoc wreaked on their homelands, threatening their survival. It goes back to the policies that force desperate people to make desperate decisions that shatter their families and lay ruin to their ways of life.
And when, in that state their children arrive at the border, we use the excuse of their welfare to attack whatever wholeness is left to them, by assuming evil of their families. And what that psychopathic encampment of QAnon in the desert does is, much to my horror, not all that different from the self righteous and frankly racist practices of our own do-gooder institutions.