Not all families of course. If you're a young American man from Compton looking at life in prison on a three-strikes count, nobody is suggesting you be allowed to keep your family together. And quite frankly, nobody in the media or across the punditocracy much gives a shit.
If, on the other hand, you're a young woman from Honduras arrested for entering the US illegally, Americans will rise up in their hundreds of thousands to march for your right to keep your family together.
What gives? A whole lot of politicking, that's what.
The anti-Trump media are ecstatic to have discovered a fresh beatin' stick with which to pummel the Orange Ogre. Yup, Trump's ICE goons are tearing families apart... the barbarity, the horror!!!
The humanitarian prerogative of keeping families together is a very recent discovery on the part of America's opinion makers. It's a rather selective empathy. It doesn't apply to those millions of marginalized Americans ensnared in the prison-happy judicial system, nor does it apply retroactively to anything that may have happened in the Before Trump era. Here's a recent story at VOX (hardly a pro-Trump media outlet) comparing immigration policy today with the Obama era, when Americans of good conscience neither knew nor cared about what happened at the border.
And let's never forget former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's profoundly compassionate insights into the deaths of half a million Iraqi children back in the Clinton era. I suppose that's different; those children have long been reunited with their families in Paradise.
Speaking of Albright, here's her acceptance speech at the Atlantic Council's 2018 Freedom Awards
gala last week, where she was honoured for her lifetime achievements for "liberal democracy" and Empire. Truly an inspirational porridge of sanctimony and bafflegab!
But it does prove that a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand children are no big whoop one way or the other in the over-arching sweep of American Exceptionalism.
Unless of course their narrative can be harnessed in the cause of "the resistance."
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