In truth, the kid stuff on its own doesn't bother me that much. It's a very temporary separation, and based on those pictures, the facilities are actually ok. There's bedding. They have ample toilets. They have space blankets! What actually bothers me about the kids is that this is obviously a tactic by ICE to punish immigrants. There's been an all out assault on immigrant lives that cannot be called anything other than state sponsored terrorism. You think those kids have it bad?
Try these African immigrants who were dragged through hell in the increasingly privatized immigration detention facilities. That story actually made me sick. Or, remember the Haitian refugees who have been here for years but didn't have their status renewed by the Trump administration? They got shoved into detention facilities and became detained
indefinitely thanks to a court ruling. Yeah, be a law abiding citizen for years and suddenly live in a fucking prison for you-don't-know-how-long because your president is racist. And do I have to mention Joe Arpaio's sick and twisted tent city jail where he physically and psychologically tortured the detainees? This country has already dehumanized its immigrants, and it hasn't been a long time coming, it was a swift and vicious change, along with the rest of the post Obama backlash.
In fact I'm extremely pessimistic about any real effect this news cycle will have. I think the kids will be reunited with their families and then squished into similar but worse facilities. Then I think the news media and the liberal cognoscenti will declare mission accomplished and people will forget about (latin american) immigrants again because there aren't any kids to capitalize on, which ends up being the only way white people ever seem to sympathize with brown people.
So, I mean, I care about the kid stuff, and it is cruel (and unique to this country), but I'm just so routinely eviscerated by the news that I've been reading for the past few years that this is just another tally mark for me, and a small tally mark at that, in the routine crimes against humanity the United States participates in regarding its immigrant population. If you're European and this is the first time you've tuned in, you should know it's a thousand times worse than you think.