Let's stop repeating Republican talking points and call deportation what it is: kidnapping, trafficking human beings, and theft

It is one of the everlasting quirks of humankind’s time on this earth that many of the bad ones, the ones who are responsible for the deaths and misery of millions, are not big, famous, showy generals, or the elected or unelected leaders of nations, but rather milktoasty little functionaries who sit at desks and execute their ugly, murderous plans out of sight of the public. They are not elected to office. They don’t earn rank during long military careers and time in battle. They are, evermore, contemptible miscreants like Stephen Miller, little people who are given power because their morals match the lying, heartless, fascist men who appoint them.

Miller went on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” and told slavering host Maria Bartiromo that on Inauguration Day, his master, Donald Trump, plans to “issue a series of executive orders that seal the border shut and begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”

It’s a crime against decency and the English language that the words “deport” and “deportation” are flung around so blithely, not only by Trump and his hand-puppet, Stephen Miller, but by the mainstream media. What those words describe is the kidnapping, imprisonment, and trafficking of human beings under cover of an executive order that is not a law, but the administrative whim of one man, Donald Trump. When Donald Trump sits down at the Resolute Desk on Inauguration Day and signs a piece of paper put in front of him by Stephen Miller or some other White House functionary, he will not be signing into law a bill that has been passed by the Congress. He will be photo-opping a campaign promise that will be challenged by lawsuit within hours, but in the meantime, lives of immigrants will be upended, and people will die, as they did the last time Trump rounded up undocumented immigrants and stuck them in cages on the Texas border with Mexico.

Remember that? The mainstream media hasn’t reminded you what happened back then, so I will. NBC News reported on May 29, 2019: “At least seven children are known to have died in immigration custody since last year, after almost a decade in which no child reportedly died while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.” One case was that of a teenage migrant who died of the flu. The flu. That’s how careful Trump’s border agents were when they detained migrants in hastily-constructed camps along the border the last time. NBC reported that in late 2018, a seven-year-old child “succumbed to a rapidly progressive infection that shut down her vital organs.” This was after CPB agents sent her on a 90-mile bus ride from one CPB location to another, even though she was showing symptoms of vomiting and dehydration. In the eight months following the death of the seven-year-old child, several more migrant children died while being held in facilities that had concrete floors and thin mats to sleep on.

So, let’s have a show of hands: How many readers who have children allowed them to sleep overnight someplace where all they had was a thin mat laid on a concrete floor, and the lights were left on all night? I have three children. I’ve never sent one of them to a summer camp or a sleepover at a friend’s house where they would be treated like that.

Why was this done to migrant children in 2018 and 2019 during Trump’s first term in office? Because Donald Trump and Stephen Miller didn’t see brown-skinned migrant children as human beings. They saw them then and see them now as among the ten million “undocumented immigrants” they plan on “deporting,” starting, as Miller and Trump and the rest of them have said, on “day one.”

This is an excerpt from my weekly Salon column. To read the rest, go here:

The "deportation" lie