Bearing witness to an American atrocity
“Never again” is never guaranteed
Like any government action, there are many ways to measure the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that has cruelly and forcibly separated more than 2,300 children, including infants and toddlers, from their parents. Does the policy command public support? (No.) Does it stem from congressional action? (No.) Does it make the United States safer? (No.)
The most basic measure of any government policy — particularly in a country built on human enslavement — has to be whether it’s grounded in human decency. Does it protect human beings from violence and harm? Does it keep them safe from oppression and persecution? Does it leverage the state’s monopoly on violence to serve the public, or does it do so to serve a political agenda? Policymaking is complicated, but these questions are not.
There’s little doubt that by these crucial measures, the Trump administration’s immigration policy is an abject failure and a stain on America’s moral conscience. To subject families fleeing violence and persecution to further violence and persecution is, as Alex Wagner wrote in The Atlantic, to “extinguish the idea of America.” To rip children from their parents and shatter families into disconnected units — some of them too young to form a sentence, let alone a compelling legal argument — is to write a new chapter in a long and brutal legacy of bigotry and dehumanization.
Grounding a nation’s rules and laws in basic human decency isn’t a matter of doing the right thing because it feels good. Generations of memorable calls to summon the better angels of our nature, to bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice, to ask what we can do for our country — these aren’t just rhetoric. They’re values lived through policies rooted in compassion and understanding, in giving each other the benefit of the doubt, in building a society that makes us better versions of ourselves.
These policies are the anchors that keep human beings — the tribalistic, zero-sum, us-versus-them creatures we are — from drifting into darkness. We know that people are capable of great kindness. But history shows us that individual kindness doesn’t always override the impulse of the majority tribe. We ground public policy in human decency because the cruelty of dehumanization is far too easy.
When we think of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, or Rwanda or Bosnia in the 1990s, or America throughout centuries of slavery and genocide against indigenous peoples, we reassure ourselves that we’ve learned from history. We rightly recommit ourselves to a policy of “never again.” But the horror being systematically implemented on the southern border of the United States is a reminder that “never again” is never guaranteed. It’s a reminder that while the world as a whole is likely safer and kinder and more humane now than any time in human history, no society is immune to wickedness.
Today, the echoes of darker times are unmistakable. Warehouses full of caged human beings. Families torn apart, sometimes irreparably, to provoke fear and to rally political support. Tent cities for children. Denials of asylum for survivors of gang violence and domestic abuse. Cruelty masquerading as the rule of law or the word of God. Angry screams about an impending “infestation” to justify the quiet construction of the infrastructure of atrocity.
Reflections of a tragic past haunt us for a reason.
This ugly reality owes to more than just the rage of Donald Trump and the resentment of Stephen Miller. Their cruelty and xenophobia may be the catalyst (“Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border,” one Trump adviser told Vanity Fair), but making it real means mobilizing vast federal agencies. It means quietly awarding lucrative contracts that create new economic incentives and solidify family separation as a powerful interest group.
It means cultivating a sense of righteous compliance that empowers federal officials to joke that the cries of children screaming for their parents are an “orchestra” missing a “conductor.” It means cultivating a conviction that America is under attack that liberates individual actors to keep asylum-seekers locked in chain-link cages, and to prevent crying siblings from hugging. This combination of fear and lies, of impunity and bureaucracy, is how atrocities happen.
But they only succeed when well-meaning people look the other way. When we find ourselves overwhelmed. When we succumb to apathy and exhaustion.
What can we do? Exactly what scholars, storytellers, and survivors have done throughout human history. We fight to expose the human tragedy our government is perpetuating. We refuse to ignore it or let it become normal. We resist the temptation to close the browser, or file these stories under “out of sight, out of mind.” We reject the comforting conviction that it can’t be that bad — that this chapter of systematic dehumanization is sure to end differently — in favor of an awareness that America has a long history of leveraging the loss of humanity for political gain.
We support the journalists and truth-seekers whose work has brought inhumanity into the light and kept it there, taking the small policy changes and bureaucratic tweaks that might otherwise be overlooked and showing how together they form a Trojan horse of cruelty. And we urge these same journalists to continue to cover the human impact of future government policies, even if that coverage comes at the expense of the political horse race. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick put it recently, “It’s all too much, and we still have to care.”
We bear witness to dehumanization, and we fight it with relentless humanity.
Earlier this month, Stephen Miller — the latest in a long line of resentful white men with a chip on his shoulder to stumble into a position of power — told The New York Times that the “message” of these cruel directives “is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”
This is wrong. The real message is twofold: no society is ever truly free from the threat of humanity’s worst impulses. But those impulses, and those who would enable them, can be defeated.