Watch Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen avoid acknowledging that Customs and Border Protection keeps children in cages:
“Sir, they’re not cages.” What are they then? “As the children are processed through, they are in sub-parts of these facilities.” But not in cages. Children are in “areas of the border facility that are carved out for the safety and protection of those who remain there while they’re being processed.” But not in cages.
Related reading
All OCA Orwell posts (Pinboard)
[Axios has it as “some parts,” but if you listen carefully, it’s “sub-parts.”]
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
“Sub-parts”
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comments: 4
Didn't the previous President start all this? Oh wait, he's a Democrat. Never mind.
I think he did. From The Atlantic (June 18, 2018):
“The cages aren’t wholly new. During the Obama administration, unaccompanied immigrant children who arrived at the border were kept in them as well, as this tour by Representative Jim McGovern shows. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said unaccompanied minors would be deported, labeling the practice a deterrent. There was outcry at the time, especially from immigration groups, and the Obama White House was forced to stop detaining families by a court. What is different now is that the children being held are being forcibly separated from their parents at the border. So is the scale of the issue — the Washington Examiner reports that there could be 30,000 such children in custody by August.”
See, I don’t judge the rightness or wrongness of a policy or action according to political affiliation. But I also see the differences described in the last two sentences above between what was happening then and what’s happening now. And I recognize the trauma — apparently life-long trauma — inflicted on children separated from their parents. I think of my granddaughter and find such a thing too painful to try to imagine.
But the point of my post was the language of euphemism from a government official unwilling to call a cage a cage. Really, zzi, my blog posts are not the place for your potshots, or anyone’s.
MICHAEL: Thanks for naming this behavior for me (not governmental euphemisms, but riding on someone else's blog to take cheap shots):
I have instituted a NO POTSHOTS policy on my blog.
Watch out for brickbats too!
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