ICE and the Disappearing Children

The story of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) separating children from their parents, ostensibly for baths, never to return the children triggered me as a historian.

In the Nazi concentration camps the gas chambers were disguised as showers. The victims were told they were going to take delousing showers so they would peaceably enter the chambers.

The plumbing looked right so they had no suspicions until hydrogen cyanide gas started spraying from the shower heads.

Children's concentration camps is not entirely a Trumpian invention.

The Nazis liked to put children in separate camps. It made selection for their medical experiments easier when there were no adults around to protect the little ones. But mostly separating children from parents is integral to the psychological torture of both adults and children that gives psychopaths their joy.

ICE has earned itself a Gestapo-like reputation where ripping children from their parents arms and placing them in inhuman kennel-like conditions may be the least of their human rights abuses.

ICE routinely kick in doors and arrest whole families for the crime of having Hispanic surnames. Even if they are American citizens. Even deporting American citizens to foreign countries. Even shooting citizens in their ethnic cleansing purges.

Then, you knew I'd get there, we have ICE "losing" over 1500 children. They have plenty of excuses from being lousy bureaucrats who've simply misplaced  hundreds of kids to all the children are criminals who have gone into "hiding."

Of course, "losing" their children could be just another psychopathic torment ICE is inflicting on parents. Or it could be infinitely worse. Disappearing children was a weapon of the fascist dictatorship of Argentina in the 1970's. It was a weapon so potent that it still torments mothers 40 years later.

Has ICE begun killing illegal immigrants? We know ICE is evil, there is ample evidence for that. With all they do already, murder is not too big a step deeper into depravity. I'd like to believe that they have not begun killing innocents but I am certain there were many Germans in Frankfort in 1941 who liked to believe their countrymen were not murdering Jews in Poland.