Politics vs. Morality

Note to readers: My deadline for this column prevented me from seeing the big Trump rally in Fargo, but let me play Carnac The Magnificent for a moment (kids, ask your parents if you don’t know what this means) and predict in advance—I’m typing this on Saturday, June 23—what he said to his adoring fans: He talked about how much he loves farmers and how great they’re gonna be doing thanks to him; he talked a little bit about what a joke Hillary is and how badly he beat her two years ago and how much everybody loves him; he talked about Congressman Cramer for about five minutes, and then he got back to talking about the important stuff: Him. Maybe he threw in a line about how tough he is on the border and how unfair the Democrats and the “fake news media” has been to him about it and how all off them want our borders to be entirely open so that absolutely anybody who wants can come in whenever they want. (Tell me if I got it more than half right.)

Back in the real world, though, we’re in the midst of what almost everybody else in the country and the rest of the world understands is a pretty serious humanitarian crisis. This isn’t about politics. It’s that rare situation when actual morality is on the line. The central question: Do you think it’s OK for American authorities to tell—as has been reported by numerous accounts—a mother seeking (legal) asylum that they need to take her young child away briefly for a bath, only to find out, hours and then days later, that she’ll likely never see the child again? The separated children—some of them just a few months old—are held in steel cages or kennels. The cost to care for each of these newly created orphans: $775 per night.

It’s worth noting how the Trump administration tried explaining this to the American public. Both Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly said, early on, that the separation policy was intended as a deterrent: Think you’re gonna immigrate to the U.S.? How about we snatch your children and send them across the country without so much as giving you a claim check or a receipt? Still wanna come? Problem is, crafting such a policy as a deterrent is illegal. Which is why Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said the policy didn’t exist. “Period.” Both Sessions and Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders then tried to claim some kind of biblical justification for this policy which didn’t exist. When pressed on specifics, Sanders simply claimed that “it’s very biblical to enforce the law.” (An interesting perspective, given that Jared Kushner has admitted lying on his security clearance forms numerous times—each one of them a felony—and numerous other high-ranking administration figures have admitted lying to Congress and/or the FBI, which is also a felony. Why isn’t it biblical to enforce those laws?)

Trump pleaded helplessness. This policy, which didn’t exist but which he said made him as mad as the rest of us, was something he was simply powerless to do anything about. It was all the Democrats’ fault, he said, so they’d have to fix it to prevent these “vermin” from infiltrating our country. Never mind that Republicans control both Houses of Congress and the White House—or that decent people don’t refer to actual human beings as if they were cockroaches.

Finally, after realizing that virtually the entire country was galvanizing against him and his rubber-stamp Republican party, he made a big show of signing an executive order that he claims will stop this cruel policy that was created by Democrats and complies with the Bible but doesn’t exist. What exactly this executive order will really do is still up for debate.

The Republicans are doing the best to make you think this is about solving an urgent immigration crisis, or that this is about stopping marauding gangs that are coming here to kill us. Here’s what they don’t tell you: Net immigration from Mexico in the past ten years is negative one million, with last year’s number the lowest in more than a decade—and arrests at the border have dropped 75 percent.

I reached out to the entire North Dakota congressional delegation for comment on this. Senator Heitkamp was outspoken in her opposition to the government’s cruel and inhumane policy almost immediately and long before Trump’s executive order. Senator Hoeven and Congressman Cramer—after Trump signed the executive order—both sent press releases noting their support of Trump’s new policy (which replaced the old one that didn’t exist but that he was powerless to change).

Congressman Cramer, though—before the executive order—gave a couple interviews to local television and radio programs, where he was asked about the policy. He told one crew that he thought the whole issue had been “overdramatized.” And he told the other crew that the kids weren’t being kept in cages—they were simply “walls made of chain-link fences,” and that “chain-link fences are on playgrounds all across America.”

That last point might be true—in fact, I’m just back from taking my kids to play at a playground a short walk from my apartment in Brooklyn, which does indeed have a waist-high chain link fence surrounding it. Now let’s imagine I somehow made that fence five times as high, kicked all the parents out, put a padlock on the outside, and forcibly removed the parents from the area while telling them that their children were being shipped across the country, but that I couldn’t tell them where, or if they’d ever see them again.

Would it be fair to call that dramatic, Congressman Cramer? And do you still want to try to claim that it’s the same chain-link fence?