This is a wonderful piece in The New Yorker, and you should go read every word. Here are my favorite bits:
I think we became the party of hemming and hawing and trying to be all things to everybody. And it’s not to say that we need to exclude people, but it’s to say that we don’t have to be afraid of having a clear message. To say, we believe in the human dignity of all people. We believe that health care should be a right. We believe that all people should be paid a living wage. We believe that, as our economy evolves, it’s time to expand public education beyond K through twelve, to K through sixteen, K through college, or K through vocational. And what we call bold agendas, or Republicans call socialist, are things that they’ve always called socialist. And [we should] wear it, understand that that’s what they’re going to say, but don’t run away from the actual policies that can transform people’s lives.
So first I start asking them, “How long have you been here?” And I start asking these questions, and at first they didn’t know what was going on. And so then I was, like, “Hold up, rewind. This is who we are. We’re members of Congress. We know that there are issues in this facility and we need to find out what’s going on.” And that’s when they just started bursting. They were almost falling over each other trying to tell me everything. You know, “They took my kids over here,” “I have two children here,” “I’m trying to find out where they were,” “They took me here,” “They moved us there,” and so on. So first I started asking them what their day was like, to understand their conditions from their perspective. I asked them who had been separated from their children in that room. Two of the women had their children taken away.
But, meanwhile, it’s important to contextualize this, that family separation is more than just taking parents away from their children. What people are saying and what the Administration is saying and qualifies as an unaccompanied child, and quote-unquote fake families, or human trafficking—what they are talking about with respect to that are also children that come with their brothers and sisters, and children that come with their grandparents, children that come with their aunts and uncles. And in Latino culture, Latino culture is extremely familial. You know, I was raised with my cousins as my siblings. I was raised with my aunts and uncles as secondary parents. And it was not unusual at all for me to spend days with my aunt or uncle. And that’s pretty much like a parent. And so when the Administration comes and says that a child with their cousin or a child with their aunt or uncle is unaccompanied, it’s a violation of the actual spirit of what is happening.
And so, anyways, there were two women that were separated from their direct children nonetheless. And so I asked them where they went. And I also asked what some of the other facilities were. Because we saw all these empty tents. We went in, here and in Clint, there were all of these tents that almost look like dog kennels, and they were just empty. And I asked these women, “How many people are here?” And they’re, like, “There’s no one else here, there’s no one else here.” And I said, “Well, why is there no one else here? We’ve been hearing that there are hundreds of people in these facilities.” And they said, “They took them all away.” And I said, “When?” They said, “The day before yesterday.”
To where?
And I asked them where, and they said two places. They dumped a lot of them in Juárez. So they took hundreds of people and just dumped them in the streets in Juárez, Mexico. And then they also took them, some of them, to Arizona. To certain C.B.P. facilities in Arizona which also have been notorious for poor conditions.
Now, is that legal?
For C.B.P. to do that, it is.
You know, there’ve been a couple of articles lately saying, basically, that the cruelty of all this is the point of the policy. What does that mean?
It is, the cruelty is the point. And, you know, a lot of folks on the right tried to bring up Obama and say, “Obama did this, Obama did this, Obama did this.”
Do they have any point?
They have some points, but they don’t have others. Obama never separated children from their parents. That’s a violation of international human rights. Obama never took this into overdrive the same way that the Trump Administration has. But Obama did pursue policies, and he laid the groundwork on this whole idea of quote-unquote deterrence. And deterrence is what has evolved into where the cruelty is the point, because it’s this idea that you can get people who are seeking asylum in the United States to think twice, to prevent them, if you inflict a little pain on them when they come. So the idea is, if a family knows that they’re going to be detained when they get to the United States, maybe they won’t come to the United States. Maybe they won’t seek asylum here. Maybe they’ll seek asylum elsewhere. And this policy of deterrence started under Obama.
In the absence of a Democratic majority, what is the answer?
So there’s a few. One is, we have, I think, as a country, a misunderstanding of the issue of immigration. We think of it as a stand-alone issue. It’s like asking, what are you gonna do about homelessness. But these are systemic issues. Once you’re at the point where you are mitigating what is happening at the border, you are already dealing with the symptoms of a large amount of other U.S. policies. So, for example, a large contributing factor to the surge on the border is the fact that President Trump withdrew U.S. humanitarian aid to Northern Triangle countries, to Central America. The United States, in my opinion, has completely abdicated its responsibility and role in Latin America, in that we are not acting like an equal partner or neighbor in the Western Hemisphere at all. We just think of everything as south of Mexico, and we treat it that way. And because of that, our largest interaction with Latin America is what happens at our border. And so that’s how it manifests in our country.
Besides Marianne Williamson, who impressed you the most?
[Laughs.] I think the debates offered really good performances from—I think there’s a large consensus on this—I think on the first night Elizabeth Warren and Julián Castro really distinguished themselves. I think on the second night, of course, Kamala Harris had a very large moment, confronting Joe Biden.
Was she fair?
I think she was. I think she was fair. I absolutely think she was fair. And I think this is also part of a larger discussion, and that issues of race and gender are not extra-credit points in being a good Democrat. They are a core part of the competencies that a President needs. We have to understand that our country is one of the biggest experiments in a multiracial democracy in the history of humanity. And if you don’t understand the multiracial, or the multi-identity, part of a multiracial democracy, it can severely hamper your capacity to govern.
What makes Joe Biden “not there” for you? And if he were to get the nomination—or a centrist of any kind, center-left, however he’s defining himself, but certainly a center figure in the Democratic Party—how should progressives behave?
Well, it’s not just about being centrist, per se. It’s, when you are struggling to talk about segregationists, and you err on the side of discussing them in glowing terms, that is a big problem. I think struggling in talking about women’s rights is a big issue. Struggling to convey respect for women in this day and age is a big issue, I think those are systemic issues. Like, those are very deep. Those are not gaffes. They are problems. And so it’s before you even get to, where are you on public college and where are you on a living wage, I think, just, like, where are you on understanding the people that live in this country?
Seriously, go read the whole thing. It’s definitely worth your time.