Yes, but what does the story of that one guy tell us about human nature. It
explains why those people who worked in the German extermination camps, could
do what they did.
It also was very concerning to me. I've talked about my home health aide. She
is responsible and does what I need done. She's also employed by this Catholic,
in name only, corporation, which cares for troubled children in residences.
She's one of the care workers. She has a seven year old son to whom she is
devoted. But she almost never mentions the children she cares for, and when she
does, it is not with sympathy or understanding. She's there at night so she
tends not to interact with them. The care workers get regular training sessions
which seem to have to do with how to physically restrain the children. At one
point, I said something like, "it would probably help if the training included
some explanations of why the children are behaving as they do or why they are
at the residence". And she responded, "We don't get paid enough for that kind
of training". I think she meant that they're underpaid and overworked and she
didn't want to understand any more about those kids than she had to.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2019 1:52 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: 'Somewhere People Just Accepted What's Going On
as Normal'
More than 20,000 Border Patrol Officers? Would we consider those to be
Government Subsidized Jobs? And talk about decent benefits! Along with
something around $100 thousand a year, comes health and retirement benefits.
But wait just a minute. Wouldn't it serve the American People better if those
workers were sent around the nation's cities, cleaning up the streets, filling
pot holes, insulating drafty homes and apartments, unplugging toilets and
greasy sinks, hauling junk out of vacant lots, and hunting down absentee slum
lords and fining them for neglecting their property?
And If we made the total subsidized work force around 100,000, think of how
much more we could get accomplished, and what sort of an impact it would have
on local economies. And we might also hold group meetings and teach folks to
care for their towns, buying back at pennies on the dollar all the neglected
property owned by the slum lords.
Hmm...I'd better quit day dreaming and get back to work.
Carl(sleeping beauty)Jarvis
On 7/17/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
'Somewhere People Just Accepted What's Going On as Normal'
'Somewhere People Just Accepted What's Going On as Normal'
A family is placed in a Border Patrol vehicle near McAllen, Texas.
(Eric Gay / AP)
The Border Patrol agent, a veteran with 13 years on the job, had been
assigned to the agency's detention center in McAllen, Texas, for close
to a month when the team of court-appointed lawyers and doctors showed
up one day at the end of June.
Taking in the squalor, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the poor
health and vacant eyes of the hundreds of children held there, the
group members appeared stunned.
Then, their outrage rolled through the facility like a thunderstorm.
One lawyer emerged from a conference room clutching her cellphone to
her ear, her voice trembling with urgency and frustration. "There's a
crisis down here," the agent recalled her shouting.
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At that moment, the agent, a father of a 2-year-old, realized that
something in him had shifted during his weeks in the McAllen center.
"I don't know why she's shouting," he remembered thinking. "No one on
the other end of the line cares. If they did, this wouldn't be
happening."
As he turned away to return to his duties, the agent recalled feeling
sorry for the lawyer. "I wanted to tell her the rest of us have given up."
It's rare to hear from Border Patrol agents, especially since the
Trump administration has put them at the front lines of its sweeping
immigration crackdown. Public access to them is typically controlled and
choreographed.
When approached off duty, agents say they risk their jobs if they
speak about their work without permission. As a result, much about the
country's largest federal law enforcement agency - with some 20,000
agents policing the borders and ports - remains shrouded in secrecy,
even from congressional oversight, making it nearly impossible to hold
it accountable.
Disturbing glimpses of some agents have recently begun to fill the
void, including some that were published recently after ProPublica
obtained screenshots from a secret Facebook group for current and
former Border Patrol agents that showed several agents and at least
one supervisor had posted crude, racist and misogynistic comments
about immigrants and Democratic members of Congress. The posts raised
questions about whether the deplorable detention conditions on the
border were out of the control of Customs and Border Protection, as
the agency had asserted, or a reflection of its culture.
Other reports followed, including one from CNN that described agents
attempting to humiliate a Honduran immigrant by trying to force him to
be photographed holding a sign that read in Spanish, "I like men." The
Intercept published more degrading posts from the secret Facebook
group, and it reported that it appeared that Border Patrol Chief Carla
Provost had once been a member. Provost has not commented.
But there was some nuance. An account of life inside a Border Patrol
detention facility outside El Paso, Texas, by The New York Times and
The El Paso Times, revealed that two agents there had expressed
concerns about the conditions to their supervisors.
The agent who spent June in McAllen doesn't see his reality in any of
those depictions. He's in his late 30s and is a husband and father who
served overseas in the military before joining the Border Patrol. He
asked not to be identified because he worried that his candor could
cost him his job and thrust him and his family into the middle of the
angry public debate over the Trump administration's border policies.
His comments come at a particularly fraught moment, as politicians on
the left compare the Border Patrol's detention facilities to
"concentration camps" and senior Trump administration officials,
including most recently Vice President Mike Pence, dismiss
descriptions of the inhumane conditions as "unsubstantiated."
When asked about Pence's comments, the agent said the damning
descriptions of the facilities are "more substantiated than not." And,
while he didn't embrace the term concentration camp, he didn't dispute
it either. He searched out loud for a term that might be more
accurate. Gulag felt too strong. Jail didn't feel strong enough.
He came around to this: "It's kind of like torture in the army. It
starts out with just sleep deprivation, then the next guys come in and
sleep deprivation is normal, so they ramp it up. Then the next guys
ramp it up some more, and then the next guys, until you have full
blown torture going on. That becomes the new normal."
Referring back to the grim conditions inside the Border Patrol holding
centers, he said: "Somewhere down the line people just accepted what's
going on as normal. That includes the people responsible for fixing
the problems."
He spoke at length in several interviews, making clear that the views
and motivations he articulated were his alone. He said he's not on
Facebook, much less a member of any secret Border Patrol social media
groups. He also said he did not witness any egregious behavior by his
colleagues during his time in McAllen. But he said the agents who were
permanently posted there had the shortest fuses, and he'd heard them
launch into condescending harangues at the young migrants, blaming
them for crossing the border illegally and denying their requests for
extra food, water or information about when they'd be released.
Most of his colleagues, he said, fall into one of two camps. There are
the "law-and-order types" who see the immigrants in their custody, as,
first and foremost, criminals. Then, he said, there are those who are
"just tired of all the chaos" of a broken immigration system and "see
no end in sight."
"The only possible end to this that I see is if there's some change
after the next election," he said, referring to what might finally end
the stalemate in Washington over how to reform the system. "Either
this president will win again, and Congress will be forced to work
with him. Or a new president will get elected and do things a
different way."
In addition to the interviews, the agent shared a journal entry about
his time in McAllen, which he wrote in a tentative attempt to sort
through what he described as the "roughest" experience of his career;
a month that he said revealed a disturbing capacity for detachment.
"What happened to me in Texas is that I realized I had walled off my
emotions so I could do my job without getting hurt," he said. "I'd see
kids crying because they want to see their dads, and I couldn't
console them because I had 500 to 600 other kids to watch over and
make sure they're not getting in trouble. All I could do was make sure
they're physically OK. I couldn't let them see their fathers because that was
against the rules.
"I might not like the rules," he added. "I might think that what we're
doing wasn't the correct way to hold children. But what was I going to
do? Walk away? What difference would that make to anyone's life but
mine?"
When asked whether he simply stopped caring, he said: "Exactly, to a
point that's kind of dangerous. But once you do, you feel better."
Part of that feeling, the agent said, comes from experience. He's
served Republican and Democratic administrations, each one with its
own border crisis and wildly unpopular responses. Other people might
find it hard to view his agency outside the context of their political
leanings, but he said that he didn't join because he feels strongly
one way or the other. He has a criminal justice degree and was looking
for a federal law enforcement job that would provide him financial
security, without requiring him to go overseas.
What keeps him in now, even as his job has morphed into one he and his
wife are uncomfortable talking about in public, is that he earns about
$100,000 a year, including overtime and holiday pay. He has a
top-of-the-line health insurance plan that, among other things,
covered nearly the entire cost of his child's birth. In a little more
than a decade, when he turns 51, he'll be eligible to retire with a
full pension that probably won't cover the cost of a house on the
beach, he said, but will give him the freedom to "do just about
anything else I want, and not have to worry."
The agent, tall and fit with dirty blond hair, said he thinks of his
time left in the Border Patrol like the home stretch of a marathon. He
does his work with blinders on to everything but his family and the finish
line.
"I'm
already starting to attend retirement seminars," he said. "All I'm
trying to do is get through the next decade."
That was his mindset, he said, when he landed in McAllen. It was his
first time on the border since he was a rookie. He'd spent most of his
career posted in the eastern part of the United States, investigating
smuggling organizations rather than intercepting undocumented
immigrants. But as huge numbers of Central American migrants came to
the Rio Grande Valley, he and hundreds of agents across the country were
summoned to help.
In his journal entry, the agent described what he saw when he arrived
at the Border Patrol detention center as a "scene from a zombie
apocalypse movie."
His colleagues, he said, wore surgical masks and rubber gloves because
there was "sickness and filth everywhere." And he said the facility
"looked like a walled-off compound where the government had the last
safe zone and was taking in refugees fleeing the deadly zombie virus."
The scene that struck the agent the hardest that first day was the
sight of dozens of children being held in cages - an image publicized
this year to widespread condemnation. The children seemed about the
same age as his 2-year-old son, but that's where the similarities
ended. "My kid would have been running laps around that entire building,
nonstop," the agent said.
"But the boys my kid's age, they were just there. They weren't running
or playing, even though they had been pent up all day."
The agent said he suspected that the kids were lethargic because they
hadn't been given enough to eat. He said he wondered, "Why are things
like this?"
He said he didn't look for answers because he didn't expect he'd find any.
"I decided not to dwell on it, and just do my job."
He went on that way for weeks, seeing things without dwelling on them.
His interactions with individual immigrants, he said, are a blur. He
vaguely recalled a government staffer combing lice out of a little
girl's hair; 7- and 8-year-olds pacing in circles and sobbing
inconsolably because they'd been separated from their parents; a
teenage mother who'd swaddled her baby in a filthy sweatshirt that
she'd borrowed from another detainee because she'd been forced to throw away
the clothes she brought.
Only a few of those encounters are mentioned in the agent's written
account of his experiences in McAllen. Most of it reads like a
chronicle of a mundane work trip. He got Memorial Day off. He bought
groceries and stopped drinking soda. A colleague who was staying at
the Residence Inn shared enough free gym passes to last the entire
trip, and his waist size went from
33 inches to 32. He started listening to music again: "Not a specific
style, language or rhythm rather music that expressed passion." And he
tried meditation.
The visit by the team of lawyers to the facility near the end of June
seemed to shake up the agent. The team, led by a California attorney
named Hope Frye, had arrived to interview children being detained in
McAllen. The agent's duties placed him close enough to them to observe
their work.
Frye said that typically during such visits, the agents tend to blend
into the background; silent and straight-faced, in their badges and
drab green uniforms. They didn't engage much with her because they
were instructed not to. She said years of hearing immigrant children
tell her how badly they'd been treated in detention had long made her worry
about the agents'
humanity. "I'll look at them and wonder sometimes, 'What kind of a
parent are you when you spend your entire day filled with hate and
victimizing other people?'"
But to get her work done, Frye said, she tries to keep such thoughts
to herself. At some point in McAllen, however, she let a comment slip
to the agent about a young child who had been separated from his
family. The agent, she said, blurted out that he knew of another woman
who was separated from her family and raising a 2-year-old on her own.
Frye, 68, said she asked the agent if he was referring to his own family.
Her question started a series of exchanges that didn't diminish her
suspicions about the Border Patrol, Frye said, but did change her
thinking a bit about the agent.
"If what happened was a film, you'd see an older woman with many years
of experience, her eyes lined from seeing these poor children, and a
young man, with a young family, seeing this nightmare for the first
time," Frye said, recalling her encounter with the agent. "What I
thought to myself was, 'How sad is it that this young man who probably
wants to be of service to his country is stuck doing this.'"
Referring to the agent's initial outburst, she said, "I think he was
trying to tell me, 'Hey, I'm human too.'"
Katherine Hagan, a Spanish interpreter who worked alongside Frye, also
interacted briefly with the agent, and, although he didn't say it in
so many words, she felt he was struggling to reckon with his role at
the facility, as if, she said, "he had become so accustomed to seeing
children behind wire cages that he had assimilated it as normal and
necessary."
At one moment, she said, she recalled him scrambling to find clothes
for the baby girl wrapped in the sweatshirt. The baby was so dirty
that Frye wiped away rings of black dirt from around her neck. But at
another point the agent lectured Hagan about indulging the immigrant
children, warning her not to let "the aliens" use the officers'
bathrooms.
"I'm trying to find the right words to describe his demeanor," Hagan,
a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, said of the agent. "I could
tell he felt embarrassed and potentially kind of exposed. I don't know
whether he was having some kind of epiphany. But it was clear he knew
that I saw him - really saw him - in the middle of this horrible
situation."
When asked about the interactions, the agent said he was trying to
communicate to the lawyers that the detainees were not the only ones
at the facility who felt trapped. Walking away, at least in his mind,
was not an option. Trying to change things on "a macro level," the
agent said, was for fools.
"The most I felt I could do was make sure toilet paper was stocked. Or
if someone wanted an extra juice, I'd give them an extra juice. Or
maybe do something to make someone's day a little nicer; maybe smile
and treat them with respect. That's all I felt I had the power to do," the
agent said.
"The
ones that try to save the world, they're the ones who either get
burned out or put on a leash."
The agent compared himself to the cynical donkey in George Orwell's
"Animal Farm" who survives by never sticking his neck out.
"I've decided that I'm not interested in advancement," he said. "I'd
rather be a full-time father than a full-time Border Patrol agent."
But now that he's home, he feels the experience has somehow followed him.
"I go to the playground with my kid, and I say to myself, 'Why am I
not enjoying this?'"
Ginger Thompson / ProPublica
