Richard Connor: This isn’t zero tolerance, it’s just intolerable

Casa Padre, the U.S. immigration facility in Brownsville, Texas, where immigrant children have been detained. (Miguel Roberts/The Brownsville Herald via AP)

“Ping.”

It’s 5 a.m. and a text alert has awakened me.

Often, I turn off the phone at night because texting has become the new email and the messages keep coming at you like ocean waves to the shore. They are constant, relentless and often immediately important. So, Pavlovian as I am – as most of us are – I jump to the sound of an incoming text.

On this night I had not turned off the sound. I jumped. And then I was awake.

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“Ping.”

The message is from a son to his father. He wants his father to recruit someone to write about the situation in Brownsville, Texas.

My first thought was sentimental. Father’s Day was coming up and here was evidence that a son still believes his father can save the day. Bring in the cavalry, Dad.

Soon, the sentiment surrendered to rage.

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There, in Brownsville, in a building named “Casa Padre,” about 1,500 immigrant children have been separated from their parents and housed in a former Walmart that now resembles a minimum-security prison. About 10 percent of the captive children were taken from a parent, or both parents, as they attempted to enter the United States illegally. The remainder are children who were most likely captured as they tried to enter our country on their own.

The children range in age from 10 to 17. Most will be there, on average, 49 agonizing, lonely days.

Your imagination does not need to run as wild as a ferocious wildfire to try to comprehend the fear, the loneliness, the desperation felt by these children and their families.

The son’s text ended with a sarcastic postscript his sometimes cynical father could appreciate:

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“Give me your tired and your poor.”

There is no need to try to replicate the detail of a Washington Post story by writers Michael E. Miller, Emma Brown and Aaron C. Davis. It’s posted on the Business Press website. (To read the story, click here.)

U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, probably had to read it as the only way to find out what goes on at Casa Padre; when he tried to visit the facility June 6 to see for himself, he was turned away at the door.

A U. S. senator denied access to a building where the U.S. government is detaining children? Unbelievable.

Casa Padre existed before Donald Trump became president so there is no need for the Trump-haters to point a single finger of blame in that direction. But under Trump’s administration, the number of those incarcerated, particularly young boys, has grown at an alarming rate.

Wrote the Post reporters: “The policy of criminally prosecuting all who cross the border illegally is creating a new category of residents at these holding centers, young boys and girls who are grappling with the trauma of being unexpectedly separated from their mothers and fathers.”

The child-separation policy is a product of this administration, the result of the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy. If we want to participate in a citizens’ revolt we should demand zero tolerance for the practice of ripping children from the arms of their parents and imprisoning them.

We’re not talking Sophie’s Choice here, but it’s in the ballpark.

There needs to be outrage in this country over what is happening in Brownsville. Casa Padre, by the way, is run by a nonprofit based in Texas. It’s called Southwest Key and now has operations in three states with more than 5,000 immigrant children reportedly housed in them.

The founder, Juan Sanchez, is also chief executive of Southwest Key. For all we know his intentions were good and may be still be good. He wanted to help with juvenile justice programs.

His soft heart, though, is paying him some hard money. In 2016, the Post reported, his compensation was $1.48 million. His wife Jennifer, the organization’s vice-president, is doing OK, too: According to IRS records reviewed by the Post, she earned $280,819 in 2015.

Who says you cannot do good and do well at the same time?

Several years ago in Pennsylvania two judges went to prison for running a “cash-for-kids” scam that sent juveniles to jail at the drop of a hat – or should I say gavel?

That operation was not only cruel but blatantly illegal. What the U.S. government is doing in Brownsville is permissible under federal law but constitutes a shocking violation of a historically humane nation’s covenants of common decency. Law or no law, jail would be fitting punishment for the perpetrators of this despicable policy.

There is no denying that illegal immigration is a massive problem. There is also the not-so-secret reality that farms, ranches, and any number of labor-intensive businesses would be hard-pressed to get work done without the illegal immigrants who have poured into this country in search of employment. The Texas economy would be among the hardest hit if this immigrant labor force suddenly vanished.

But the problem is not just about stopping folks from crossing the border. It is much deeper than that.

Let the president build his wall. Hell, hire illegal immigrants to build it and then banish them to the other side. See if the wall keeps them from coming back, or keeps anyone who is determined to cross the border from crossing it.

Lock people out if we must. But for heaven’s sake, let’s stop this madness of locking people up, especially children, for the crime of yearning for a better life and trying to find it in the greatest nation on earth.

Richard Connor is president and publisher of the Fort Worth Business Press. Contact him at rconnor@bizpress.net