July 16, 2019: Watchwords * Letter to the Editor * OPINION * Del Rio News-Herald
Letter
to the Editor,
Watchwords
When
President Trump called the southern border situation a “crisis”, the National
Democratic Leadership and their collaborators in the leftist-controlled mainstream-media
conglomerates decried his assessment as false and foolish.
Now,
when it suits their purpose, leading up to the 2020 Presidential Election, to
portray the President as responsible for the situation at the southern border,
they all jump-on-the-bandwagon, finally admitting that there’s a “crisis”. It
was a “crisis” then, and it is still a “crisis” now.
The
“cages” that children are kept in, to protect them by keeping them separate
from adults who might abuse them, are the same ones funded in fiscal year 2015 and
built under the Obama administration. During President Obama’s tenure those
“cages” were referred to as “chain-link enclosures” within detention facilities.
As
the country’s network of detention facilities struggles to keep up with an
influx of new arrivals, Fort Sill Army base in Oklahoma is once again being
utilized. The same Fort Sill that once was used as a Japanese-American “internment
camp” during World War II, and then under the Obama administration which held
several thousand unaccompanied children in 2014, is now under the Trump administration
being characterized as a “concentration camp”.
All detention facilities are referred to as “concentration camps”.
When
we refuse to admit a “crisis” exists in our southern border, when we refer to
chain link enclosures as “cages” and detention facilities as “concentration
camps”; we are in essence saying, the President of the United States is like Hitler
and those operating the detention facilities are like SS officers.
Do we
actually believe family members, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens working
at those facilities are like the cruel and evil Nazi officers?
When we
are using rhetoric that not only demonizes the highly charged situation, even
if unintentionally or inadvertently, we nonetheless are viciously attacking the
reputations of hard-working men and women doing their best of enforcing the law
and operating within their budgetary constraints, given the current circumstance
that exists.
We
must watch-our-words, ever vigilant like a sentry on watch-duty.
Marian Casillas, Ed.D.
Del Rio, Texas