Tent Cities? (Updated)

Looks like Health and Human Services are taking policy direction from "Sheriff" Joe Arpaio:

The Department of Health and Human Services will visit Fort Bliss, a sprawling Army base near El Paso in the coming weeks to look at a parcel of land where the administration is considering building a tent city to hold between 1,000 and 5,000 children, according to U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the plans.

HHS officials confirmed that they’re looking at the Fort Bliss site along with Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene and Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo for potential use as temporary shelters.

(Via Shakesville.)

Sound familiar?

"Hitler! Hitler!” the prisoners chanted to the TV cameras in protest. It was 4 February 2009. More than 200 Latino men in black-and-white striped uniforms, shackled to each other, were being marched towards an outdoor unit especially for “illegal alien” prisoners in Arizona’s infamous jail, Tent City.

The chants were directed at the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who a few months before had called this outdoor jail close to downtown Phoenix – his own tough-on-crime creation – a “concentration camp” in a speech to political supporters at his local Italian-American club.
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When asked about the comment by the Guardian in July, Arpaio brushed it off as a joke. “But even if it was a concentration camp, what difference does it make? I still survived. I still kept getting re-elected,” he said.

So now HHS is thinking about running concentration camps for kids who've been forcibly separated from their parents.

Even Franklin Graham has had enough (he says):

First of all, I think it’s disgraceful. It’s terrible to see families ripped apart and I don’t support that one bit. And I blame the politicians for the last 20, 30 years that have allowed this to escalate to the point where it is today. We are a country of laws; laws need to be obeyed, no question about that. But the situation that we have today is a result of our lawmakers in Washington over generations ignoring this and I’m hopeful that soon something could be done to fix it.

And somehow, it's not Trump's fault, it's everyone else's -- in spite of the fact that it's a plainly stated policy of the Trump regime. And quite frankly, given Graham's slavish support of Trump from the beginning, I'm calling bullshit. I guess he felt he needed to pretend to be a real Christian for a while.

Note that they're making great play on applying this to those who cross the border illegally, but they're doing it to people who are legally coming into crossing points seeking asylum. Of course, this is about what you'd expect from a bunch of racist neo-Nazis.

(Tom Sullivan has a fairly detailed post on how Trump and Sessions are stacking the deck against people seeking asylum that's worth reading in toto. He also has a post on how these children are being treated. We're in the realm of small people with a little bit of power, it seems.)

I'd ask if this regime can get any more disgusting, but they keep uncovering new bottoms (and I don't mean that in any fun way).

Update: MSNBC aired this story when one of their journalists visited a child detention center in Texas.

This is one of the better facilities, and it's only going to get worse.