I did everything they told us to do. Believed the family-values pitch. Believed the protect-the-children bullshit. Bought the whole damn thing.
Here’s what protecting children looks like under the Trump administration: 26,000 unaccompanied kids — no parents, no guardians, no one — and the government just killed the contract that gave them lawyers.
Congress required by law, for more than two decades, to protect these children because they can be exploited, abused, trafficked. The Office of Refugee Resettlement was supposed to make sure they had legal help. Then this administration stopped paying. Just stopped. $65 million owed for work already done. Not disputed work. Not fraudulent work. Work performed. Services rendered. Kids represented. And the government said nope, we’re not paying, because the lawyers wouldn’t hand over confidential information about these children. Attorney-client privilege. You know, the thing that makes a lawyer a lawyer instead of a government informant.
Without a lawyer, these kids win their case less than one percent of the time. Less than one fucking percent. With a lawyer, they have a fighting chance. So what do you do if you want to deport children as fast as possible? You cut the lawyers. You starve them out. You make them lay off twenty percent of their staff. You make it impossible to take the cases. And then you call it accountability.
They don’t want to protect children. They want to deport them. And the “protect the children” line was always a goddamn costume for cruelty they’d already decided on.
Family values, my ass. These are kids with court dates and no one to show up for them, and the people who cut the lawyers are the same people who wave the Bible on Sunday morning and vote against every goddamn program that would actually help a child eat, sleep, see a doctor, or stay alive.
Take the flag pin off before you rob a kid of a lawyer. You sanctimonious frauds.
Source story: the source story.