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“An American Gulag of Spanish-Speaking Women and Children”

In the 1940s the world experienced Soviet Gulags in Siberia, Nazi “work” camps in Germany and Poland. The American desert was spotted with United States Government “Internment” camps for the lucky among us who came from Japan, or their children and grandchildren.
2015, the United States government is back in the internment business. This time it isn’t for Japanese, it’s for women and children from Central America; they come from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras (with the highest murder rate in the Western Hemisphere) and even the socialist paradise of Nicaragua.
They all speak Spanish, they all made their way through 2000 kilometers of Mexican territory, and they all walked across the border and surrendered to American authorities peacefully. They all seek refuge under American law. They came by the thousands.
What was perfectly clear as the mass of people flooded across the border into Texas was that the “Hope and Change” Presidency of Barack Obama was not only ill-equipped to handle the masses — it didn’t have a clue how to even think about the problem.
Example of stupid fumbling: Charter buses were filled in Texas with women and their children and bused to Murrieta, California, a small California town of a few thousand people over a hundred miles from the Mexican border and a thousand miles from where the people entered the United States. Why were they taken there at great cost? For “processing.” Problem? No one informed the mayor or police that these people were coming and for what. When word leaked that “illegal aliens” were coming to Murrieta for “release,” a mob quickly gathered and blocked the highway so the buses couldn’t pass. The mob was angry and only steps from a full blown violent riot.
The entire world was shown the full-throated anti-immigrant semi-riot on television and on the Internet. TV screens were full of images of an almost all-white Murrieta mob backed up with outsiders from all over manifesting seething anger at immigrants of all sorts including illegal immigrants. Never mind these were refugees in the buses.
An intelligent Obama Administration would not have taken the busloads of Spanish-speaking refugees to a semi-rural up-scale mostly white town on the road to Las Vegas but rather it would have taken them to San Diego on the border where a hundred people simply wouldn’t register in a population of three million border residents where one in three look like the refugees.
That incident occurred during the refugee crisis. A year later a federal judge has ordered the Obama government to release thousands of women and children the government has interned or is it “interred” in facilities that do not meet standards of health and safety. The judge ordered the release within a week of the order.
One wonders what the media would do and say about this atrocious situation and mistreatment of women and children if it was President Bush in the White House instead of Obama.  To make matters worse, the highly incompetent Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, is a public relations disaster. This guy might have been a good lawyer at the Defense Department but he looks like nothing more than a political crony of the President AKA a political hack. Has he visited the facilities targeted by the federal judge to see for himself what the situation is? No. Has he assigned his top people to publicly deal with the problem? No. Has he had a press conference to discuss the problem and what his department is doing about it? No.
The entire Central American refugee crisis of a year ago has been mishandled since the first ten-year-old turned himself into a Border Patrol Agent after making his own way 2000 kilometers through Mexico. The bungling continues to the point federal judges are involving themselves by lambasting the Obama Administration for its inability to handle or solve the problem.
The refugees continue to be victims of an administration whose motto seems to be “QUE SERA, SERA.”

Contreras’s books on immigration are available at Amazon.com

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