On Friday, the Associated Press published a harrowing report from
a border station near El Paso,
where child detainees have been receiving the world's cruelest American civics lesson.
According to the AP, there's not adequate food, water, or sanitation inside.
The report describes teen mothers and other younger kids being asked to care for infants
and toddlers on their own.
No child should ever be forced to take care of other children.
The only thing children should ever be forced to do
is invite every kid in their class to their birthday party,
even Stuart.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department stood in court and explained it was totally cool to
deny migrant kids basic hygiene supplies.
If you don't have a toothbrush, if you don't have soap, if you don't have a blanket,
it's not safe and sanitary. Wouldn't everybody agree to that?
Do you agree to that?
Well, I think it's -- I think those are -- there's fair reason to find that those things may
be part of safe and sanitary.
Not may be...are a part.
Why do you say maybe?
It wasn't perfumed soap. It was soap. It wasn't, you know, high-class milled soap.
It was soap.
What the fuck?
Soap is a necessity for everybody, and especially for me,
because after watching that, my brain needs a shower.
Most of the kids in those overcrowded facilities come from Central America's Northern Triangle
countries: Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
Trump and his supporters claim it's fine to warehouse them like pallets of generic peanut
butter because it's "their fault" for coming to America.
But the truth is, the U.S. is a huge reason they were forced to flee here in the first place.
There's no time to discuss every terrible thing the U.S. has done there,
so let's focus tonight on El Salvador.
Oh, it does not like hearing an American say "Let's focus on El Salvador."
It's okay! I'm not going to do a coup!
There, there. Okay.
El Salvador has reason to be scared. For decades, in conflict after conflict,
we backed whichever side said communism was bad and gave us good deals on coffee.
Hence the popular mug slogan,
“Don't even talk to me until I've had my morning coup.”
In the 1980s, we poured billions of dollars into El Salvador's military.
Our generous aid helped turn El Salvador into a war-torn hell, largely because the gipper
told us to be terrified of commies.
Central America is a region of great importance to the United States.
And it is so close: San Salvador is closer to Houston, Texas, than Houston is to Washington, D.C.
Central America is America.
It's at our doorstep, and it's become the stage for a bold attempt by the Soviet Union,
Cuba, and Nicaragua to install communism by force throughout the hemisphere.
In conclusion, we must bomb Houston. God bless America.
Where's Nancy? Did she squash that whole AIDS thing yet?
The U.S. trained Salvadoran troops who then massacred tens of thousands of people.
It was one of the longest and bloodiest civil wars in Central America, and a case study
in Cold War politics with the U.S. bankrolling the Salvadoran government against the left-wing guerillas.
The U.S. kept backing the Salvadoran military, even after they
brutally assaulted and murdered American missionaries.
The infamous El Mozote Massacre, in which the army murdered over 800 civilians, was
carried out by commandos trained in the United States.
When we stomped out communism, we also stomped out pretty much everything else.
For many civilians, getting the hell out of El Salvador became a matter of life or death.
Salvadorans fled to the United States in the 1980s,
just in time to escape America's next intervention:
Arnold Schwarzenegger's repeated attacks on Central America.
Many of the migrants wound up in Los Angeles, where some younger Salvadorans would wind
up in street gangs. Over time, these gangs would turn into a term spoken -- or, more
often, screamed -- by our president.
Rough, tough MS-13 gang members.
The vicious gang, MS-13.
MS-13.
The menace of MS-13.
That's right, President Trump's favorite foreign threat was made in the USA!
Unlike his ties,
and two-thirds of his wives.
And it was born as a direct result of our crappy policies in Central America.
Don't get me wrong, today's MS-13 is a violent gang,
but that, too, needed help from Uncle Sam.
In the '70s and '80s, MS-13 were not the machete-wielding sociopaths
of today's right-wing Facebook memes.
They were "teenagers and young adults who bonded around metal music."
I mean, of course, it's necessary to crack down on teenage metalheads.
Heavy metal is a gateway to all sorts of deviant behavior, like
hosting a late night show.
Thanks...yes, gorgeous.
So nice.
Thanks to the "tough on crime" policies of the early 90s,
many young MS-13 members were incarcerated.
The American prison system helped transform them from the juvenile delinquents of the
'80s to the violent gang we know today.
In other words, we were getting more murders,
but at least those punks aren't playing that devil's music anymore!
Luckily, America had a solution to the gang we helped create:
make it someone else's problem!
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 allowed America
to deport immigrants convicted of crimes.
Gang members, brutalized by American prisons, were now sent back to El Salvador, the country
we helped make unlivable in the first place.
It's the circle of life.
Except death!
Suddenly, MS-13 members were America's most deadly export
next to corn syrup.
Between 2000 and 2010, over 40,000 former prisoners were deported back to El Salvador.
And, thanks again to that pesky civil war we tag-teamed on, El Salvador's infrastructure
was too broken to control them.
Many gang members were deported back to El Salvador in the 1990s, and the group took
advantage of the weak government in El Salvador to consolidate power, take control of large areas.
Christ. Have we ever given them anything not terrible?
Can we just send El Salvador an edible arrangement?
Oh God no, those are awful too.
Since then, the gangs' stranglehold in El Salvador has only gotten worse.
Today, the country is among the most violent nations on earth.
Naturally, the chaos is sending innocent civilians looking for safety in the United States all over again,
bringing it all full circle!
As in the seventh circle of hell, because sweet Lord this is awful.
America shouldn't be closing off our borders to anyone fleeing for their lives, but it's
especially evil when they're fleeing a situation we helped create.
That's like if I set my neighbor's house on fire, but when they ask if they can stay with me,
I punch them in the dick.
All refugees deserve basic compassion.
But we owe a special debt to Central American refugees.
At the very least, we owe their kids some fucking toothpaste.