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The president* continues to commit crimes against humanity, and in the dead of night, too, and nobody seems willing to stop him. And, one day, some folks may try to call him to account in the Supreme Court, only to see the red-bloomed face of Justice Brett Kavanaugh staring back at them. That is your happy thought for the morning. From The New York Times:

In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas. Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases. But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.

The United States government is waking children up in New York in the middle of the night and shuffling them off to the desert in west Texas. Outrage is insufficient. Anger is vain and futile. Rage is inadequate. Something beyond all of these is needed.

MANDEL NGAN Getty Images

“The number of families and unaccompanied alien children apprehended are a symptom of the larger problem, namely a broken immigration system,” Ms. Stauffer said. “Their ages and the hazardous journey they take make unaccompanied alien children vulnerable to human trafficking, exploitation and abuse. That is why H.H.S. joins the president in calling on Congress to reform this broken system.”

So an agency of the national executive is "joining with" the head of the national executive to call for reform (and that stupid fcking wall). Until it gets it, the official position of the administration* is going to be, stop making us traumatize all these children. If the Marquis de Sade and George Orwell had a baby, it would be this policy right here.

Several shelter workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, described what they said has become standard practice for moving the children: In order to avoid escape attempts, the moves are carried out late at night because children will be less likely to try to run away. For the same reason, children are generally given little advance warning that they will be moved. At one shelter in the Midwest whose occupants were among those recently transferred to Tornillo, about two dozen children were given just a few hours’ notice last week before they were loaded onto buses — any longer than that, according to one of the shelter workers, and the children may have panicked or tried to flee.

Do these people honestly believe none of these kids is going to grow up hating us?

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

The children wore belts etched in pen with phone numbers for their emergency contacts. One young boy asked the shelter worker if he would be taken care of in Texas. The shelter worker replied that he would, and told him that by moving, he was making space for other children like him who were stuck at the border and needed a place to live.

I just mention that because, some day, probably after I'm dead, one of them is going to take bloody vengeance, and I don't want anyone to be surprised when that happens.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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