Jeff Sessions’s Border

A history lesson from Jeff Sessions.

“If you are smuggling a child [across our border], then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you…. If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.” These words are from the remarks prepared for Jeff Sessions to deliver to the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies on May 7.

Sessions and the administration intend this policy as a threat, a warning, and a lesson on their vision of American “values,” aimed at all (and only, it seems) comers from the south, including asylum seekers.

What does the lesson mean for the rest of us? What do these words, this plan, tell us about ourselves as a nation?

Unfortunately, nothing new.

Today, it’s children used as pawns in an inhumane policy wrought by an immoral government. Today, it’s families torn apart at the border.

In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, it was families herded into internment camps  for no reason other than their ancestry. That year, 117,000 people of Japanese heritage were forced from their homes with nothing but what they could carry. Citizen or not, if your great-great-great grandparents were Japanese, you were evacuated. The “relocation centers” or concentration camps were like barracks, or worse, horse stalls and cowsheds. Armed guards occupied towers along the perimeters with guns pointing inward. Fear and prejudice ruled.

In 1865, it was the Devil’s Punchbowl in Natchez, Mississippi. The Civil War had ended, but brutality to formerly enslaved people had not. Accounts suggest that the Devil’s Punchbowl, a wooded gulch near Natchez, Mississippi, was turned into a handful of concentration camps for newly emancipated people. Forced into hard labor and locked behind concrete walls, thousands died of disease and starvation.

In 1854, it was the Know Nothing Party.  The organization started as a secret society called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner and grew to become the first significant third party in American politics. Its ideals were based on nationalism, religious discrimination against Catholics, and a connection between the working class and upper-class rhetoric. You need only substitute Muslims and Jews for Catholics to perceive the parallel with our politics today.

In 1619  a Dutch ship arrived in Jamestown. Since then we have given ourselves the stain of slavery, morphed now into mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, and police brutality. You need only recall the names Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Amadou Diallo, and so many more to understand the original sin of breathing while Black.

These realities are part of who we are as a nation. But they don’t define who we can become.

American Buddhist Pema Chodron observes, “Whatever is happening, is the path to enlightenment.” What a very long path it is.