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Trump's new 'Willie Horton' looks like MS-13

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

As horrendous as the stories may sound of a system that has taken more than 2,300 migrant children from their parents under President Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, it is even worse that nobody appears to know when -- or whether -- the children and their parents will be united again.

Ironically, a Republican administration was sending immigrant families into the sort of bureaucratic mess that Republicans traditionally have been the first to denounce. Adults arrested at the border have been held by the Department of Homeland Security. Their children as young as babies are taken by the Department of Health and Human Services. Communication between the two has been shockingly poor.

More fortunate than most of the children is a remarkable six-year-old, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid. She was taken from her mother, Cindy Madrid, after the two were detained shortly after setting foot in Texas on June 13, after a month-long journey from El Salvador.

Cindy had coached Jimena into memorizing her American sister's phone numbers. A week later, that number in her memory became the little girl's lifeline. An audio recording of her and other children, crying out for their parents at a Border Patrol detention facility, was provided to ProPublica reporter Ginger Thompson by a civil rights lawyer and widely rebroadcast, perhaps saving the little girl from becoming lost in the system.

Amid the chaos, little Jimena became a voice for all the other children and a sharp burst of reality against the "American carnage" nightmare that Trump has promoted since the beginning of his candidacy.

In photos, Jimena certainly does not look like MS-13, the truly vicious Salvadoran criminal gang that Trump's rhetoric has used to make us afraid of all illegal immigrants, despite his occasional exceptions for "some" who "I presume are good people."

 

MS-13 is a transnational gang of about 30,000 members, most of them in Central America, with about 6,000 in the United States, which is where the gang began before many of its leaders were deported back to El Salvador.

Trump's repeated references to MS-13 in his speeches and tweets indicate an intention to make the gang into a Willie Horton for this year's midterms and his own re-election campaign, which appears already to have begun.

Horton, you may recall, was a Massachusetts prison inmate who raped a woman and assaulted her fiancé after walking away from a furlough program. He became nationally infamous when supporters of Republican George H.W. Bush in 1988 launched attack ads against Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Although the furlough program was initiated by his predecessor, Dukakis was tagged by the Grand Old Party with running a "revolving door" prison system.

In political circles, the term "Willie Horton campaign" came to mean any similarly coded appeal to racial anxieties -- Horton was black and his victims were white -- to smear an opponent as being soft on crime.

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(c) 2018 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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