History Will Call Them Monsters: The Politicians Who Cage Children and Called It Patriotism

Future generations will struggle to understand how a nation that claimed to love children could deliberately subject them to fear, isolation, sickness, & despair in the name of Donald Trump & the GOP…

Credit: Pixabay

These people are monsters.

Louise and I know what child abuse can do to children. In our late 20s, back in 1978, we started a residential treatment facility for severely abused children and ran it for five years.

Louise’s first intake was a girl who was the daughter of her sister by her father; he’d then started in on her at age 10. Our second was a boy who came to the attention of the authorities because his older brother had been tied to a pole in the basement by his parents where he starved to death; it was the smell that provoked the neighbors to call the police.

And those weren’t the worse.

We saw kids covered with cigarette burns, the victims of rape and torture, beatings, and human trafficking.

Our job (and that of our professional staff: the program continued for another 30 years) was to help them recover their humanity, to find a meaningful sense of self, to overcome the PTSD and trauma of those early experiences; it was nothing short of herculean.

It takes years and years of intense work, and even at that these kids are scarred for life, leaving them with challenges and memories that will haunt them to their dying days.

My dear old friend, the late Joseph Chilton Pearce (I wrote the foreword to his internationally bestselling 1971 book The Crack in the Cosmic Egg), wrote a brilliant book on childhood development, The Magical Child, that lays out the vital importance of children feeling safe and loved during their early years. One of his most well-known quotes is:

“All children want to do is play in worlds they create and project on their external world. If allowed to do that, they are constantly building new neural structures for creating internal worlds and projecting them on their external world. And they build up an enormous self-esteem and feeling of power over the external world through their own capacities.”

His observation is corroborated by over a century of science. As researchers at Harvard noted in a paper presented at the National Symposium on Early Childhood Science and Policy:

“The basic architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. Early experiences affect the quality of that architecture by establishing either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all of the learning, health, and behavior that follow.

“In the first few years of life, more than 1 million new neural connections are formed every second.”

Which is why it’s so obscene that the psychopaths and monsters in the Trump administration are gleefully holding brown-skinned babies, toddlers, and young children in brutal, cold, fluorescent-lit-all-night cages for months at a time and longer.

As the Marshall Project documents:

In March, two-year-old Kaleth went with his parents to a routine immigration check-in in California, an appointment the asylum-seeking family had never missed, and ICE jailed all three of them anyway. They handcuffed his father and drove him to an adult facility while Kaleth and his mother were flown to the Dilley detention center in Texas.

Torn from his dad, the boy kept dragging a little table under a wall-mounted internal prison phone, trying to climb up to reach a father he had no way to call. Then he stopped eating for twelve days, vomiting when his mother tried to feed him, his cheeks going hollow and his eyes sinking into their sockets while staff called it “depression.”

Welcome to the work of the Republican hypocrites who piously proclaim their “Christian” commitment to “life” and claim concern “for the children,” even as they refuse to release the Trump-Epstein files and are now working as hard and fast as they can to expand their concentration camp system for kids and their parents.

Just this week they voted to spend another $70 billion to expand their violent, murderous, masked secret police force and its for-profit mass detention system.

Which children, after all, would Jesus lock up?

Hundreds of young children are now victims of Trump’s brutal, vicious system designed to “purify” America of Black, Brown, and Middle Eastern people and their kids and grandkids. Prior to Trump’s second term, there were rarely more than 3 children in the entire nationwide system awaiting deportation, and they were typically held in more humane conditions, with their parents, and for brief periods.

Now they’re in barbaric prisons, often separated from their parents, kept awake all night by the lights and noise, touched by nobody unless it’s to abuse them, their brains being reprogrammed for a lifetime of pain and emotional and spiritual struggle.

Courts set a 20-day limit on ICE holding young children, but the Trump regime and their for-profit prison partners making $200 per person per day or more routinely ignore those orders.

Graphic by The Marshall Project and MSNOW, used with permission

Alsu and Azat fled Russia with their one-year-old, Amir, fearing that their opposition to the war in Ukraine would send them to prison and their son to an orphanage, but, presumably because of Trump’s affection for Putin, they were locked in American immigration detention.

Inside the concentration camp they watched their once-lively boy go silent, start hitting himself in the face, and lose so much speech that he could say nothing beyond “mom” and “dad.”

Staff forced his mother to wean him off formula and offered only food unfit for a one-year-old, leaving her so desperate she hid cereal in her socks so he wouldn’t go to bed hungry. When the parents complained, Azat says the for-profit guards woke him in the night and threatened to split the family up and send Amir to foster care if they didn’t stop.

Trump signed the $70 billion Secure America Act this week to fund more of these concentration camps over the next three years — to lock up as many as 120,000+ more people — vastly expanding the system.

Trump has already officially designated “leftists” as “domestic terrorists,” just has Hitler did in 1933 and Putin did a decade ago. Monsters, all.

Speaker Mike Johnson said after the House vote that passed without a single Democratic participant:

“It was Republicans and Republicans alone who did the responsible thing and funded these critically important agencies at this critical time.”

Majority Leader Louisiana’s Steve (“David Duke without the baggage”) Scalise reduced the whole fight to a pathetic attempt at a slogan, lying that Democrats didn’t want to fund more arrests and prisons “because they want open borders.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune caved in (as usual) and joined Trump at the Oval Office signing; the president praised the Camp agents and guards themselves, with Trump calling them heroes:

“That’s what they are, they’re heroes, what they have to go through to keep us safe, them, heroes for what they go through to keep us safe.”

Monsters.

Amalia was one year old when she spiked a fever inside Dilley, and her parents say every trip to the clinic got them Tylenol and a warning not to complain. When the baby lost consciousness, her mother went back and begged the staff, asking how long they meant to leave her like this and whether they were going to let her die.

Only after the child’s oxygen fell to dangerous levels was she sent to a hospital, where she spent more than a week and was diagnosed with COVID-19, an ear infection, pneumonia, bronchitis, and RSV all at once.

Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales, whose Texas district contains the Dilley facility, is the single largest House recipient of money from the PAC funded by the for-profit company that runs that prison.

This monster told Bari Weiss’s “Face the Nation” on CBS that he said he’d visited Dilley “many times,” called it a “nice facility,” and said it was “nicer than some elementary schools in San Antonio.” He dismissed Democratic critics (who don’t also get money from CoreCivic’s PAC) as “grandstanding.”

Inside Dilley, the children have described the place in their own words. One 14-year-old wrote that there “all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” and another child’s drawing carried a plea scrawled across it:

“I am not happy, please get me out of here.”

Health care is also at the heart of the fight over conditions there. The immigrant advocacy group RAICES told a court that families at Dilley had raised concerns about inadequate medical care on at least 700 occasions since August 2025, citing delays and a lack of follow-up on children’s complaints.

Mothers of children held in detention told reporters for Texas Public Radio that their kids were sick again and again, couldn’t sleep on the metal bunks crammed into overcrowded rooms, and at times refused to eat after finding worms or mold in the food.

But, hey, as monsters like Trump, Miller, Hegseth, and Vance will be the first to tell you, they have to save “western civilization” by purging America of those people whose skin is darker than your average European.

Even if it does mean destroying children’s minds and lives forever.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Monsters Among Us”

Comments on Wednesday’s Daily Take:

How Dark Money Captured America — And How Hawaii Just Declared War on It

Hawaii stands against dark money because its Indigenous soul has never forgotten that governance belongs to the people and the land, not to those who can afford to buy both.
~ Four Arrows

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~ Jason Merchey

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