theunitofcaring:

The Associated Press correspondent at the border just reported that we’ve started tear-gassing toddlers: 

The context is that asylum-seekers have been trapped in overstretched shelters in Mexico by a series of policy changes by the Trump administration and agreements between the Trump administration and the Mexican government, and today a group of refugees marched to the U.S. border to request dialogue + petition to be allowed to make the asylum claim that under standard interpretations of international law they are entirely entitled to make. The U.S. closed the border crossing. One woman with a tear-gassed three-year-old told reporters that the U.S. launched tear gas at the crowd when some refugees started trying to squeeze through the fence. No one crossed into the U.S. Thanks to the strong winds, migrants who weren’t near the fence were still choked by it. 

It would be legal and manageable under U.S. law to admit every one of these families, give their case for asylum a hearing in a court of law, and allow private charities and churches to provide for their safety and settlement in the U.S. pending those cases. The administration decided to make this their hill to die on instead, and has pushed for the use of lethal force. 

There’s a really dangerous and scary phenomenon where someone becomes convinced that any shred of humanity or decency they show will be a foot in the door, and that their only option is to keep buckling down, and to take all failures to get what they want as evidence they weren’t forceful enough. It’s the spiral of escalation that leads to choking toddlers with gas grenades and feeling like you’re in the right because if you granted these people a hearing some of them would stay in the country and that’d encourage more of them and there’s no way at all to reach any kind of equilibrium except vicious violence at the outset, made more vicious every time the current level of force fails to get everything you want from every single person out there. I’m scared that the forces at the border will keep escalating.

I don’t really know a good way to have institutional checks that go “our objective here is not that we win and they lose, no matter what; our objectives also include not being drawn into tear-gassing toddlers.”