https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=329291&post_id=189348516&utm_source=post-email-title&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=rovhk&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo0NjUxMDE4NCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTg5MzQ4NTE2LCJpYXQiOjE3NzIxOTM0NjksImV4cCI6MTc3NDc4NTQ2OSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTMyOTI5MSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.JCSVbHL117lQ5He2obwGgkD1weZtWgxZzxbK0BXw9KI
~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
The infrastructure has been under construction for decades. San Benito is just the newest link.
 You like true crime, right? Well, there is a mystery happening in South Texas. Not the surface mystery. That one gets answered quickly. I’m talking about the deeper one, the one that reveals the dark fundamentalist coding of MAGA that often gets drowned out by Trump’s empty campaign hedging on abortion rights, his tariffs, his terror, and his Epstein cover-up. Here’s the scene: The Trump administration has been routing every pregnant unaccompanied minor in the entire U.S. immigration detention system to a single for-profit shelter in San Benito, Texas. Girls picked up in California, New York, across the country, all sent to this one building run by a contractor called Urban Strategies. The government’s own child welfare officials flagged the facility as medically inadequate. High-risk obstetric care is hours away. Some of these girls are 13. At least half became pregnant through rape. Why San Benito? That’s the question Andrea Pitzer digs into in the newest episode of Next Comes What, a podcast I produce. Jonathan White, who ran the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s unaccompanied children program during Trump’s first term, answered this with unusual economy when reporters from the Texas and California Newsrooms came calling. “This is 100% and exclusively about abortion.” Texas has a near-total abortion ban. Once a pregnant child is placed at San Benito, companion rule changes could bar her transfer to another state for the procedure, even in a medical emergency. White called the strategy elegant. All they have to do is send them to Texas. That is the surface mystery, solved. The playbook, as Jennifer Weiss-Wolf documented in Ms. Magazine, is literally written down: Project 2025 explicitly recommended against detaining unaccompanied children in states where abortion is available. This is the movement’s idea of subtlety. An anonymous government staffer, apparently still in possession of a conscience, told reporters: “Putting pregnant kids in San Benito is not a decision you make when you care about children’s safety.” They did not add “obviously,” but they didn’t have to. A few hours north, at the Dilley family detention center, Rep. Joaquin Castro arrived for a visit and found a teenager with apparent appendicitis turned away by a nurse. He was told all pregnant women were off-site at medical appointments. That’s an excuse designed to insult our intelligence and flout impunity, given that one of those women was deported that same week at nine months, and no airline was willing to board her. The Children’s Defense Fund calls conditions at Dilley “state-sponsored child abuse.” Over 3,500 people are detained there, more than half of them children. Obviously, there’s no such thing as a pro-life concentration camp, Andrea reminded me as I was pitching ironic titles for this episode. So to review: pregnant migrant girls, forced to give birth in Texas, in a facility their own government considers unsafe, their mothers can be deported as soon as the delivery is done. Now the mystery: what happens to the babies? Andrea offers a historical parallel that might make you taste your breakfast again — drawn from her newsletter, Degenerate Art, which you should also be reading. In 2016, she visited ESMA — the Navy Mechanics School in Buenos Aires — a torture site under Argentina’s military dictatorship. On the third floor, there is a small, nondescript room — the birthing room. Pregnant detainees were brought there to deliver. Their babies were given to the junta’s families and allies to raise as their own. About 500 babies were taken this way; the mothers were murdered afterward. Roughly 130 of those children have ever been found. The United States is not running death flights THAT WE KNOW OF, unless you count the ones that fly deportees to third-party countries run by regimes picked for their disregard for law and life. But the operational sequence—force the birth, neutralize the mother, distribute the child to ideologically sorted families—already describes the domestic adoption industry at scale, as journalist Jill Filipovic laid out last year. Maternity homes that lock girls in and “counsel” them toward surrender. States like Alabama and Utah that give birth mothers five days, or literally zero time, to reconsider. Agencies that will only place children with married Christians, and pay the travel expenses of pregnant women willing to give birth in the right jurisdiction. Texas has committed $200 million to this infrastructure. Women choose abortion over adoption at a rate of 50 to 1, which adoption advocates attribute to women simply not understanding their options, a remarkable theory to hold about 50 million people who have, in fact, been pregnant. Harvard Kennedy School researchers Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks have a name for the larger pattern: patriarchal authoritarianism, the phenomenon by which authoritarian consolidation and the rollback of women’s rights don’t merely coincide but actively generate each other. The sorting mechanism is always the tell: who deserves to be a mother, and who does not. In the taxonomy being assembled in South Texas, the pregnant girls at San Benito have already been categorized. They are inventory. That is what the deeper mystery was always about, not San Benito, but what comes after San Benito. Because that’s all the far right truly seems to care about. It is written in Project 2025, funded by Texas Republicans, and being executed right now, as career civil servants send anonymous quotes to journalists about losing sleep waiting for something terrible to happen. The movement that told you it was about saving babies has been, this whole time, very interested in what happens to the babies afterward, just not in any way that cares about the child’s well-being whatsoever. Watch this episode. Then read Andrea’s newsletter. Then call all your reps and Senators and ask them what, exactly, they are doing about the pregnant children in San Benito, Texas. |
No comments:
Post a Comment