U.S. Customs officials have demanded that Mexican refugee aid workers on the Mexico side of the border and U.S. Border Patrol, for processing and identification purposes, inscribe numbers with permanent markers on the forearms of parents and children trying to seek refugee status in the U.S.
For persons who have already experienced and suffered unfathomable horrors, this action further increases their trauma while it shows an utter lack of historical perspective. Not only is this akin to branding animals for slaughter, but analogous to the numbers tattooed onto the forearms of concentration camp inmates during the Nazi Holocaust.
Some have roundly criticized me for raising these comparisons. They argue that participants in competitive sporting events, such as marathons and triathlons, must affix numbers either on their sportswear or hung around their necks for identification purposes to aid judges and referees better access contestants’ course times and determine whether they are eligible for trophies and other awards.
People seeking refugee status, however, have very little in common with individuals entering sporting events.
Sports participants engage voluntarily in their activities. They most likely have the needed time to spend many days in training and practice for their events. To be a serious contender, they must have the resources to purchase quality equipment that not only increases their chances for success but also protects their bodies from injury.
They are cheered on from the stands and from the sidelines by supportive loved ones and by total strangers who vicariously run and jump and throw along with them while also striving to outdistance all others and improve their own personal bests.
Some participants will be handed awards, while others will gauge success by the distance they traveled. Following a period for their bodies to ramp down, and after a cleansing shower or bath, they will settle around a bountiful table for a nourishing meal with loved ones and discuss the day’s adventures.
By the time refugees arrive at the U.S. southern border – the relative fraction of people who survived the long and treacherous journey – they have already suffered unspeakable terror. They involuntarily fled their homes and the people and countries they loved where they shared common languages, customs, and histories with those around them.
Rather than competing in a sporting event for a trophy or for an improved personal best, their decision to journey far from their homes was based on issues of staying alive: to escape the traumas of war, of violence, of starvation, and for the ability to protect themselves and their loved ones.
Not many people cheered them from the stands and from the sidelines, except on rare occasions when good people along their route offered them shelter and nourishment to continue on their way. What propelled them, though, was the hope for a safer life and a chance to better their circumstances.
But throughout their plight northward, they heard the recurring noise from a United States president who characterized them as “Islamic terrorists,” as “violent and dangerous gang thugs,” as “drug dealers,” as “people who want something for nothing,” and as “thieves for American jobs.”
The United States has no intentions of granting many of the refugees permanent residency. Trump used them as pawns to frighten an already tense U.S. population in his quest to diminish and possibly reverse the imminent Democratic wave in the 2018 mid-term elections.
Once at the border, they were met by armed U.S. military personnel – whom Trump used as mere props from central casting — who had fortified fences with sharp razor wire, and who shot irritating pepper gas upon them and their small children. Having permanent ink numbered inscriptions forced onto their arms added further insult and dehumanization in their challenges to survive.
So, actuality, the comparison between identification numbers given to sporting contestants and those forced onto people seeking refugee status are false equivalents.
While the fate of branded animals in slaughterhouses and concentration camp prisoners in Nazi Germany will most likely not represent the ultimate treatment of refugees held in U.S. detention, if deported or forced back to their home countries, their destiny will be sealed and the comparisons I made with be justified.
I hope, however, that I am wrong.
I am seeing reports of people who are attempting to achieve refugee status who appreciate the numbers written on their arms because they see them as giving them a chance at a better life. They don’t see them as dehumanizing. Many, like myself, believe there are less humiliating and dehumanizing ways to help people go through the immigration process.
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