Keeping Families Together

As stated in the previous post, I actually completed this cartoon about a month ago, but set it aside to create and publish the other one first, as I knew this would remain relevant for a longer period of time.

I first came up with the punchline here as a sarcastic exaggeration, but it didn’t take long for me to encounter someone saying it in all seriousness as an attempted defense of the Biden Administration’s continuing imprisonment of children and operation of literal concentration camps for Central and South American immigrants.

While the components of this horrible, inhumane policy were distilled into their most openly racist and deliberately cruel form by Donald Trump, they were established by Joe’s former boss, Barack Obama, who continues to retain the title of “Deporter-in-Chief” after Trump failed to exceed him in terms of either deportations or arrests by ICE.

As with everything else, Trump talked a big game, but had neither the stamina nor the attention span necessary to follow through on his vapid bellowing. He merely aspired to be worse on immigration than Obama was.

Biden’s taken the same approach in the opposite direction. He’s paid lip-service to the awfulness of Obama’s immigration record, and he’s made a few limp attempts to reign in deportations by executive order, but instead of shutting down the concentration camps, he’s expanded their usage, and instead of freeing the children from the cages, he’s just crammed their parents in there with them!

Meanwhile, the Biden to Biden’s Obama, Kamala Harris, already has some experience gleefully jailing people for the perceived “crimes” of their immediate family, not to mention a well-known rapport with ICE, so who else could be more qualified to run point on immigration than her?

…apparently just about anyone, as Harris has somehow managed to piss off everyone, regardless of stance, by doing little more in the nearly two months since she was given the role than punting responsibility while publicly downplaying its seriousness with some of her signature sociopathic laughter.

Why did Biden tag Harris specifically to handle immigration and border security, anyway? After all, it’s not like she’s ever demonstrated any expertise on either matter. Her initial comments upon receiving the assignment were akin to saying the border is “a land of contrasts”—a dim level of engagement she thus far maintains—and some of her positions during the Democratic Primary were so contradictory as to be null.

In 2019, she said, “I will release children from cages,” but now that she’s in a position to actually do something about it, she isn’t even trying!

In June of the same year, she also said she would “immediately put in place a meaningful process for reviewing the cases for asylum.” I guess she must have a different idea of what the word “immediately” means than most people do, huh?

It’s almost as if Biden gave her the job fully expecting she’d embarrassingly fail, as revenge for drawing attention to his close friendships with segregationists and past support of segregationist policies, so she’s decided to get him back by purposefully being even worse at it than he could’ve possibly imagined, like some kind of petty Obi-Wan Kenobi of incompetence.