Kill the Indian, save the man. That was the justification of the Indian Boarding Schools, where Native American children were ripped from their families and forced to conform to White Christian ways. It was better for them – better for everyone, really. That was the mindset. Never mind the permanent fracture of culture.  And if you believe those days are over you’d be wrong. There are no more boarding schools because they have been replaced with Foster Care. And since all Native American children in South Dakota were labeled “special needs” that means they are now a cash crop for that state. They are taken without cause on a regular basis and placed with White families, flying in the face of the Indian Child Welfare Act. It is annihilation of the rightful family. It is the utter destruction of a people. Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other ethnic group. They have soaring rates of alcoholism and drug abuse. Being raised “white” does not save them.

The Magdalene Laundries of Ireland have finally been exposed as the basis of slave labor and human trafficking that went on for decades. “Homes” that “took in” (incarcerated) young women and children were an open secret. This was perhaps considered a step-up from the workhouses where whole families were separated coming through the door – those who survived were traumatized to the point of insanity. But the Laundries had a commodity beyond the sheets and uniforms they washed – the children. Up to 2000 Irish children were adopted to the US, for “donations” to the nuns.

When Romania fell in 1989, Ceausescu’s orphanages were discovered. “A slaughter of souls,” was the way one survivor described it. Most of those children were simply victims of poverty and powerlessness, forced into existence by the edict of the communist dictator who outlawed contraception. They were raised in massive groups, without family. Those who reached adulthood were stunted and scarred in every possible way. The most sociopathic of the boys were selected to be part of Ceausescu’s secret police – happy to kill for the one who made them an orphan in the first place. The “lucky” ones were adopted out of the country, where adoptive parents in Europe and the United States were shocked at the children’s rage and complete disconnect when given a normal family.

Now we are creating another disaster, this time with the “Border Children” whose parents tried to enter the Promised Land without the benefit of being White. Families are torn apart in the most traumatic way imaginable – even breastfeeding babies. And please note, this is nothing new. We set a precedent with our Foster Care system (considered the solution for the Orphan Trains) where children are taken from their parents on a daily basis with devastating results. The reason – as always – is money. Fostering and adoption equals profit. If the family unit is not severed, people are not getting paychecks. That holds true for domestic infant adoption, international adoption, and foster care adoption. But adoption is such an American institution that it can only be thought of in the warmest of terms. A poor orphan, unwanted, with criminal parents now will have a good, white, Christian, AMERICAN home.

Thousands of American-born children in foster care are unaccounted for. Officials don’t have any idea where they are. And for every one child actually rescued by CPS, seventeen are harmed. Children are drugged, abused, raped, killed, and rehomed like unwanted puppies – and their captors are paid to do it. 

There is no plan in place to reunite the border children with their parents. There never was, because that was never the intention. They are mere bargaining chips for a certain Nazi president to get his precious wall, the one he vowed Mexico would pay for. The careless statement of the Attorney General that the abducted immigrant children are “getting better care than a lot of American kids do,” is painfully accurate, and exactly what is wrong with the entire Child Protective Services system. It’s never about protecting children. It’s about power and profit.

But let’s imagine now that most of the border kids are reunited with their parents. Psychologists have warned there is “irreparable harm” already. Irreparable harm deliberately done to these children – if they are reunited and released, reunited but kept imprisoned, or reunited and deported. The damage is done and this on us, America.

The ones who are not reunited for whatever reason will most likely enter the US foster care system, where they will either age out and be shoved out into society or deported because they are not naturalized, they will be adopted. The lucky adopted ones will now become our adoptee cribmates, and I can give you a peek at their future:

PTSD, alienation, victimization, disconnect, depression, crime, suicide.

Adoptee Suicide

Why Aren’t We All Sociopaths?

Owning Humans Is Alive And Well – It’s Hana Who’s Dead

Precious Little Justice For Hyun-su

All of these things happen at much higher rates with adoptees, even domestic infant adoptions. Even “successful” adoptions. So how can adoption save the border kids?

It can’t.

Elle Cuardaigh is author of The Tangled Red Thread