1904- american town kidnaps 20 orphans at gunpoint...

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1904- american town kidnaps 20 orphans at gunpoint...

Post by bentech »

we really have always been the scum of the earth...

This Is How You Kidnap a Child: An American History
From creating orphans to trafficking children, the United States is not new to family separation

Jun 27





The white residents of Morenci, Arizona — or “Hell Town,” as it was known — had their pistols to the heads of the New York City nuns. The nuns had escorted to town 40 Irish-Catholic orphans, who were there to meet their new foster families. The nuns from New York came to Morenci — and the neighboring town of Clifton — because there were Mexican-American families there who were willing to foster, families who shared a religion with the orphans (if not a language).
But in the time between their arrival on October 1 and their hasty departure four days later, 19 of the 40 children were kidnapped, wrenched from the arms of Mexican mothers who had been deemed “unfit” by the white community. The nuns managed to flee with the remaining 21 children, but the loss was still palpable.


Morenci, Arizona circa 1910. Morenci is a “company town” and home to the largest Copper Mining operation in North America. The author’s father grew up here. (Public domain)
Thus began, and ended, the Great Arizona Orphan Abduction of 1904 — a brief but brutal mass-kidnapping in the tiny mining towns of Morenci and Clifton. Enraged by the sight of dark mothers with white babies — who, incidentally, were not “white” when they left New York, given their Irish heritage — the Anglo women led the revolt, insisting that kidnapping these children was an improvement over sending them home with the Mexican mothers.
A mob formed. In the middle of a torrential rainstorm, men threatened Mexican families into giving up the orphans. Another group stormed the hotel the sisters were staying in, demanding that they release the orphans into their custody. Charles Mills, the mine boss, read aloud the pitiful “Mexican” wages of the adoptive families for all to hear. People accused the nuns of being “slave traders,” traffickers of the worst kind. Anglo women fought over which babies would be theirs. Like the Mexican women — whose priest had coordinated the foster program with the New York nuns—many of the Anglo women were unable to have children of their own. It was thought that this was due to environmental pollution from the mines. They felt entitled to these children, a consolation prize for the fertility they felt had been taken from them.
It did not matter that in much of the country, the Irish weren’t considered white. The Arizona Bulletin still wrote a scathing condemnation of the Catholic nuns for selling “sweet, innocent, white American babies” to “squalid, half-civilized Mexicans of the lowest class.” And though the nuns filed a suit for guardianship of the 19 children that had been taken, they ultimately lost. Anglo families came to court with their kidnapped children, letting the image of happy white families convince the courts that all’s well that ends well.
Only three of the 19 orphans were tracked after abduction: Josephine, who died of pneumonia just two months after being abducted in that storm; Katherine Wright (formerly Fitzpatrick), who was photographed in the lap of her adoptive aunt in 1906; and Sadie Green (renamed Gladys Freeman), who was taken some 527 miles away after the abduction to be raised in Los Angeles, California. Records unearthed by historian Linda Gordon show that by the age of 13, Sadie would be raped and impregnated by a local grocer. The rest of the children would vanish, as Irish surnames were changed and the families moved around.
This is how government policies and local law enforcement kidnap a child.
This is how children disappear.

The Great Orphan Abduction did not begin in Arizona, although it certainly came to a head there. Rather, this incident was the culmination of a chain of events. It was an unexpected end to a process, but that process always intended to rehouse these children. It is not the only story of children ripped away from adoptive or birth parents in American history, but it is a story that covers so many of the elements of these kidnappings — a case study, where any single thread helps illustrate how the entire web is woven. And it’s a web we must examine to understand how so many get caught in it, and how it is carried out.
Stealing children from their parents is a cycle in America. Today, as we stare down a mass-kidnapping perpetuated by the American government against refugee children, it is a cycle we must try to break.

Orphans are made, not born.
It is important to remember this fact, because many of the children who rode the Orphan Trains out of cities like New York or Boston had living parents. Most were orphaned not by the death but by circumstance: Their parents were often poor, sick, or unwed mothers. They were also often immigrants. The option for these children was usually the streets; orphanages were a last-ditch effort used out of necessity and desperation. Some of these children made their way to foundling societies, asylums, and orphanages shortly after birth; others were rounded up off the streets. There were incredibly few avenues for social assistance in the 19th century, and anti-immigrant sentiments were high. The Arizona Orphan Abduction began not once the nuns reached Morenci, but with the very circumstances that led children to be abandoned and put on trains in the first place. For many, society had failed the parents first, and the children as a result. Not all children were even aware of what the Orphan Trains were for, or what was happening to them. Their kidnapping was simply a worst-case scenario of the whole ordeal.
When the state fails to provide ways for parents to keep their children alive, and to meet basic welfare requirements, it creates a society in which it is easy to have your child taken from you. The “Arizona Orphans” were part of a larger Orphan Train movement that began in 1854 as a means of finding orphaned or abandoned children new homes across the country.


Children traveling on an Orphan train, 1904. (Credit: leparisien.fr/CC BY-SA 4.0)
At best, the Orphan Trains brought children to loving families and homes. At worst, the program was an active trade network for child labor, sending children to work on farms or perform other free work for families. In cases like those, the accusations of child trafficking that the Anglo women in Clifton-Morenci made would not have seemed so ridiculous. But even so, in Arizona, the accusations mostly rose out of anti-Mexican racism, rather than any real proof of abuse of the children. The train system was more complicated than that, and ultimately had nuanced outcomes as a result: On the one hand, the trains and placement system for abandoned or orphaned children led America to develop our foster care system. On the other hand, the Orphan Trains were first developed by a man on a mission to put young children to hard work.

In 1849, a presbyterian minister named Charles Loring Brace arrived in New York City with the intention of evangelizing to the city’s poor. What he found was a city whose immigrants were struggling in tenements and slums, a city where thousands of children were living on the streets. Like many people of his time, he linked their foreignness to their character. They were deemed worse than their immigrant parents in his eyes, and he was willing to say as much.
Brace would write a book in 1872 entitled The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them, wherein he described street gangs of young boys:
They are far more brutal than the peasantry from whom they descend, and they are much banded together, in associations, such as “Dead Rabbit,” “Plug-ugly,” and various target companies. They are our enfants perdus, grown up to young manhood. The murder of an unoffending old man . . . is nothing to them. They are ready for any offense of crime, however degraded or bloody.
Brace’s solution to the social problem of roving street gangs and homeless children was not simply to find them homes, but to put them to work. While such a solution wasn’t possible within New York City itself for many young children, it was ideal on the western frontiers.
Our hope in this matter is in the steady demand for juvenile labor in the country districts, and the substantial rewards which await industry there.
While child labor was a fact of life for most frontier children at the time, westward expansion and settlement was bolstered by the importing of more children, and thus more laborers. Potential parents on the frontier would fight for favored orphans. They would often paw, prod, and poke children before making their selection, valuing health and looks. In an effort to alleviate poverty and child homelessness in Eastern cities, Brace expanded the roots of western colonial expansion.

These were not the first groups of children to be traded and auctioned off in America. The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery except as punishment for a crime, was ratified in 1865, 11 years after the Orphan Trains had begun to ship mostly white children across the country. Put simply, the active trade of black children as slaves had already been going on for at least two centuries when the movement began. This is not to say that the Orphan Trains were as horrific as the auctioneer blocks, which marked a lifetime of chattel slavery in all cases — it was most assuredly better to be an Orphan Train child than it was to be a child slave sold away from your family. But it is to say that America’s local governments, land owners, and Anglo citizens had already gotten quite used to breaking up families to suit their purposes, or “solve” problems in labor shortages.
By 1854, America was skilled at creating orphans. Our nation’s power holders had discovered a tactic they felt worked, and they were willing to adapt it as necessary when ethics and morals changed. Formal slavery was abolished outside of prisons. The “solution” was then to fill the prisons — create vagrancy laws, create laws against selling cotton after sunset or using obscene language. Jim Crow and “Black Codes” rose up. Instead of owning slaves, Anglo-Americans owned sharecropper lands, and by extension, continued to “own” sharecroppers. While it was illegal to have auctioned off “street arabs” (homeless children) as slaves, it was perfectly legal to sweep young vagrants off the streets and cart them off to frontier families. Laws that applied to citizens would fail to protect Native Americans, and anyone else prevented from obtaining their citizenship or from voting.
This tactic of keeping power concentrated, and colonizing both land and culture has always included marginalized children. They are the first line of forced colonization and assimilation, because children are more vulnerable without adult guardians. The younger the child, the more dependent they are for survival and protection — the more they can be controlled.

M
ission and Indian boarding schools were also a substantial part of this assimilation-colonialism ecosystem. Schools for Native children facilitated a process of stripping children’s identities, dehumanizing them — and there were no subtleties about their purpose, whether they were run by Spanish or English colonials. Although these schools began alongside early colonial efforts, the U.S. Government officially subsidized the creation and maintenance of Indian boarding schools from 1810 until 1917, some of them built on unused military installations.

Chiricahua Apaches Four Months After Arriving at Carlisle. Undated photograph taken at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. (Public domain)
Famously, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was built in 1879 on a former military site, and became the “model” for other Native schools established by the Bureau of Indian affairs. It was founded by US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt, who had previously conducted “social experiments” on Native American prisoners, including cutting their hair and forcing them to wear western dress. He gave a speech in 1892, explaining his model of cultural genocide as a means of assimilation for both the Indian schools, and in general:
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.
This was enacted forcefully. Children would be taken from parents and families and forced into schools. They were banned from wearing native dress and speaking native languages. Children would be given new, English names, and were forced to convert to Christianity. New students would sometimes be scrubbed down in a kerosene bath.


Tom Torlino, a Carlisle School student, before and after spending time at the school. (Source: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Public domain, circa 1882)
Boys would have their hair cut, an act that was both designed to humiliate and assimilate. Punishment was often corporal. Many children died of disease while in the schools, and their bodies would be kept from their families. They would be buried away from their homes.
Though not directly called orphans, Native children were stripped of their parents and communities. Separation was forced. Children were hostages of the American government, used as leverage to keep tribes in line.
By 1928, a report titled “The Problem of Indian Administration” was released. Alternatively known as the Meriam Report, Lewis Meriam reported on the state of Federal Indian schools. It was not good. The report reads in part:
In nearly every boarding school one will find children of 10, 11, and 12 spending four hours a day in more or less heavy industrial work — dairy, kitchen work, laundry, shop. The work is bad for children of this age, especially children not physically well-nourished; most of it is in no sense educational since the operations are large-scale and bear little relation to either home or industrial life outside; and it is admittedly unsatisfactory even from the point of view of getting the work done. At present the half-day plan is felt to be necessary, not because it can be defended on health or educational grounds, for it cannot, but because the small amount of money allowed for food and clothes makes it necessary to use child labor.
[…] The term “child labor” is used advisedly. The labor of children as carried on in Indian boarding schools would, it is believed, constitute a violation of child labor laws in most states.
Parents were unable to legally refuse to send their children to boarding schools until 1978. As late as 2008, NPR continued to report on still-extant Native Boarding schools, which now number only a small handful and often teach native culture and arts. Although the atmosphere of boarding schools has evolved, they remain a complex and complicated site for Natives.
While the boarding school system of assimilation has largely died out, the struggle persists as the American foster system often places Native children outside of their tribal communities. Instead, children are placed with white foster families or in large privately-run foster homes, even in cases where this clearly violates the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act.

There are countless stories of manufactured orphans, foster care children, and fractured families in America on a governmental level. Whether big or small, federal or local, these outcomes are not accidental, what causes them is not unavoidable.
Japanese Internment. Mexican Forced Repatriation. Slavery. The Chinese Exclusion Act. Orphan Trains. The Trail of Tears. Deportation of undocumented children or parents. Prison camps for undocumented immigrants hoping to plead their case as refugees. Children being ripped from their parents arms, taken from the care of relatives, and placed in the arms of white foster parents.
It is naive to believe the crisis we have today is entirely unique to Trump. It is also naive to believe this is only the impact of President Obama’s policies towards Latin American refugees. The problem of kidnapping children — creating orphans — is one that is coded into our nation’s history.

This is how you kidnap a child.
The exact circumstances change, but the process remains generally the same. Parents who are marginalized by society have children who are both marginalized and vulnerable. That marginalization can be achieved in a number of ways, usually layered on top of each other: racism, poverty, lack of resources, violence. Instability can be achieved faster by imprisoning parents.
The process goes roughly like this: Separate parent and child. Do not place them with relatives, but instead in the care of an outside actor — government schools, orphanages, detention centers/prison camps, and in the foster homes of strangers. Deteriorate ties to the child’s past, whether they are stable and healthy or not. Change the child’s name. Convert them to another religion, one their parents don’t practice. Teach them an entirely different language, one their parents don’t speak. If the children resist their new situation, use corporal punishment or hard labor to keep them in line. Kidnapping by the state requires a new identity, a new life, and only a small chance to reconnect to an old life entirely.


Melinda and Seth Moser were awarded permanent custody of Carlos while his mother was in federal custody for undocumented immigration. He has been renamed “Jamison” and has been kept from his birth mother since he was eleven months old.
Any child can be taken from their parents if their parents are deemed “unfit” to provide for them. This system, when it works in genuine service of a child’s welfare, is not a bad thing. But when it deems a parent unfit simply because they are immigrants, or simply because they are poor, or simply because they are brown, the system is easily abused in the name of colonialism.
To foster a child is not to kidnap them, necessarily. Many foster parents are wonderful people. Adoption is not inherently harmful. But after the government detained Encarnacion Bail Romero during an immigration raid at her poultry processing job, they allowed another couple to adopt her son, Carlos. This, despite Romero leaving her son in the care of relatives and never consenting to an adoption in the first place. Melinda and Seth Moser gave Carlos a new name, “Jamison,” and have been awarded permanent custody. He speaks English now, unlike his mother, who speaks Spanish. He may never see his birth family again.

Trump’s policy of separating refugee children from parents does not end in detention centers, it begins in them. As time goes on, more and more reports will emerge: children have already been taken from detention centers and flown across the country. Secretary Besty DeVos’s family is intimately connected Bethany Christian Services, one of the foster systems that has been rehoming children. At least 81 children who have been taken from their parents at the border have so far been fostered out by this Evangelical organization.
The left-wing group The Other 98% has called this a “state-sponsored kidnapping.” They aren’t wrong. Children sent to detention camps and then carted off to foster families across the country are unlikely to be able to return to the families they were torn away from. Many of them will inevitably end up like Carlos — their names and languages will be changed, they will be kept from mothers, fathers, cousins, aunts, or uncles.
Even Bethany Christian Services seems to doubt that the children they are displacing are ever going to be reunited with their families.
Dona Abbott, Bethany’s Branch Director of Refugee Services, explained to WZZM that: “Sometimes we get information about where the parent is being detained and sometimes we don’t.”
There is no system in place to return these children, Abbott admits:
Prior to this, we had a fairly organized, kind of systemic way of [ensuring] children got back to family. Now, we’re just not certain. You have parents deported separate from their children, and being deported to unsafe situations. So it would be easy for a parent to get lost in that situation.
What is unsaid by Abbott is necessary to say here:
These parents are not truly lost, they have been detained. They did not abandon their children, they were forced away from them.
Our government has kidnapped refugee children.
And we must acknowledge the cycle if we ever want to break it.




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