Allowed to think

Today marks 33 days since Judge Dana Sabraw’s July 26 migrant family reunification deadline, but hundreds of families still remain separated.

According to the most recent numbers, the Trump administration continues to have 528 children under U.S. custody, including 23 kids age 5 and under. The parents of 343 children have already been deported, including six kids age 5 and under.

139 children are under U.S. custody because their parents “indicated desire against reunification or waived reunification rights.” But according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “many parents” did so under duress and not understanding what they were signing. With families still separated in blatant violation of a court order, family separation remains a crisis.

Do not forget the children. Do not rest until they’re free from their daily trauma and in the arms of their parents once again. Do not forget who jailed them all in the first place

Masha Gessen, who grew up in Putin’s Russia, has six rules for us: 1. Believe the autocrat; 2. Do not be taken in by small signs of normality; 3. Institutions will not save you; 4. Be outraged; 5. Don’t make compromises; 6. Remember the future.

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.