Republicans, the Party of Family Values, Suggest Migrant Babies Should Be Starved – Mother Jones

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Till this week, Republicans, like Democrats and most people, have been largely unaware of the nationwide child components scarcity. However desirous to feed the outrage machine, the GOP is now parlaying the scarcity into an appalling political assault over the Biden administration’s immigration insurance policies. And so they’re particularly going after migrant infants.

“Whereas moms and dads stare at empty grocery retailer cabinets in a panic, the Biden Administration is pleased to offer a child components to unlawful immigrants coming throughout our southern border,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott stated in a statement Thursday, blasting the federal government offering child components to immigrant holding services.

“American households, there’s a scarcity, however for those who’re a migrant, don’t fear, as a result of Uncle Sam has a stash of that,” Fox Information host Steve Doocy stated in a recent segment. “Joe Biden continues to place America LAST by delivery pallets of child components to the southern border as American households face empty cabinets,” Rep. Elise Stefanik tweeted.

That Republicans have seized on a reliable disaster to launch a merciless marketing campaign on a number of the most susceptible—literal infants—is a pure match for a celebration that subsists on fury over their supposed locations in line getting taken by these they deem much less worthy. It’s a grievance that fuels a lot of the GOP’s rhetoric and coverage agenda, from social welfare to immigration. Nevertheless it’s exhausting to overlook the obtrusive hypocrisy in these cries, because the so-called household values celebration targets precise infants weeks earlier than they would possibly win a decades-long combat to overturn Roe v. Wade.

However behind the cruelty of suggesting that some infants are extra deserving of hunger additionally rests a shocking stupidity on two fronts. As my colleague Fernanda Echavarri notes, lots of the pictures Republicans are circulating to assert that the Biden administration is sending pallets of child components to detention facilities don’t even embody the newborn components that has vanished from shops:

From what I can see, the pictures exhibiting pallets and cabinets with dozens and dozens of cans are not child components, they’re cans of NIDO, which is a milk substitute for toddlers. Assuming these images present what storage rooms at the moment appear to be in a Border Patrol holding facility, most of what anti-immigrant pundits and politicians are freaking out about is milk substitute for teenagers one yr or older, not child components. 

Secondly, the GOP is railing in opposition to households—lots of them absolutely asylum-seekers—which have been detained by the US authorities. Their detention robs them of the power to buy in individual to be able to safe meals for his or her infants, or within the case of so many households proper now, having to drive from chain to chain for hours in opposition to the backdrop of rising gasoline costs. So what are undocumented households who must feed their infants left to do? Maybe the identical Republicans now outraged that the federal government helps feed detained infants are working underneath the notion that moms ought to simply breastfeed and depart the components for them.

That’s incorrect. However Republicans reinforcing the pernicious, misguided notion that ladies are designed to make and feed infants is one more good theme for the GOP.