Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Medicine in Japanese American Concentration Camps

Episode Date: June 21, 2019

This week on Sawbones, we revisit a dismal period in American history that our government seems determined to repeat. Also you'll meet the heroic Japanese American doctors, nurses, dentists and other medical professionals that fought to save lives despite the fact that they themselves were prisoners. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with the two in that's lost it out. We've washed on through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

Come that essence, come that essence, the escalant macaque for the mouth. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Sobones, Emeralds, who are from Miss God and Medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McElroy. And I'm Sydney McElroy. Justin, we're going to talk about something a little more serious than we usually do. We frequently do serious episodes, Sydney. Well, at this point, I don't think that's a fair descriptor.

I guess, there's still, I would say these sessions. This one's a serious one. Yeah, this is among our serious episodes. I have been because of various groups I'm on on social media. I have been kept abreast as many people have, not me alone, but specifically as a physician, I receive a lot of articles about the medical crisis aspect that is happening along our southern border. Obviously, there is a humanitarian crisis, a much larger issue than just the medical care. But the medical piece of it is called the my attention frequently. I guess those things are probably just algorithms, surface them to the internet, knows I'm a doctor. Yes, Facebook's specifically a measure.

Facebook knows I'm a doctor now. And I've been reading a lot about the fact that we have been keeping people, human beings in facilities where they are not receiving proper or any medical care whatsoever. And I know there have been a lot of court cases and legal arguments recently as to what is necessary to humanly care for humans that you are incarcerating. I know that there's been a lot of news about recent arguments from our presidential administration that it is not

necessary to provide soap in a humane facility, that that is not part of humane treatment. Soap. I wouldn't think it happens to, but I think me and this president finally found something we disagree on. This is the one thing. This is the first one of everything. And hey folks, I mean that literally. And you know, there, I think that if we had never done this before,

I don't know, maybe you could say there was just poor organization, people didn't know what they were doing, but I wouldn't chalk it up to that. There's obviously a lot of malicious intent and the United States has a history of detaining other citizens in some cases and incarcerating them in camps. And so I started digging into the history of the medical care that was provided when during World War II, Japanese Americans

were detained and placed incarcerated in camps, mainly throughout the south and west of the country, the southwest and the middle of the country. Maybe worth clarifying at this moment, there's been a lot of semantic debate, and I don't think unwarranted semantic debate about concentration camps and internment camps and detention can't, you know, just regular prison. And we're gonna be talking for about a half hours and I don't want it to be a situation where we seem to be coming down on one side

of any sort of like, you know, vernacular or what have you, that is not our intent here. We're just, no, I think that it's important that we know what these terms mean. So the problem with internment, and I didn't know it was a problem until I started researching this.

So if you didn't know it was a problem. I know the problem with internment. You didn't know the problem with internment? No, the problem with internment. The problem with the word internment. I'm shocked. For once, I'm on the right side of history. You saw no problem with it. No. Did that obviously, I'm shocked. On for once, I'm on the right side of history. You saw no problem with it.

No, Sydney. Obviously, I mean the turn. I'm a guest. I thought the appropriate term was internment camps. It turns out that I'm wrong. And probably a lot of other people did not know either. I would advise you to look into histories of that time period of those camps that are written

and recorded by Japanese Americans and people who actually were in the camps to talk about it and to explain the situation as opposed to accounts from the US government because the US government used terms that were intentionally more positive euphemisms for what they were doing because the American public wouldn't like the idea that we were building concentration camps. But an internment camp sounds like something else and then when you call them an assembly center or a relocation center, that sounds not bad at all, right? So a lot of these terms that were used were specifically to cover what we were actually doing.

Right. The term concentration camp, by the way, we always think, rightfully so, it is connected with the Nazis. But there have been throughout history other examples of concentration camps. The British had concentration camps during the Second Boer War. The Spanish had concentration camps during the Ten Years War in Cuba. And interestingly, this has actually been addressed specifically regarding the Japanese concentration detainment. I think those would be proper words. I would not call them

internment camps during World War II. This came to a head in 1998 because there was going to be an exhibit about these American camps at Ellis Island. And the word concentration camps was going to be used throughout the exhibit. And an agreement, there was some discussion. Is this appropriate? Is this really, are we misleading? Does this equate it to the Nazi, let's call them what they were, death camps?

Does this make it all sound like the same thing? And actually, it's really interesting, uh, representatives of Japanese Americans and Jewish Americans came together. The American Jewish Committee and the Japanese, uh, American National Museum Committee, uh, representatives of Japanese Americans came together and decided that, you know, what, this term is appropriate because, uh, as they put it, all of these camps, and they named some of the ones I've already named, have one thing in common,

the people in power removed a minority group from the general population and the rest of society let it happen. And that's a concentration camp. So, the term is appropriate for those in turn Japanese Americans or in World War Two, and I would say would be appropriate along the border today. So I is it fair to say that a lot the difference if we're talking about intern, sorry, internment. Internment versus concentration.

A lot of his connotation, right? I mean, it is, it is basically describing the same concept, but it is the connotations that we have with those two terms. So at the time, an internment camp could also have referred to a place where people who had actually either committed a crime or were thought to commit a crime or were prisoners of war, who actually were known to be the enemy, the, you know, other side of the war. Were those people who were held could also be an internment camp.

And so to use that term for citizens who were taken from their homes and unfairly incarcerated. Lumps those two. Right. It's not accurate. Right. for citizens who were taken from their homes and unfairly incarcerated. Lumps those two together. Right, it's not accurate. And so these are the terms we're using. One other terminology, I found both Japanese Americans and Nikkei as a perhaps preferential term, Nikkei, for people of Japanese descent who have left Japan and live elsewhere. Nikae is also, so I sometimes will use that term to refer to Japanese Americans.

Okay. So, in case you're not aware, I'm not going to do an exhaustive history of what the legal and the issues of the war and why we put Japanese citizens into, Japanese American citizens into these camps. I'm not going to talk about all of the things that went on that there are many atrocities outside of the medical piece of it. I'm just going to focus on the medicine. But following Pearl Harbor, the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Roosevelt issued executive order 9066, which basically said, we are going to have these military exclusion zones, parts of the country where anyone who we could suspect might undermine or harm America

can be removed from that part of the country. And this paved the way for the military to remove any one of Japanese descent from California and then parts of Oregon, Washington and Arizona. So basically along the Pacific coast? Where the majority, the vast majority of Japanese-Americans were living at the time the the what and Hawaii I should say But the continental US was the focus. It's actually interesting if you look at the numbers There were a lot more people of Japanese descent living in Hawaii like proportionally proportionately

But a much smaller proportion of them were placed in camps, whereas a much larger proportion of the mainland Japanese American population was placed in camps for whatever reason. So some managed to immigrate quickly out of these areas before the order was given, but the majority did not, and were taken to wartime civil control administration centers. Those were the, what the United States government called assembly centers. And these were kind of hastily built detention facilities to take people and decide what to do with them next. And they're similar detention facilities along the border where people who are captured trying

to enter the United States illegally are immediately taken. Or legally, I should say, if they are seeking asylum or refugees, but they are taken immediately to these facilities. And these were basically the same kind of thing that they would build for the army, like an army barrack, like a quickly assembled army barrack. They were made for mainly young healthy men

as you would have in the military at the time. So they had communal bathrooms, they had a mess hall. And I mean, you've got to remember, these were regular everyday citizens who were taken from their homes with what they could carry and put into these facilities. So we're talking men, women, children, the elderly, the healthy and the sick, all placed together, somewhere horse stalls that had recently just been kind of hosed down and cleaned

out. Barnes and horse stalls essentially. Bedding was just like, cots and strong mattresses. There was no interior plumbing. They had wood or coal burning stoves if they needed heat. And then basically everything else they needed, they had to take care of themselves. So, and I'm using this to lead up to some of the medical problems that are going to occur. You had regular citizens who were told, listen, in terms of like food handling, storage preparation, you figure it out. We don't have the personnel and we're not going to do it.

So you have people who aren't necessarily trained in food handling, handling the food, which can lead to the outbreak of foodborne illnesses. which can lead to the outbreak of foodborne illnesses. After this, they realized if we're going to keep people here, we probably need to have a system for providing the medical care, because people get sick. Also, when you house them in inhumane facilities, they get sick a lot faster. So they called the United States Public Health Service in

to basically organize some kind of medical care system for everyone who's been incarcerated in these camps. Now what's the American Health Service? It's the US Public Health Service. It's sort of like it's medical professionals who have basically been sent, like they are employees of the government and sent to places to help provide care. And a lot of the time, like modern day, you'll be sent to like a rural area or a high needs area and in repayment, they usually like pay back your student life.

Government doctors basically. Yeah, yeah. Not forever, though. Like usually they will go on to other careers after their loans and time and stuff like that or paid back. But anyway, so they come from health departments and they set up with all of these grand ideas, what they're going to be able to provide in these camps, dentistry and nutrition and sanitation pharmacy, optometry, lab services. We're going to have nursing services and midwifery and social work and psych services and we're gonna have all this stuff and they have a plan for everything.

They recommend that there should be one physician for every thousand inmates. That doesn't even seem like a good. It's actually not a terrible ratio. It will compare to what a lot of people would have had at the time pre-war. Okay. It wasn't a terrible ratio, but but this was the plan. This was not the real. Okay. Got you. Even one to 1500 was a rare rarely attainable goal once once things actually got started. They they didn't have part of the problem at this point is you've got all these lofty goals, but there's a war. And a lot of the physicians in the country were overseas,

were were had enlisted and you know, we're being pulled out of their practices and hospitals to go take care of soldiers during the war. As a result, a lot of hospitals and offices were willing to pay a lot more for physicians who stayed at home. So why would you go work in one of these facilities in one of these camps for a lot less money from the US government when you could go to this other private hospital and get paid twice as much as you would before because they need you so much right the demand was so high. So they had a really hard time finding doctors for these camps like a league of their own. Yes, but instead of playing baseball. They were providing life saving medical care. Yes. And there is crying in that. Yeah, you can definitely cry in that. That's okay. There is crying in medicine. Sorry folks.

Jokes is, Jokes is out of the room. I'm just doing my best here trying to find any like a little just great bummer I could throw in here. Not a lot of great opportunities for humor as you can understand. Just do my best. Well, this isn't funny, but this is not funny. No, but this is a positive note. At this moment, what is decided is, you know, we know, even though we're pretending these aren't fellow humans that we've put in these camps, these aren't fellow humans that we've put in these camps, they are. And we know that some of them are medical professionals. And in fact, before the war, there were 87 physicians, N.K. physicians operating and surgeons in the country, in the four Western states that were part of this. And there were also 137 nurses and 105 dentists and 132 pharmacists and 35 optometrist. Anyway, they had all these professionals among the detained. And

so they said, well, okay, if you will work here, because we're not going to let you leave anyway. Right. But if you'll work here, we'll pay you about $20 a month, which even then wasn't. Yeah. I can't do the inflation calculation on that, but that seems culture. Even then it was not to comparison. One salary I saw if a, if a white nurse was employed there. So somebody who was not a detainee, if somebody came in and worked at one of the camp hospitals, a white nurse was paid like 135 a month and one of the knee-k doctors would be paid 20 bucks. Got it. So for there's a comparison that makes sense from the time.

So basically they they said, if you will work here, we will pay you and you can continue to do the job that you did before we incarcerated you. And also we need you to because everybody's going to get sick and we don't have doctors and nurses and medical professionals to take care of them. And so at that point, the NEC physicians really stepped up and said, okay, we're going to take care of each other. We are going to provide universal health care to everybody that lives in these camps for however long they're going to keep us here. And initially, they were supposed to only be in those first the WCCA centers for two

months. So all they had were like first aid stations, you know, they didn't have like formal hospitals. Now, they weren't necessarily only there for two months. Sometimes that lasted a lot longer, which is again, I think echoes what's happening at the border. And a lot of these initial facilities, people are supposed to be detained for no longer than I think like 72 hours. But in some of these cases, especially some of the children who have gotten very ill and some of the children who have died

at the border, they were kept there for six days or longer. So you see these cases where exactly what happened here, people are kept there way longer and they don't have the facilities. The wheels of bureaucracy never turn as quickly as they say they want to. Exactly. So they have these crowded unhealthy, unsanitary conditions inside these WCCA centers and people staying there much longer than they had intended. So it was absolutely essential that they had these physicians who were able to step in and immediately began taking care of people. The first goal was an inoculation program because the doctors knew and the medical staff not just adopted. In a camp situation, you could have it could be exponentially worse than outside of a situation like that.

So they immediately began immunizing as long as they had immunizations. Shortages of supplies were always an issue, always an issue. So anything I'm saying that they did, please know, it took longer and was harder and they never had enough, even though they worked as hard as they possibly could. But they they immunized everybody against diptheria and typhoid and smallpox and living cough. They had during a three month period, they gave 28,923 typhoid immunizations and 11,475 smallpox immunizations, which is a lot, but you got to remember,

at the end of the day, we are talking about between 110 and 120,000 people who were placed, who were incarcerated in these camps by the end. So, that was the beginning at the WCCA Centers. Now, obviously this was not the last step. You might not know this. I've actually learned a lot about this process. From there, the citizens would be sent to WRA centers.

And I want to talk about the next step, because a lot more medical care would happen at these facilities, because they work at there a lot longer. But before I do that, let's go to the Belling Department. Okay, let's go. The medicines, the medicines that I skilled at my cards before the mouth. It may seem a little weird to be doing ads on an episode like this. Unfortunately, we don't know sort of what these topics are going to be when we're figuring out, like, ad calendars and all the boring business stuff of podcasting.

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So, as I mentioned, we're about to be transferred out of these WCCA centers, and I want to talk about the more permanent kind of semi-permanent hospitals that were set up. One example I did want to give of the food handling and storage issues. This sounds like a small thing, but food poisoning can be a big problem. And at one point, there was a center, about 35 miles south of Seattle, the Puy-Puy-Up center, where some spoiled Vienna sausages made everybody so sick that they were having to leave the barracks in the middle of the night to run to the public latrines and they were some distance away. So they're all taking their flashlights and having to run along these, there's no roads.

I mean, it's just all outside. So they're having to try to make it all of these again men, women, children, the elderly, the sick, the healthy, everyone to make it to these public latrines quickly and wait their turn to because they're sick, gastrointestinal distress. And there were so many people running around with all the flashlights. They thought the centuries thought it was an escape and there was almost a huge panic. And it was all due to foodborne illness. And this was a common problem. One thing that was noted, I would say, over and over again, is that obstetrical care

was something that nobody thought of initially. But especially as we move on to the War Relocation Authority centers, which was where they were supposed to be slightly more permanent places where you could be detained for a longer period of time. So, more comfortable, more services before the plan was to relocate people to these non-military exclusion zones, right? Other places in the US where you were going to let you live. Now, we've taken everything from you and taken you from your home. We're going to send you somewhere else. Or you could be possibly sent back or sent to Japan, either, especially it's worth

noting at the time, there was not a pathway for a lot of the Japanese Americans who had actually immigrated to Japan, not first generation or second generation, but who had actually been born outside of the US. There was not a pathway for them to become citizens in the US period. So, this created a great deal of strain, especially they were in the country for long periods of time, maybe almost their whole life, but they still couldn't own property, they couldn't vote, they weren't officially recognized as Americans. And so, they faced the threat of deportation in this situation.

But in these camps, they realized at 6.40 a.m. on September 22, 1942, that people give birth some time. Oh, that had to escape them until that exact moment. Yeah. And that they weren't really set up for anyone who gives birth or the giving birth process or what they would do. God's green earth would they not take that person to a medical facility?

Well, they didn't. They had to quickly, the doctor had to think quickly and Dr. Eugenia Fujita, who was the attending, who delivered this first baby, had to think quickly, get a dining hall table and covered up with some towels. And this, our first baby, Mrs. Thomas Takai gave Takaki, sorry, gave birth to our first baby named Eugenia after the doctor, who delivered her that day on a table in a temporary infirmary in the laundry hall. But I will say that one thing that is noted is that the maternal care was actually kind of a

bright spot in a lot of the care people received because the doctors realized pretty quickly that they were not going to be given appropriate facilities to do this. And so they put a lot of time and effort into prenatal care, postnatal care. They would not let the midwives deliver the babies because even though they were allowed to prior to being detained, the government, the Army insisted that it only be physicians who deliver the babies for whatever reason. And so the midwives were allowed to provide a lot of prenatal postnatal care. So these patients, or the patients, these detainees who were pregnant probably got a lot more prenatal care than they might have outside.

This is not justification, but they did get prenatal and postnatal care. And they eventually started taking them to local hospitals to actually give birth, because they realized that this could have been catastrophic at times. Unfortunately, there were catastrophic cases, but they began to at least have a plan in place to provide for people who were pregnant and giving birth. At the War Relocation Authority centers, like I said, they were supposed to have a lot more permanent facilities. They were supposed to have hospitals built before anybody got there. They were supposed to have X-ray and lab equipment, medications.

Of course, they didn't. Again, bureaucracy. They had the beginnings of these things, sometimes half of these things. Not helpful. No, no, but they did not when people first got there. I guess if it's the bottom half, that's, you know, maybe you can make something work there.

And you're thinking like, well, people were only kept there for so long. What do you need? Like, do you need a hospital? Yes, you do. The hospitals over the course of these hospitals, once they were built and staffed and people used them, recorded a total of 5,981 births,

1,862 deaths. Inpatient and outpatient services were, I mean, countless, they have numbers, thousands of people went in and outpatient services were I mean countless they have numbers Thousands of people went in and out of these hospitals get people get sick Give a good sick and again when you keep them in in these It when they're incarcerated when they're in these camps. We know People get sick a lot faster

Another area they didn't have a shortage was dental care actually. Dental care actually was pretty excellent within these camps. And again, when I'm, when I'm complimenting the care that was provided, remember, detainees provided this care. It was not a compliment to no, the US military was not. And they, while they would at times have, uh, non-Japanese physicians and nurses, of course they had to. There were times where you had to employ people and they did find people. They were not the ones who were providing the most consistent care. It was often the NECA physicians and nurses who were doing so. When they moved everybody to these WRA centers, they had a whole other host of issues they faced.

The initial places, the initial camps where people were kept were pretty close to like, like I mentioned, the one was like 35 miles south of Seattle. They were pretty close to where the original Japanese populations existed. Now, these other centers were set up mainly in like desert areas. And so, there were extreme temperatures, and they weren't really prepared to deal with how hot it got inside these camps in the summer and how cold it would get in the winter. And so, like, I saw one mention that the nursery, at one point, it was 105 degrees inside the nursery. Like that's unacceptable.

You can't have newborns in a temperature like that. And this was very hard on the very young and the very old of the population. Dust was a huge problem. This doesn't sound like a huge problem, but when you're talking about these poorly ventilated buildings where people are living, the dust storms would get so thick that they said you could see when you would get up in the morning off of your cot, there was an outline of your body in the dust that settled on you that you were breathing all night. And what resulted from that was a lot of respiratory illness.

So a lot of asthma was a common problem. There was a lot of pneumonia, a lot of people got coxidiumicosis, which is unique. It's like a to this part of the country and it's an illness that can, it's sort of a flu-like, but can also cause pneumonia illness. There were malaria was a big problem, especially the Arkansas camps. They eventually brought the mosquito problem under control, but it was a big problem initially. Again, food in adequate food handling was a huge problem in adequate food supply. Not only did people suffer from issues like salmonella related to spoiled food, but they also suffered from nutritional deficiencies,

vitamin deficiencies because of just inadequate supply. It was a frequent, the US military would publicize often how little they were spending per inmate in these camps, how little money they spent on food. And to contrast, they would always publicize the number. We only spend, it was like 37 cents per inmate on food in the camps, but our troops get 55 cents per troop, So don't worry. Don't worry. We're not feeding them too much was the message that they wanted to make sure the public got.

TB tuberculosis is a huge threat in any situation where people are living in close quarters like this and accounted for like 11% of the deaths that would initially occur or that would eventually occur in these camps. As time went on because the whole idea was that you would go to these relocation centers and be sent somewhere else, physicians started to leave. And so at times it would become a big problem to provide medical care just because you doctors

left. They moved somewhere. And you kind of see it was interesting. These were things that I learned. This divide between some of the physicians who were immigrants to this country and the first generation Japanese Americans who were actually born in this country. A lot of the immigrants to this country felt the need to stay. And they all felt this compulsion that even if their family had gotten a place to go and

they could leave and start a new life and be outside the camps, a lot of them struggled with the responsibility of taking care of their, you know, fellow Japanese Americans. And they found that a lot more of the, what are called, ESA or the immigrants to this country who were not technically citizens of the United States, they were more likely to stay and continue to provide care, even if they could have left, because they felt this obligation to maintain. But even with that, people were leaving. And as they brought in more and more Caucasian physicians

and nurses to fill these spots, the care suffered somewhat, not necessarily from incompetence, as much as cultural issues, cultural ignorance. There was a lot of divide in, and I would say well-founded mistrust. Sure, of course. Despite all of these issues, despite all of the struggles by the time in December of 1944

when there were two court decisions handed down. One was Cory Matsu versus the US, which said, basically, yeah, we don't think it was unconstitutional at all to take all of these citizens out of their homes. Cory Matsu versus the US, which said, basically, yeah, we don't think it was unconstitutional at all to take all of these citizens out of their homes. That was fine. You can call it a military exclusion zone and move all these people. This Supreme Court decided that they also made a decision, X part, Indo, which said, it's not okay to put them in facilities, though. So you could have the removing was fine, the camps are not. So they just stand outside them.

They have to leave their houses and they have to go somewhere else, but we don't have a place for it. I don't know what the legal solution to that was. Yeah, it seems a little contradictory. So by the following January, officially the policy, you couldn't incarcerate. It was illegal, unconstitutional, to actually incarcerate people. So this began the end of incarceration,

although the last camp didn't close until March 20th, 1946, even though. It's a little slow. And so through that whole period, you still had doctors and nurses and other medical personnel taking care of people within these facilities. And it really is a testament to the Japanese Americans, to the Nikae, to the Japanese immigrants who had not been granted citizenship status, who should have been by all rights, but didn't have a legal pathway to it at the time. It is really a testament to them that care inside these facilities was as good as it was. And again, in a, in a, I am not saying that

it was a paradise. No. Sure. There were all kinds of health problems that, let's be honest, were created by the camps, the very nature of the camps created most of these issues. But these, these physicians and nurses and dentists and pharmacists and midwives persevered and managed to provide for their limitations a very high level of care to their fellow fellow detainees which is admirable and a bright spot in a very very dark story dark chapter of our history. The legacy, of course, persists. It would be very ignorant to assume that once everybody was let out of the camps that everything was fine. You don't suffer

long-term consequences from that. There were some, as some children, or as some adults today note that who were born inside the camps for the first four or five years of their lives, it's all they knew. Sure. Oh gosh. So post-traumatic stress disorder was a common problem, anxiety and depression. And when you left, I didn't even get into. When you left, it's not like they gave you everything back they took from you. Sure.

You'd lost your land, your home, your possessions. You had to go somewhere new and start over again. So there were all kinds of long-term issues that a lot of the detainees suffered due to that kind of toxic stress and the adverse childhood events that the children in the camp suffered. And there was one study I found that showed that

it even just being in the camp's probably limits the expected lifespan of an individual when compared with cohort that genetically is similar but did not experience the camps. And I think that this is useful for us to reference and talk about because I think everyone would agree that that was a horrible, horrible thing that we did and shouldn't have done. It was wrong legally and morally and on every level that you can be wrong.

It was wrong. And it is what we are doing again at the Southern border. Whatever your personal feelings are on immigration, I think we can all agree that taking fellow human beings and putting them in unsanitary, unsafe, unhealthy conditions where they don't have proper food or water or a surface to sleep on. You can read any of the accounts. People are kept obviously behind these fenced in, if you want to call them cages or you want to come fenced in areas, whatever words you want to use, they're sleeping on concrete floors,

babies, you know, five months old, five month old sleeping on concrete floors, being given not proper nutrition and then obviously not proper medical care, in any sense of the word. So there have been a lot of petitions and movements by physician groups, especially the pediatricians in Texas have been very vocal trying to get the government to let them in to provide more consistent services. A lot of the people who are coming to this country have already been put through severe severe environments and situations have traveled long distances, have perhaps had their medications taken from them, stolen from them, or in some cases just taken by border patrol as routine. Just take your backpack and if that has

your insulin and now you don't have your insulin. And there isn't necessarily a lot of people at the border who have any kind of medical training to recognize who needs immediate evaluation by a hospital or clinic and who can go straight to these facilities. So we're just we're repeating these mistakes all over again. Um, is there anything to be done? Yes. Aside from the obvious like, make us, you know, political pressure that you can apply seems, you know, protesting and voting for good people that don't support concentration camps. It seems like a groovy start.

Sure. I mean, I think one thing is we need to acknowledge what these are. They are concentration camps. If you feel better calling them detainment camps, okay, uh, internment camps is not technically accurate, I would say, because of the connotation, although, well, I guess technically it could be accurate, but the connotation, I think, leads you to believe that these people have done something wrong and they haven't. They are asylum seekers. They are seeking asylum, not concrete floors and cages. But they are, one, let's call them what they are, and then let's recognize that that's a humanitarian crisis, and the United States doesn't want to be involved in that. And I would say calling your personal legislator, senators and congresspeople, and letting

them know that you care about this issue. You don't have to, I think a lot of times when we call, we think we have to have like a specific piece of like legislation that we're calling about, like I'm calling to ask you to vote yes or no, I'm blah, blah, blah. And that's great. But you can also call to say, I just want my senator, whoever to know that I really care about this. This matters to me. And if whatever action they take or don't take will help decide my vote in the future. And I would like to see action taken. The other thing that you can do right away that's even easier than making a phone call because I hate using the phone too.

If I feel you, I'm solidarity if you don't like making phone calls. You can donate to racisttexas. That's r-a-i-c-e-s-Texas.org, who can help, hopefully, make sure that people are getting asylum seekers and immigrants are having a, there's a just process for this. And I would say those are the main two things you can do today because we didn't even touch on the fact that it is a medical issue that we are separating families. It is a medical issue that children are being removed from their parents. That kind of toxic stress, that adverse childhood event will damage them possibly forever.

And they will require extra medical care and likely mental health services and social services for the rest of their lives because of the damage that is being done in the name of the United States. And that's all of us, at least us two citizens. That is a medical issue, and we have to stop. Folks, thank you so much for listening to our episode.

I know it was a tough one to thank you for hanging in there and not looking away, which I think is the easiest thing to do. Our theme song is provided by the taxpayers. It's called Medicines. You can find their music on Bandcamp, I believe, if you want to find more taxpayers music. And we're on the Maxman Fun Network, which has a lot of great podcasts. You can go track down. But we will be back again next week, statistically speaking, with what almost certainly will be a more lighthearted episode. But until then, my name is Justin McRoy. statistically speaking, with what almost certainly will be a more light-hearted

episode. But until then, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm sitting McRoy. As always, don't drill a hole in your head. Alright!