The U.S. State Department’s decision this weekend to halt all visitor visas for people from Gaza, which includes the medical-humanitarian visas that have brought injured children to American hospitals, will cost Palestinian lives. Officials say this process will be subject to a “full and thorough review”. For a child with infected burns or a deep trauma wound, a pause is a verdict on their life. The freeze did not arise from new intelligence or any novel identification of problems in the temporary visitor visa pathway. It followed a social-media panic with the circulation of mischaracterized videos of injured children arriving under the care of a U.S. nonprofit being labeled as a “security threat,” rhetoric amplified by political allies. The State Department then announced it was stopping visas while it re-examines procedures.
The racism and misinformation at the heart of that panic deserve naming. Some have labeled the process of evacuating children with amputations and burns as being potentially linked to terrorism and even characterized their joyful cries as “jihadi chants.” That is textbook dehumanization: take a population of wounded kids and code them as a threat to justify exclusion. Many have commented on the chain reaction from such posts to the administrative action. The line from a viral smear to a federal policy that blocks chemotherapy, skin grafts, or prosthetics for children should shame us, and the speed with which it occurred.
It also wildly overstates the scale of what has actually happened. In total, many of the NGOs running these U.S. transfers report a few dozen total children to date, not a “flood”. Individual city stories have been about twos and threes: a pair treated in Dallas; several children welcomed in Boston. This is the opposite of a large-scale pipeline; it’s a narrow, highly vetted corridor that exists because Gaza’s health system has been shattered.
Hellbound and Down 