Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending the U.S. practice of taking children away from their immigrant parents who brought them across the border seeking refuge in America. As a result, families of immigrants will be detained together.
If this is an improvement, it is a tiny one, and it may not even be legal.
The underlying problem is that the Trump administration is following a policy of prosecuting every immigrant who crosses the border from Mexico without proper documentation. This includes immigrants fleeing violence in Central America, who are seeking asylum in the United States. It is a violation of the U.S. Constitution and international law to detain and prosecute asylum seekers.
On Monday, Trump tweeted that all immigrants should be turned back at the border, with no hearings, no due process. This is a further violation of U.S. law, a development that should worry every American who values law and order.
As U.S. policy seesaws, the consequences remain the same for immigrant families. Thousands of children, who are now spread out at facilities in numerous states, need to be reunited with their parents. This will be a monumental task, and we have no reason to believe that the Trump administration will devote adequate attention and resources to this work, or do it in good faith.
Over the weekend, the Department of Homeland Security put out a fact sheet that outlined the process of reuniting parents and children. However, the document emphasized that such reunifications were for the “purposes of removal.” In other words, immigrant parents could be reunited with their children, if they give up their asylum claims and agree to be deported from the U.S. — back to the country they fled. People who are deported from the U.S. are barred from re-entering the country for at least five years, sometimes permanently.
If they pursue an asylum claim, Vox reported, they may not see their children for months, or even years. This is blackmail of asylum seekers in exchange for being allowed to be reunited with their children. It is also a lie as some adults have been deported without their children.
“What has become quite clear is that the Trump administration is not prioritizing reunification, or seemingly even terribly concerned about it.” Dahlia Lithwick wrote for Slate. “More terrifying is that it is clear that a rollout that was months in the making seemingly didn’t include provisions for properly identifying and coordinating which children were removed from their families and how to reconnect them.”
“It certainly seems that the administration truly had no intention of reunifying these families,” she added.
The work is complicated by the fact that, prior to the Trump administration’s policy of prosecuting all immigrants who cross the border, thousands of unaccompanied children crossed the border in previous years. Many of these children continue to be held in U.S. facilities, ranging from detention facilities to foster homes.
From numerous reports, it appears U.S. agencies have few records of who the detained children are or where their parents are. Some of the children are infants and toddlers.
A federal judge recently lost his temper over the lack of record keeping. He slammed his hand on the desk, sending a pen flying, Erik Hanshew, a federal public defender in El Paso, Texas, wrote in the Washington Post. “I can’t understand this,” the judge said. “If someone at the jail takes your wallet, they give you a receipt. They take your kids, and you get nothing? Not even a slip of paper?”
America has done terrible things to children and families in the past. Breaking apart black families to be sold into slavery and taking Native American children from their parents and sending them to boarding schools, come to mind.
We must not repeat that horrifying history by treating immigrant children as less valuable than an inmate’s wallet.
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