Taking kids away is illegal
Somewhere in Texas, a 3-year-old is crying into her pillow. She left all her toys behind when she fled Guatemala. And on this day the U.S. government took her mother away. When we read about the U.S. administration’s new policy of trying to stop people from crossing its borders by taking away their children, we, too, had trouble sleeping.
There are legal and ethical limits to how far a rights-respecting country can go to protect its borders. It cannot shoot unauthorized border-crossers on sight. It cannot torture them. And it cannot take their children.
This Friday at 2 p.m., refugee advocates, lawyers, academics, health-care providers and others will hold a protest, and come together with their children’s old toys to build a towering toy pile of shame in front of the U.S. Consulate in Toronto.
Since October, the U.S. authorities have taken more than 700 little kids — including more than 100 babies and toddlers — from their detained parents and sent them to facilities across the country. This number will soon skyrocket, since this practice has just become policy. With shelters at capacity, the administration is preparing to use military bases to house the hundreds of children per week that officials expect to seize.
Until a few months ago, when border agents intercepted undocumented families, children were sent with at least one parent to a “family detention centre.” The fact the U.S. was detaining children at all, let alone for weeks or months, earned the Obama administration widespread condemnation.
But now, in a decision that the Economist suggests is “unprecedented in American history or international practice,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions has declared that his department will prosecute every adult who crosses the border without proper documents. This means keeping them in adult-only jails — without their children.
According to lawyers and aid workers, children being separated from their parents beg not to be taken away. Experts confirm that some may never recover from the trauma. Parents wait weeks to find out where their children have been taken. In a mess of Byzantine bureaucracy, some parents have been deported without their children.
Many border-crossers are fleeing gang violence in countries with the world’s highest rates of murdered children. The administration is hoping desperate parents would rather take their chances at home than subject their children to the U.S. process.
As White House Chief of Staff John Kelly noted in a radio interview, taking people’s children away — to be “put into foster care or whatever” — is a “tough deterrent.” Or as Sessions said: “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally.”
Earlier, the administration had tried to suggest that this policy was motivated by altruism. The adults that these children are weeping for might not be their real parents. And by discouraging them from attempting the border crossing, this policy will save migrants’ lives.
Giving desperate people a shot at reaching safety will just encourage them to try. Since the road north is so treacherous, the Guatemalan mother and daughter should — for their own good — remain trapped in a country where, in the past 9 years, over 7,000 women and girls have been murdered, many of them tortured to death.
Similar reasoning has been used to suggest that Europeans should not rescue drowning migrants at sea. Or that Canadians should block even more people from making refugee claims at our border by renegotiating our Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S.
With the extraordinary decision to prosecute all unauthorized migrants, the U.S. administration is using the criminal justice system to take hostages, many of them still in diapers.
Its message could not be clearer: Step across this line and we will hurt your children. The American Civil Liberties Union, in a pending court challenge to this policy, argues this is illegal.