Paradkar: A reckoning for Canada,
Forgive me if I don’t get the big fuss around Laura Bush lambasting Donald Trump.
The former first lady wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post castigating the U.S. president’s newly enforced zero-tolerance policy toward asylum seekers that in the past several weeks has officially seen more than 2,300 children separated from their parents.
The parents are detained in federal facilities and, because children can’t be held there, they are being warehoused in cages.
There are no regulations around properly identifying children, no plan toward reuniting them. Some parents are being deported without their children.
This is heinous. There is no way around it. There can be no justification for this morally repugnant policy. There should be no tolerance of it.
Trump’s America has worn a veneer of civilization and stretched it so thin that it has torn beyond repair. On Tuesday, the country withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council.
Then again, this is a continent where history repeats itself with the regularity of a child’s tears.
Like Canada, America wrenched Indigenous children from families and put them into schools to “assimilate” them. It auctioned off children of enslaved mothers to the highest bidders and more recently, after the Second World War, imprisoned children separately from their families of Japanese ancestries.
The latest violation didn’t happen overnight, either — officials admitted they “lost track” of some 1,500 undocumented children last year — but immorality functions on a spectrum.
Bush calling the policy “cruel” and “immoral” shows Trump is finally crossing a line even for the architects of draconian immigrant policies.
Bush may have written that “our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores.”
But back in 2005, it was her husband, George W., whose administration drafted a policy named Operation Streamline that first adopted a “zerotolerance” approach for asylum seekers.
Bush’s policy turned people fleeing war-torn states and human rights violations into criminals who were guilty until proven innocent.
Once caught, the asylum seekers would be rounded up and represented in court, their cases heard not individually but with dozens together. They overwhelmingly pleaded guilty because it would get them a lesser sentence.
Bush calling the policy ‘cruel’ shows Trump is finally crossing a line
This policy that cost hundreds of millions of dollars continued into the Obama years. Families were detained under both presidents, but not separated with such impunity.
Is that the line in the sand? Prosecuting families, check. Are they together, more or less? If yes, cool. If no, then outrage.
What is this zero tolerance for? How effective has this ugly business been that more than a decade after its implementation along comes a president who decides to enact new provisions to make it more punitive?
Under Trump, America has consistently shown a lower than usual morality threshold. Its attorney general, Jefferson Sessions, invoked the Bible to enforce the law, a position so intolerable that 600 United Methodist clergy are bringing church law charges against him.
The barbaric provocateur Ann Coulter called crying children “paid actors” on farright propaganda channel Fox and appealed directly to Trump to not soften his stance.
Before this, many Americans accepted and were complicit in Trump’s dehumanization of immigrants, Muslims and countries with Black populations. They watched as he insulted women. They shrugged as he palled around with white supremacists.
They sat back as he hobnobbed with tyrants and began trade wars with allies.
They cheered when Trump’s buddy, the singer Ted Nugent, called Trump rival Hillary Clinton the C-word, but they poured out their outrage when a comedian hurled the same invective against his daughter Ivanka — in the context of this very same immigration policy that a few short days ago wasn’t as offensive even while kids were being apprehended.
Maybe that’s the line in the sand. Kids separated from families? Check. Are they placed in cages? If no, cool. If yes, then outrage.
We’ve seen the cages and we’re aghast. Unlike the Indigenous children Canada still scoops out of their homes, but out of our sight, this is a tragedy unfolding in a way we can’t unsee, can’t ignore.
Given how this case has unfolded, maybe that line is horrifyingly flexible. Kids in captivity? Check. Are they in our line of sight? If no, cool. If yes, then outrage.
An unintended side effect of the policies down south is they are forcing Canadians to reckon with our actions past and present. It’s not enough to express our horror with sad Facebook posts.
If we truly believe that all humans have equal rights, we need to ask why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is silent on this issue. We need to push him to end the Safe Third Country Agreement between the U.S. and Canada that bars asylumseekers arriving from each other’s countries at official points of entry, because they regard each other as safe havens.
That line, along the 49th parallel, should be a safe one to cross.