Separation policy has a familiar smell

Just when we thought there couldn’t be any more reasons to oppose the administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy toward immigrants seeking asylum across the U.S.-Mexico border, another horror surfaces: the death of an immigrant child who had been held in custody by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at an immigration facility in Dilley, Texas.

Much has been written about the woeful lack of preparation for this ill-conceived policy, which has caused irreparable harm to thousands of families through the separation of parents from their children. Now, policymakers must potentially answer for the death of a child.

As we grapple with these tragedies, it’s on each of us to realize that what we’re seeing is history repeating itself. The Trump administration’s actions in 2018 aren’t, unfortunately, all that different from historical actions taken by the United States toward its indigenous peoples over the last 150 years.

In the era of American Indian boarding schools, the U.S. government also separated children from parents — often under the guise of improving safety and opportunities for these children. Similar to the parents crossing the border today, these American Indian parents were also not U.S. citizens. Citizenship, after all, was not granted in a comprehensive sense to American Indians until 1924.

Throughout my career as an academic economist, I’ve conducted empirical research on the factors that improve family and child outcomes for American Indian communities. It is an established fact that the forced separation of children from their parents often resulted in death, disease and deprivation in governmentsanctioned boarding schools. For those who survived, the familial and cultural ties were often damaged beyond repair and the harm was often transmitted to later generations through substance abuse and violence. In my own research with a colleague in Canada — which has a similar history of forcefully separating indigenous children from their parents — we have documented the continued violence against First Nations women and their unusually high mortality rates. The damage is real and, often, permanent.

It is also important to remember that the U.S. government, in its sordid history as a nation built on slavery, has enacted and enforced laws that allowed the selling of children, as well. The costs of slavery to the children and families held in bondage — and to society as a whole — is incalculable. We may like to believe that such actions were only possible in earlier, less enlightened times, but the current family separation policy for immigrant families and children reminds us that we have much farther to go.

How, then, does a civilized society grapple with these unjust, inhumane actions committed by the government? This is not an academic question, but a practical one we are disgracefully forced to answer in the year 2018. While there are good debates to be had about what comprehensive immigration reform should look like in the United States, the treatment and detention of asylumseeking parents and, especially, their children should not be debated.

As it stands, the administration has failed to meet the court-mandated deadline for reunification of families by over a month. Over 500 children remain separated from their parents . With the government moving at an unacceptable pace to solve a problem of its own making, nonprofit agencies, like the American Civil Liberties Union, RAICES, and many others, have stepped in to do the work of our unwilling or incapable bureaucracy.

While these organizations continue their important work, we should each ask ourselves: When U.S. government policy removes children from their parents over a misdemeanor and places them in substandard conditions with a lack of medical attention — are we already living in the dystopian future we fear?

Public and peaceful protests have succeeded in putting an end to the active separation of parents and children. But with so many families yet to be reunited, the fight isn’t over — and the battleground has moved to the midterms. Voters should insist that their candidates address these horrors and fight to learn from history, not repeat it.

There is nothing just about separating children from their parents for seeking asylum, and nothing justifies the death of those children as a result of being in U.S. custody. In a civilized society, we don’t punish children for the sins of their fathers. Especially if the “sin” is a misdemeanor.