Trauma, stain of policy that rips children from parents
Tonight, in the United States of America, migrant children will fall asleep without the kiss of a parent or the affirmation that they are still loved. Tomorrow morning, throughout Central America and Mexico, parents will awake with a break in their hearts, an emptiness in their lives, and the uncertainty that their children, taken from them in the U.S., are still alive.
Between tonight’s aching and tomorrow morning’s longing is an endless nightmare for these children and parents, which was conjured by the monstrous policy of a government whose refuge they sought.
However long Donald Trump’s presidency lasts, lasting longer will be the cruelty and shame of his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border. Longer still will be the trauma suffered by those families and the tragedy of families who will never be reunited.
Tuesday, NBC News reported lawyers assigned to identify migrant families who were separated by the Trump administration have told a federal judge they’ve yet to find the parents of 545 children and that two-thirds of those parents were deported to Central America without their children. This is no less surprising than it is heartbreaking and infuriating, and it is the natural consequence of an unconscionable policy created to inflict pain. Although the “zero tolerance” policy officially began in 2018, the administration began separating children at the border in 2017 through a pilot program in El Paso. Most of the nearly 3,000 families separated through zero tolerance in 2018 remained in custody in the U.S., but more than 1,000 family separations happened through the 2017 pilot program, and many of those parents had already been deported by the time Trump, in June 2018, signed an executive order ending zero tolerance.
After the signing of that executive order, a federal judge in California ordered that the separated families be reunited. The administration had no system in place to track the children.
Two months ago, NBC News obtained a copy of a Justice Department memo in which federal prosecutors running the pilot program warned that children younger than 12 shouldn’t be separated because they wouldn’t be able to find their parents on their own. (But 13-year-olds and 14-year-olds would be able to do this by themselves?) Then-deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s response, according to a draft report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, was that no child was so young that they shouldn’t be separated from their parents. There are children who have now been separated from their families for as long as three years. Mothers and fathers escaped the violence of their native lands to save the lives of their children only to have them taken away by U.S. officials.
The administration had no moral or legal standing to separate these children and then deport their parents — deportations that, for some of them, were death sentences.
What the government did, in our names, is an indelible stain on our nation and everyone who signed off on it. An administration that would conceive of a plan to separate children from their parents and then proceed to sadistically carry it out with no remorse can’t be expected to atone for its sins by doing everything possible to find the parents of these children. That righteous and life-saving work will be done by lawyers and organizations. Aided, perhaps in a few months, by a new and more compassionate administration.
Until then, night will fall, morning will rise, and the nightmare of children separated from their parents will continue.