Suffer the children
There’s been a deluge of terrifying headlines about the Trump administration’s immigration practices over the past few weeks. Many of the stories focus on harrowing stories about immigrant children separated from their parents or guardians — either at the U.S. border, or because the administration “forgot” to keep track of them. It’s important to point out that some of these stories reflect inhumane
immigration policies that predate the Trump administration.
But the outrage is understandable. The Trump administration has taken an immigration process that was already maddening and added an extra layer of cruelty.
The result will be a generation of traumatized and scarred children — and a shame upon our nation.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that it would start detaining and prosecuting every single immigrant who’s caught entering the U.S. illegally.
Experts assailed the logistical ramifications of the change, which are bad enough. Prosecuting every immigrant who’s caught on illegal entry will swamp the U.S. immigration courts. It will also unfairly penalize asylum seekers who are fleeing violence.
But others noted that one of the worst parts about the change is that it’s effectively a family separation policy. Since children can’t be legally held in detention indefinitely, they’ll be separated from their parents while they wait for their day in court.
This policy won’t stop desperate parents from illegally entering the United States, but it will create lasting psychological damage for their children. It’s also a policy that is absolutely the doing of the Trump administration.
Another recent story about the heartless treatment of immigrant children has more complicated origins.
During a U.S. Senate hearing last month, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services said that the Office of Refugee Resettlement was “unable to determine with certainty the whereabouts” of 1,475 children who had come to the U.S. as unaccompanied minors.
Most of these children came to the U.S. from Central America. There have been waves of unaccompanied minors arriving at the U.S. border since 2014, thanks to surging violence and economic problems in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
The resettlement office’s practices for these children predate the Trump administration — and on paper, their practices are sensible. The office does its best to place the children with family members. It successfully did so with 85 percent of the children in the survey discussed at the hearing.
As for the 1,475 children whose whereabouts are unknown, it’s unlikely that they’ve all met a terrible fate. Many of them may have been placed with undocumented relatives who are rightfully leery of answering government phone calls during a time of heightened deportations.
Despite their differences, the two stories are related. Both of them speak to the vulnerability of immigrant children in the U.S. at a time when the White House’s immigration policy is venomous. Both stories also condemn Congress, which has punted on passing comprehensive immigration reform for decades.