Analysis: Painful scenes prompt rare Trump retreat.
WASHINGTON — A 2year-old girl, with red sneakers and dark hair, crying as a U.S. Border Patrol agent searches her mother. Boys filing along white tents against a desolate desert backdrop. Toddlers screaming for their parents in a detention center in Texas.
As wrenching scenes of the more than 2,300 immigrant children pulled apart from their parents at the border sparked anguish around the globe and a political backlash at home, President Donald Trump said migrants illegally “infest our country,” framing his policy to separate families as a deterrent against drug smugglers and Central American gang members.
From the June day three years ago when Trump announced his White House bid by charging that Mexico was sending “rapists” across the border, he has used inflammatory rhetoric on immigration, dehumanizing and criminalizing a broad class of people who he said threatened the nation’s security.
That strategy hit a speed bump Wednesday when Trump signed an executive order that said the administration would keep families together in detention facilities and ask the Justice Department to expedite their cases. The rare tactical retreat reflected how the painful images of children crying in cages — and criticism pouring in from Pope Francis, former first ladies and others — could endanger Republicans as they head into the midterm elections.
“This is a form for visual rebuttal,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a presidential historian and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
If anything, however, Trump amped up his warnings to suggest that millions of people are preparing to flood across the border and overrun the nation with what he called “tremendous crime.”
“We have to be strong on the border, otherwise you’ll have millions of people coming up, not thousands like we have now,” Trump told Republican lawmakers at the White House. “You’ll have millions of people flowing up and just overtaking the country and we’re not letting that happen.”
In fiscal year 2017, the Border Patrol apprehended 303,916 individuals on the Southwest border, down 25 percent from the previous year. Apprehensions have increased this year.
The notion that foreigners pose a threat to public safety is hardly new.
But the harder edge to the immigration discourse remained on the fringes until recently, civil rights lawyers and immigrant rights advocates said.
Now the rhetoric is coming from the Oval Office — “not Arizona or Alabama,” said Frank Sharry, founder and executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigrant rights group working to overhaul national immigration laws.
To be sure, the last three presidents — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — all helped build a deportation apparatus that increasingly targeted families. They each focused primarily on removing convicted criminals, or gang members accused of violent crimes, not people who had overstayed their visas or entered the country illegally.
But mothers and children became priority enforcement targets by 2014, as federal agencies struggled with nearly 60,000 unaccompanied children and teens surging across the border, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Critics lambasted Obama as “deporter in chief,” and while he kept families together in detention centers, they sometimes were held in poor conditions.
“The Obama administration set the foundation for the Trump administration’s immigration policy,” said Cesar Garcia Hernandez, associate professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law. “But the Trump administration sent into overdrive both in terms of the rhetoric of migrant dehumanization — and the reality.”
In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered what he calls a “zero tolerance” policy on the border, detaining and prosecuting many of those who cross illegally, rather than simply turning them back in what the administration derided as “catch and release.”
That policy led to the separation of families, the gruesome photos of toddlers crying and pressure even from fellow Republicans to find a solution that offered better optics.
But immigration lawyers stressed that the administration’s crisis was self-inflicted, while its justification attempted to blur the distinction between criminals and the majority of immigrants.
“We never had any illusion about (Trump’s) cruelty, but I think the entire country, indeed the entire world, is seeing how that rhetoric shapes policy,” Sharry said.