Republic editorial:
Family separations at the border are just plain wrong.
The easiest thing to understand about the Trump administration’s new hard line on immigration is that it’s wrong.
It’s so easy to comprehend, you can sum it up in one short, declarative sentence:
You do not use children as bargaining chips.
That is precisely what this administration admits to doing. It is creating stress on children and families to advance two policy objectives:
❚ To put pressure on Democrats to pass immigration reform that would fund construction of a border wall.
❚ To send a message of deterrence across Latin America.
The United States government between April 19 and May 31 separated nearly 2,000 immigrant children from their parents, the Justice Department reports.
President Donald Trump maintains that Democrats are responsible for this and can change the policy by working to pass an immigration compromise with Republicans.
That is farce.
The truth is that Trump can end this policy with a wave of his hand. So far, he refuses.
Prior to the new hard line, the United States was lenient on illegal bordercrossers with children, allowing them to go free on bond and stay together as a family as the adults awaited court hearings. This so-called “catch and release” prevented the kind of trauma that separation is creating today.
For weeks now, a chorus of righteous anger has been rising against the Trump policy as reports surface of children younger than 5 being separated from their mothers.
When Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, was urged by colleagues to see for herself what was happening at a shelter run by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Texas-Mexican border, she witnessed a little girl about 2 years old screaming and pounding her fists, the
Washington Post reported.
The child was unconsolable and workers at the shelter were prevented by rules from picking her up and holding her. They were not allowed to touch the child.
Kraft was appalled:“The kids need to come first. America is better than this.”
Equally outraged, some 4,600 mental-health professionals and 90 organizations have petitioned the Trump administration to end the policy: “To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma.”
White House and federal officials are not the only adults using children as bargaining chips.
Some immigrant adults have admitted that they brought their children to the border because they believed U.S. officials would release them, the adults, into the general population sooner, the
New York Times reported.
Other immigrants acknowledged that they pretended to be the parents of children who accompany them.
It is also common for parents to “entrust their children to a smuggler as a favor or for profit,” The Arizona Republic reported.
This prompted National Review’s
Rich Lowry to write, “If someone is determined to come here illegally, the decent and safest thing would be to leave the child at home with a relative and send money back home. Because we favor family units over single adults, we are creating an incentive to do the opposite and use children to cut deals with smugglers.”
But even if human smugglers and some migrants are misusing children to gain passage to the United States, it doesn’t give our own government license to exploit those same children to achieve political ends.
The White House is so determined to stop illegal immigration, it issued a smarmy statement defending its “separation” policy.
“Open-border laws and policies are responsible for the permanent separation of too many American families whose loved ones have been lost to illegal alien crime,” the statement reads.
It went on to catalog horrific crimes committed by migrants who violated our immigration laws.
That’s an old and shameful trick in America.
In years past, this was done to the Irish, Italians, Russians and Poles, to name a few. Now it’s being used to broad-brush Latin Americans.
The policy has already emboldened the left. Democratic candidates are heading to the border to decry the administration’s policy and plan to make it a central issue of the midterm elections. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is betting Americans will back them.
“Democrats can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change!” Trump tweeted this past weekend. “This is why we need more Republicans elected in November. Democrats are good at only three things, High Taxes, High Crime and Obstruction. Sad!”
So children under 5 are enduring the trauma of separation from their parents so Trump can fashion a campaign slogan.
There isn’t much complicated about that.
This is wrong.