The moral stain remains five years later

Five years later, the moral stain remains. Americans never fully reckoned with the mass-scale, government-sanctioned child abuse carried out in our name when thousands of immigrant children were snatched from their parents. Worse, we may be sleepwalking into bigger atrocities in the years ahead, as Donald Trump and other Republican politicians threaten even more extralegal punishment of immigrants if handed back the White House.

For those whose memory is hazy: In 2018, the Trump administration systematically separated 5,000 asylum-seeking children from their parents. This family-separation policy, aka “zero tolerance,” was intended to inflict such intolerable cruelty upon immigrants exercising their legal right to apply for asylum that it would deter anyone further from seeking refuge here. As Trump put it recently: “When you say to a family that if you come we’re going to break you up, they don’t come.”

His administration failed at the deterrence objective, but it succeeded at the cruelty part. Teens and toddlers alike were taken from their parents. The government didn’t even keep records of the separations; many parents had no way of determining where their children were or even if they were alive.

And for a brief, honorable moment, American voters were horrified.

The family separations program was a historically unpopular policy, faring worse in polls than any major bill of the prior 30 years. Maybe the public cannot agree on how to fix the immigration system, or what to do about the border. But at least we mostly agreed it was morally abhorrent to use state force to traumatize children.

Democratic politicians, including eventually presidential challenger Joe Biden, voiced outrage over the treatment of these families and pledged reunification and recompense; some Republican lawmakers condemned Trump’s policies too. Facing political pressure and litigation, Trump formally ended the program without actually making already-separated families whole.

Since then, the issue has faded from headlines, and the public conscience.

Apparently fearing political backlash, the Biden administration pulled the plug on a settlement being negotiated with affected families in late 2021. Dozens of cases brought by these families continue to languish in court. It was only this week, in fact, that former Trump administration officials were finally ordered to testify in any of these suits.

Five years after the separation policy formally ended, as many as 1,000 kids have still not been reunited with their families, according to Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in cases brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. Gelernt notes that some of these children have now spent nearly their entire lives without their parents.

Americans don’t care. Worse, blood-thirst for tormenting immigrants seems to be growing.

That’s partly because, post-COVID, the number of asylum-seekers coming to the border has spiked, and the cities where they end up have struggled to manage the influx. These are challenges wrought by our broken immigration system, which lawmakers could fix if they wished (by, for example, granting more resources to the asylum system, to reduce adjudication backlogs; or changing existing law to allow newly arrived asylum-seekers to work legally, so they can support themselves right away). But it’s an election year. So instead of fixing the problem, politicians have decided to exploit it — and minimize or valorize the horrors of Trump’s worst policies in the process.

When Gelernt testified before Congress this month about the family separation program and its aftermath, Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) asked him which was worse — Trump’s family separation policy or the alleged child sex trafficking rings that conspiracy theorists claim Biden is enabling. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) added that “the so-called separating children from their parents” was really about keeping children “safe.”

Trump’s former acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf recently denied the administration ever even had a policy of separating families. Meanwhile, Trump himself has spoken wistfully of the policy and refused to rule out reviving it if granted another term.

In fact, last week Trump promised to visit more humanitarian carnage upon immigrants if reelected. He announced plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to grant himself unilateral power to detain and deport noncitizens. The last time a president invoked this power was during World War II, in service of another large-scale human rights abuse: Japanese internment. With voters running short on empathy, and news organizations focused on the horse race, the announcement got little attention.

Meanwhile, other Republicans vying for the presidential nomination have aped Trump’s instincts. At the recent debates, candidates referred to our country as being “invaded” by immigrants, endorsed “militarizing” our border, and promised “lethal force” against those attempting to cross it.

Voters, I beg you: Remember that revulsion you once felt for this rhetoric, these policies, their costs? Hold onto it. Nurture it. And remind politicians of it every chance you get as we approach Election Day.