“What we want is a safe, lawful system of immigration,” Jeff Sessions writes.
“Zero tolerance” policies have almost perfect track records of failure.
Zero tolerance in criminal justice — in the form of inflexible mandatory sentences — has filled limited prison space with people who are not serious threats to public safety.
In schools, such mindlessly applied policies have led to students being needlessly suspended, or even arrested. You’ve heard the stories: An aspirin violating the zero tolerance policy for drugs. A plastic knife the one for weapons. An innocent hug or kiss the one for sexual harassment. And so on.
Despite these nonsensical outcomes — often criticized most roundly by conservatives — President Donald Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have now embraced a “zero tolerance” approach toward illegal immigration.
The result — 2,000 children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border in the past six weeks alone — is as predictable as it is outrageous.
Separating children from their parents is a direct repudiation of the family-centric attitudes that have been at the heart of American law, culture and religion for centuries. As former first lady Laura Bush aptly put it, the policy is cruel, immoral and heartbreaking.
This kind of diversion from the norm comes with a price — to America’s reputation in the world, to our own sense that ours is a just, civil, moral and exceptional society. How can a country that treats families so inhumanely be exceptional in a positive way?
If the costs of these policies are high, the returns are likely to be meager. The Trump administration sees them as a powerful deterrent to future illegal border crossings. However, it is likely overestimating their impact.
Families considering making the long trek north consider a number of pros and cons before setting off. The risk of being caught and detained will be added to other risks, such as being robbed, raped or even killed during the journey, and then weighed against the threat of staying put in violencewracked countries such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
The administration also sees zero tolerance as a bargaining chip.
By taking hard-line positions on both family separations and the deportation of “DREAMers,” immigrants brought here illegally as children, Trump believes that he can force reluctant Republicans, and maybe even some Democrats, to support his call for border wall funding and restrictive policies on lawful immigration.
But his bargaining chip is looking more and more like a poison pill. His Republican majority in the House rests on holding dozens of seats in places where his immigration policies have long been unpopular, including competitive districts in California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida.
Zero tolerance rarely works as either policy or politics for the simple reason that the world is a complex, nuanced place. Zero tolerance means no ability to make case-by-case determinations, little chance at compromise and the strong chance of counterproductive outcomes.
At the border, there are other, more humane, ways of dealing with people who’ve crossed illegally. One is to simply keep them together in family detention centers. Another is to use ankle bracelets to release people while their applications for asylum or refugee status are processed.
There is no need or justification for the draconian family separation policy. Illegal border crossings, while up during the first few months of this year, have fallen dramatically in the past two decades. In 2000, 1.7 million people were caught trying to cross the border illegally. Last year, that number was down to 311,000.
It’s time to recognize what should be obvious. Zero tolerance makes zero sense. And if it is deployed in a way that is cruel and anti-family, it can also be very destructive.