Plan for migrant families cruel

The following is an excerpt from an editorial that ran in the Los Angeles Times.

The Trump administration announced its plan Wednesday for a network of detention centres to hold migrant families for potentially as long as it takes to process their applications for asylum. This is the same government that faces lawsuits over how poorly it has managed adult detention centres — let’s be honest and call them prisons. And it thinks it can build a better prison for families?

Let’s be clear from the outset: It is harmful to children to incarcerate them with or without their parents and siblings. In fact, a 2016 report by the Department of Homeland Security concluded that “detention is generally neither appropriate nor necessary for families.”

So, of course, the Trump administration is doing the opposite in a baldfaced attempt to use the imprisonment of people who are primarily asylum-seekers to scare others who might follow into staying home or seeking asylum in another country. At a minimum, that is contrary to the spirit of federal immigration laws and international agreements establishing asylum — and to any common notion of basic human decency.

No, we shouldn’t have open borders. No, we shouldn’t grant asylum to every person who asks for it. But we also shouldn’t imprison them while we sort out the eligible from the ineligible. The solution to an immigration court system so overwhelmed that it takes months or years to process cases is to expand the system itself to handle the job it has been given.