An “unconscionably cruel” immigration policy

“We still talk about American fascism as a looming threat, something that could happen if we’re not vigilant,” said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. “But for undocumented immigrants, it’s already here.” Under a new zero-tolerance policy – introduced this spring – of prosecuting everyone who enters the US illegally, hundreds of immigrant children have been forcibly separated from their detained parents and sent to overcrowded shelters. This has produced “countless horror stories”. Earlier this month, there was a heartbreaking report about a five-year-old boy from Honduras who had been separated from his father, and who cried himself to sleep at night with a stick-figure drawing of his family under his pillow. Another report revealed that an asylum seeker, also from Honduras, had hanged himself in a Texas jail after his threeyear-old was “wrenched from his arms”.

The situation is more complex than the outraged reports let on, said Rich Lowry in National Review. Illegal immigration has changed in recent years. Having long been driven by single males from Mexico, the flow has shifted to family units from Central America. Until this year, the practice was to give a pass to such families and let them live in the US while their asylum claims were adjudicated. But as the chances of subsequently tracking down unsuccessful claimants were slim, this created an incentive for economic migrants to bring children with them. The US is at least now enforcing the border properly. An inevitable consequence of that is that minors, who cannot be held in criminal custody like adults, are being temporarily separated from parents. In most cases, the adults plead guilty and are reunited with their children within hours.

Efforts to present the “unconscionably cruel” practice of tearing toddlers from parents as just an unfortunate by-product of the legal process won’t wash, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. The truth is the administration is deliberately using children as pawns to persuade people to give up their asylum claims and to warn others against coming to the US. Attorney General Jeff Sessions all but admitted as much, saying: “If people don’t want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them... We’ve got to get this message out.” America has become desensitised to Donald Trump’s “moral outrages”, but we can’t let him get away with this one.