Purposeful cruelty

Prejudice, hysteria and leadership failures continue to drive U.S. immigration policy.

All a dad wants on Father’s Day is to spend time with his kids.

One can assume that’s what Marco Antonio Muñoz wanted, too, last month when he and his family crossed the Rio Grande to apply for asylum from Honduras, one of the most violent countries in the world.

But soon after, Customs and Border Protection separated him from his wife and 3-year-old son.

The 39-year-old was found dead in his cell the next day.

Thousands of men, women and children from Central America are trekking across a continent, searching for safe harbor after fleeing danger and civil strife not usually seen outside war zones. They’re asking for asylum in places like Costa Rica, Mexico and, yes, Texas.

The United States has decided to meet their pleas with a policy of conscious cruelty that, according to Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, is intended to discourage more refugees: Split up the families. Detain them. Let them know they’re not welcome.

It won’t work. Harsh strategies against huddled masses have been condoned in the past, when most border crossers were working-age Mexican men seeking labor.

But Central American parents will stop at nothing to save their children’s lives. Even cruelty in a hostile land, it seems, is better than death and hopelessness at home.

We must find a new policy before this chilling disregard for human life further erodes America’s high ground, gnaws another hole into its sacred promise.

The Trump administration is pushing ahead with its zero-tolerance policy. The administration is even building an encampment outside El Paso to house some of the 2,000 children separated from their families over the past six weeks.

Maybe they should have gone with Crystal City, a border town with some experience in this area.

During World War II, thousands of Japanese, Italian and German families were forced from their homes across the United States and were interred at the Crystal City Alien Enemy Detention Facility. At the time, the entire nation was caught up in a frenzy of fear, convinced that their neighbors posed a threat to the war effort. We now know those fears were unfounded — but it should have been obvious at the time, too. In 1983, a Congressional commission found that internment was motivated by “racial prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership,” and not by military considerations. The 467-page report also stated that government officials “ignored” recommendations by the FBI and naval intelligence that careful surveillance of suspicious targets would be enough to check espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity.

Today we face a similar conflux of prejudice, hysteria and failure of political leadership driving our response to the humanitarian crisis in Central America. Immigration experts and pediatricians alike are pleading with the federal government to stop taking children from their parents and end a policy of mass detention that began under the Obama administration, and instead embrace policies that we know work.

This means resuscitating and expanding the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s family case management program that was shuttered in June 2017. That program proved to be less expensive than detention and had a 99.6 percent appearance rate at immigration court hearings.

It means fully funding our immigration courts, including extensive support staff, so that the hearings take weeks instead of years. Fulfilling the Constitution’s promise of due process, speedy trial and effective representation will ensure that asylum seekers receive a fair determination about whether they can stay legally or be sent back.

It also means long-term investment in Central America to help stabilize nations like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras and calm the chaos that these refugees hope to escape.

If we don’t make these changes, however, the history is clear about what will happen. Families will suffer. America’s international reputation will weaken. Our children will read about this ignoble moment and wonder why we responded with panic and fear rather than calm and compassion.

Maybe, like those interred at Crystal City, a generation of kids will return decades from now to the abandoned Walmart where they were detained to remember the injustice they endured in a nation they turned to for help.

And they will ask: Why did they let it happen again?