Cruelty was the point all along
Abbott’s immigrant busing stunt is just an offshoot of Trump’s failed Zero Tolerance border policy.
So, what would you do? You’re a 36year-old farmworker in an impoverished, violence-ridden Central American country. Trying to coax a meager living from barren fields, you support your family on the $4 a week you brought home during a miserable harvest season. You and your wife skip meals, and yet you watch your two small children go to bed every night restless with hunger.
Maybe, just maybe, you would look into their listless eyes and decide to do something drastic. Maybe, you would set off on a dangerous 2,000-mile trek toward the glimmering dream of a better life in the United States.
That’s the unfortunate choice 36-yearold Nazario Jacinto-Carrillo made a few years ago, accompanied by his 5-year-old daughter, Filomena. As Caitlin Dickerson tells the story in the current issue of The Atlantic, his hopes were dashed just as that distant dream came into view. Six Border Patrol agents captured Jacinto-Carillo at the border near San Diego, ripped daughter Filomena from his arms and took him into custody. He eventually agreed to be deported back to Guatemala, because, he told Dickerson, a federal agent assured him that if he did so, Filomena would be returned to her family within two weeks.
She was not. The traumatized little girl finally made it home three months later.
In a way, the Jacinto-Carillo family was fortunate. Under the Trump administration’s heartless and inept Zero Tolerance initiative at the border, officially implemented in the spring of 2018 after a “pilot” program in 2017, several thousand children were separated from their parents and transported to shelters in states as far away from the border as New York. Some were less than a year old. Parents had no idea what had become of their children; often, neither did the government.
Like Jacinto-Carillo, many parents were deported without their children; it took months and sometimes years to get their children back home. “I didn’t know if he was alive, dead, anything,” a parent told Dickerson. Many of the youngsters have suffered “irreparable harm.”
The most outrageous part of this debacle is that four years after Zero Tolerance fell apart, several hundred children still are separated from their families. They’re lost in a bureaucratic tangle somewhere in this vast nation, while their anguished parents, no doubt blaming themselves, lie sleepless at night wondering whether they will ever see their children again.
Dickerson’s remarkable investigative article — one of the longest stories the venerable magazine has ever published — is titled “An American Catastrophe.” It’s aptly named.
The U.S. government’s family-separation policy — implemented in our name — ranks with some of the darkest policy decisions in American history: Japanese-American internment during World War II, President Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the federal workforce in 1913, taking young Native Americans from their tribal homelands and erasing their culture in governmentfunded Indian schools. As Dickerson points out, cruelty wasn’t a byproduct of the Trump administration’s family-separation policy. Cruelty was the point.
Here in Texas, we have a governor who treats the immigration issue with the same disdain as Donald Trump and his heartless Javert of immigrant cruelty, the baleful-eyed Stephen Miller. Greg Abbott may govern a state with a 1,200mile international border and historic overlapping ties with its southern neighbor, but he’s not interested in helping solve vexing border problems. Like Trump and his anti-immigrant minions, he seems to be immune to the plight of vulnerable people. He’s more interested in stunts — stunts crafted to entertain the anti-immigrant base of his party and assure his reelection to a third term.
Abbott’s latest divertissement — imitated by Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey — is to load asylum-seeking immigrants onto buses and transport them from border towns to Washington, D.C., and New York City. His rationale is that the Biden administration’s bleeding-heart immigration policies encourage veritable armies of the undocumented to invade our nation, thereby burdening and endangering Texas and other border states. As Abbott proudly proclaimed in April, “We’re sending the border to Biden.”
Actually, he’s bringing the border to local jurisdictions in the Northeast. The Democratic mayors of New York City and Washington, D.C., in conjunction with social-service agencies and private groups, are scrambling to meet the needs of more than 5,000 vulnerable people dumped on their doorsteps. A cynical Texas governor couldn’t be more pleased.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams suggested that some asylum-seekers were shipped to his city against their will after being misled by Texas officials. “This is horrific,” he said while meeting a busload of arriving immigrants, “when you think about what the governor is doing.”
In a press release, Abbott called New York City “the ideal destination for these migrants who can receive the abundance of city services and housing the Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city.”
Ironically, Abbott may be right about immigrant opportunities in New York, historically a proud metropolis of immigrants.
Our governor is right about another thing, as well: Ultimate responsibility for the scores of people crossing the border without documentation does not rest with Texas or its border-state neighbors. Men, women and children either sneaking across or presenting themselves at legal ports of entry requesting asylum are the federal government’s responsibility. State and local jurisdictions need to be reimbursed for every dollar they spend assisting desperate immigrants. Most trying to come here are just as needy as last summer’s Afghan refugees or, more recently, displaced citizens of Ukraine.
Imagine, though, that our elected officials were men and women intent on solving problems and meeting challenges, rather than amassing power for power’s sake and holding on with the intensity of a youngster hugging his teddy bear. Imagine they were more interested in solutions than stunts.
Perhaps we would still have problems at the border. The U.S. provides millions in foreign aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala as a way to stanch their emigration flow by fighting poverty, violence and corruption. Despite significant improvement in some areas, longstanding local governance and corruption issues as well as flawed delivery of that aid have helped prevent the flow from being stanched (although it’s unrealistic to expect a quick fix).
What if Abbott and other border governors were farsighted, innovative, eager to seek out new approaches? They could be working with Washington, while perhaps Washington worked harder with Mexico and Canada on a comprehensive continental approach toward border and immigration issues. Well-designed guest worker programs, safe and orderly legal pathways to migration, law-enforcement cooperation and assistance to reduce the effects of development disparities might be part of a trilateral effort.
A continental approach has been suggested by, among others, a then-New York Times reporter named Anthony DePalma in his 2001 book “Here: A Biography of the New American Continent.” “Our futures are overlapping whether we like it or not,” DePalma wrote of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. In his insightful book he addressed shared interests, common dreams and “coordinated responses to problems that have no regard for borders.” Although NAFTA (now the United States-MexicoCanada Agreement) acknowledges commonalities in regard to trade and the free flow of goods, the USMCA does little to meet the challenges raised by an incessant flow of restless, often desperate people.
DePalma at the turn of the century was overly optimistic, if not naïve. He could not have anticipated the rise of tea party congressmen who scuttled bipartisan immigration-reform legislation in 2013. He could not have predicted the election of a president three years later who reveled in acts of cruelty toward immigrants, including separating parents from children.
One of the reasons Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy failed — in addition to its dubious legality — is that those charged with implementation could not bear seeing the results. They watched Border Patrol agents tear breast-feeding infants from their mothers or listened to bewildered children in cages crying inconsolably for their parents, and they went home each evening in despair. According to The Atlantic’s Dickerson, many did what they could to sabotage the program (even as Miller promises that a re-elected Trump will revive it).
No one who cares about this nation advocates border chaos and immigration law confusion, and yet it’s not easy to decide who should join us in this country, who should stay, who has to go. Trump’s Zero Tolerance and a Texas governor’s penchant for using desperate people as pawns are sober reminders to all Americans. In this nation of immigrants, men and women of good will must make the hard decisions, not cynical politicians who choose to ignore our nation’s heritage.