Trump, GOP lose moral authority after immigration policy
Six little words were all the United States needed to raze centuries of claims of moral leadership on family values.
“We need to take away children,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions insisted in May 2018.
Remember the children when you vote in this election.
You, privileged American, may have tried to forget their brown skin torched by the sun and little bodies dehydrated and exhausted from the multi-country trek to the U.S. border.
A perilous journey taken only to be torn from their immigrant parents at the doorstep of their shot at the humblest version of the American Dream.
Not even babies were spared.
“We need to take way children,” the aging former senator and xenophobe commanded.
And all the way down the chain — his deputy Rod J. Rosenstein, five Department of Justice prosecutors at the border, Border Patrol agents, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), they fell in line and did the unthinkable.
They took some 2,600 children from their parents and sent them to faraway detention camps and foster-care facilities.
It was wholesale, horrific cruelty carried out by an administration denying that separating immigrant families was the intention of the new “zero tolerance” policy meant to deter immigrants from seeking refuge here from violence, death threats and poverty.
WATCHDOG INVESTIGATES SEPARATION
Two years later, we can confirm what we long suspected in a draft of a new 86-page report by the watchdog office of the Inspector General obtained by The New York Times.
The Trump administration was lying.
Separation wasn’t a byproduct of parents making the choice to pursue their asylum claims. It was direct, ordered punishment — and a way to send a message to others to stay away.
No child was too young to be separated from their parents, Rosenstein told prosecutors. He had escaped scrutiny but the report shows he aided and abetted Sessions.
The IG report isn’t the only sick revelation to come to light about President Trump’s heinous immigration policies as he faces re-election and, according to the latest polls, the prospect of losing to Democrat Joe Biden.
STERILIZATIONS IN DETENTION, ABUSE
In a whistleblower complaint filed with Homeland Security in September, a nurse who worked at an immigration detention center in Georgia said a doctor performed questionable hysterectomies on immigrant women, refused to test the detainees for COVID-19 and shredded medical records.
“The uterus collector,” the nurse called him.
A subsequent investigation by Associated Press found that Dr. Mahendra Amin performed at least eight gynecological procedures on immigrant women in ICE custody. Some said they didn’t understand what was happening or consent to the treatment.
How did the government react to the complaints?
ICE tried to deport one of the immigrant women speaking out; she had been through the unwanted removal of a Fallopian tube.
And so, in dribs and drabs of watchdog investigations and journalism, Americans are learning that our government is mirroring the behavior of rogue states and being condemned by international human-rights organizations .
And, just when you think you’ve seen enough, along comes another outrage.
CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE
In July, another report, this one obtained by the Miami Herald and written by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the federal agency tasked with oversight of immigrant children, revealed that the children have suffered abuse.
At least four Central American immigrant children reported being sexually abused by staff members at the privately run Homestead detention center for unaccompanied minors, now shut down.
That the violations happened in this community of refuge to generations of immigrants only adds to the tragedy.
Many other children also were hurt in detention.
Dozens of families separated at the border have filed claims against the
U.S. government, some claiming that their children were sexually, physically or emotionally abused in federally funded foster care.
These children relive their traumas in nightmares.
IMMIGRATION ABSENT IN 2020 ELECTION
You ask: Why should we care at this point?
Besides for reasons of basic human decency, the politics that drove our shameful actions are still relevant, still with us.
Yet the topic of immigration, a cauldron of discord in 2016 during the years of “zero tolerance” abuses, has been largely absent from the fireworks of the 2020 election.
It’s round two for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rally cry and social engineering maneuvers to stop the growth of the Latino population in the United States. Only he hides now behind labels like Latinos for Trump and his followers are all to happy to give him cover.
Voters should hold the president accountable for the abuses committed on his watch.
But in a race only won by uniting coalitions of voters, immigration is an inconvenient subject for both political parties, too divisive.
What’s clear, however, from what we now know is that the party of biblequoting Sessions, the party with the claim to being pro-life, supports the abuser of children.
“I couldn’t be more proud to serve as vice president to a president who stands without apology for the sanctity of human life. I’m pro-life, I don’t apologize for it,” Vice President Mike Pence said during his debate with Sen. Kamala Harris.
His words ring hollow to the core.
Mr. Vice President, where were your pro-life values when immigrant children needed protection?
The children, targeted to punish the adults, have changed who we are as a nation.
Harris predicted this would happen in an impassioned call to end the family separation policy on the Senate floor in 2018.
“Let’s be clear: A society is judged based on how it treats its children,” she said. “A society is judged based on how it treats the least among us. And we will be judged harshly. History will judge us harshly because of what this Administration has done.”
She wins the morality play, Mr. Vice President.
The United States bid goodbye to family values when we failed to protect young, defenseless immigrant children in need. And their mothers, too.