San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
How Castro’s rally for the children honed its message
Thursday’s “Rally for Our Children” came together very quickly and its messaging shifted along the way.
That was a good thing. The intensely emotional Guadalupe Plaza gathering, organized by U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, derived at least part of its impetus from national outrage over news reports contending that the U.S. government had “lost” nearly 1,500 migrant children over the last three months of 2017.
By the time the rally happened, however, the focus zeroed in on a policy initiated by the administration of President Donald Trump to separate children from parents when they cross the border seeking legal status.
Early in the week, social-media fliers for the rally featured the hashtag “where are the children.” By the middle of the week, the hashtag had changed to “families belong together.”
The “missing children” story emerged from an April 26 Senate subcommittee hearing in which Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, revealed that his agency could not confirm the whereabouts of 1,475 migrant children who crossed the border unaccompanied by parents. Most of them had come from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, seeking refuge from violence and repression.
This “missing children” narrative didn’t really grab hold of the nation’s consciousness, however, until the last week of May. A May 25 USA Today story — reprinted from the Arizona Republic — carried this explosive, but misleading headline: “The feds lost — yes, lost — 1,475 children.”
In fact, the Office of Refugee Resettlement had placed all these children with sponsors (which tend to be family members of the child) screened by Health and Human Services.
Stevens merely pointed out that in ORR’s efforts to follow up by phone with 7,635 sponsored children between October and December of last year, it failed to make contact with 1,475 of those children. (Hardly surprising, since at least some of the sponsoring families include undocumented immigrants, who don’t relish the thought of calls from the feds.)
Because Trump has taken such a draconian stance on border security, many people not only assumed that these children were lost, but also that their missing status was the result of a policy hatched by Trump’s administration.
In fact, this is the continuation of an old practice. A 2016 inspector general report found that 4,159 migrant children placed with sponsors were unaccounted for in the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency.
USA Today ultimately issued a correction for its story, acknowledging that it “mischaracterized” the legal status of the 1,475 children and noting that they are “no longer in federal custody.”
By that point, however, the story had been widely disseminated. State Rep. Diego Bernal, who helped Castro put together Thursday’s rally, shared the USA Today piece on Facebook on May 26, the day that Castro announced his intention to organize the gathering.
As the week went on, and the “lost” children story receded, the rally took on sharper definition and framed itself exclusively as a protest against the real abomination in current U.S. immigration policy: the way Trump’s administration has broken with policy precedent by refusing to allow parents and children crossing the border to be kept in detention together.
News reports indicate that during a two-week period in May, 658 migrant children (an average of 47 per day) were ripped away from their families.
“If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at a May 7 law enforcement conference. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”
Such a stance willfully defies the notion that this country can maintain a respect for humanity while enforcing its immigration laws. It mistakes cruelty for strength and conflates asylum seekers with smugglers.
“These are young kids who come here with a mother or father and oftentimes are presenting for asylum or seeking refuge, consistent with international law,” Castro said Thursday during a pre-rally press conference.
“You’re supposed to be able to do that anywhere in the world; somebody who is facing oppression, is facing violence and threats of violence, is supposed to present themselves at an international border and be able to seek asylum. But this president has done away with that, essentially.”
During the rally, Castro told the story of one border crosser who promised federal authorities he would go back to Central America if they would only let him know the whereabouts of his child.
It’s a heartbreaking scenario that will play out too many times in the coming months.