June 22, 2018
Although Trump has signed an Executive Order pausing the forcible separation of immigrant children from their parents at the border, the reality is that this “new” policy is barely better than the one that it replaced. The order provides that families will be detained together, potentially indefinitely, setting it on a collision course with existing federal law which requires that undocumented minors be released from detention after 20 days. Trump is looking to have that requirement waived by the courts or overruled by statute – to allow indefinite detention of minors. Distaff Goebbels, Kirstjen Nielsen, privately threatened Congress that family separations would resume if they failed to pass such legislation (Source: “Schiff: Nielsen privately said family separations could resume,” by John Bowden, TheHill.com, 6/21/18).
In addition,Trump’s executive order makes no provision for reuniting the 2300 children that Border Patrol has kidnapped, with their parents. In many cases, the children have been flown thousand of miles away from their parents and DHS and HHS have a haphazard, uncoordinated approach to keeping track of them. We learned this week that 700 children are being held in state licensed and regulated facilities in New York and that neither Governor Cuomo nor Mayor DeBlasio was alerted to that fact by the federal government (Source: “16 and Alone: Inside a Shelter for Separated Children in New York,” by Jesse McKinley, Liz Robbins and Annie Correal, The New York Times, 6/21/18). There is a very real possibility that some parents will never see their children again (Source: “Rules Shifted, But Reunions Remain Uncertain,” by Jack Healy, The New York Times, 6/22/18). These policies reflect an unspeakable level of contempt for the well-being and very humanity of Latinx immigrants.
The administration’s insistence that these policies are required to secure our borders, or ensure adherence with the law, is all that more despicable when we consider the prominent role our country has played in creating the conditions in these Central American countries that cause so many people to flee. It will surprise no one to learn that the United States has frequently supported authoritarian dictators as long as they protected American corporate interests. By way of example, since 2009, we have provided $114 million in security assistance to the military backed government in Honduras of President Juan Orlando Hernandez, whom Amnesty International accuses of using “dangerous and illegal tactics to silence dissent,” (Source: “Families fear no justice for victims as 31 die in Honduras post-election violence,” by Sarah Kinosian, TheGuardian.com, 1/2/18).
In Guatemala, a U.S. backed military coup in 1954 set off a cycle of guerilla warfare that erupted into a 30 year long civil war, which claimed the lives of 200,000 indigenous people. Guatemala has since devolved into a violent, lawless state where the rampant murder and abuse of women goes unpunished, (Source: “Women Under Attack: violence and Poverty in Guatemala,” by Corinne Ogrodnik and Silvia Borzutzky, Journal of International Women’s Studies, January 2011). Given these realities, Jeff Sessions’ decision to eliminate domestic abuse as a basis for a claim of asylum is particularly egregious.
The truth is that the surge of migrants at our borders are the chickens coming home to roost from a feckless Latin American foreign policy that has privileged profit over human rights. Rather than welcoming immigrants as refugees fleeing a genuine humanitarian crisis that we had a hand in creating, our government, through a combination of cruelty and ineptitude, is electing to torture them further. The only explanation for this unfathomable sadism is hatred. Trump’s statement that “illegal immigrants” will “pour into and infest our country, like MS-13” is a deliberate and clear echo of Nazi propaganda. This administration is building the architecture of genocide in plain sight. We can no longer say, “this is not who we are.” We will have to prove it.
#Familiesbelongtogether
#ACLUImmigrantsRightsProject
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