update
Separating Families at the Border Was Always Part of the Plan
ny magazine
President Trump is still trying to avoid responsibility for his administration’s brutal policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border, but a new report confirms that Trump and his advisers had been considering the extreme measures for as long as they’ve been in power. According to the New York Times, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller was “instrumental” in convincing the president to enact the policy, which applies a zero tolerance approach to prosecuting undocumented immigrants caught entering the U.S. — even if that means taking children away from their parents in the process. And while some members of the Trump administration have reportedly been uneasy over the policy and subsequent fallout, Miller is not one of them. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period,” Miller told the Times, “The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”
As outrage intensifies over the separations, President Trump has insisted he’s powerless to change the policy, in an attempt to hide his real agenda. “I hate the children being taken away,” Trump claimed on Friday, and he has continued to repeat the lie that Democrats are the ones responsible. In fact, as reported by the Washington Post, Trump believes that continuing to enforce the policy amid the uproar provides him with political leverage over Congress and could help him force Democratic lawmakers to meet his demands on border security and restrictions on legal immigration. Put another way, the president of the United States is effectively holding thousands of migrant children hostage — and likely causing them irreparable harm in the process — in the hope it will better his chances at enacting the nativist political agenda he campaigned on.
The zero tolerance practice of immediately imprisoning, prosecuting, and deporting immigrants who illegally enter the United States has been around since 2005, but the George W. Bush and Obama administrations were morally and pragmatically opposed to separating immigrant children from their families, even if some adult immigrants were clearly taking advantage of that compassion.
“That’s not who we are,” a team of Obama officials concluded after briefly considering the separations, according to former domestic policy adviser Cecilia Muñoz. Another Obama administration veteran, former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh C. Johnson, told the Times that efforts to deter undocumented immigrants from entering the U.S. are ineffective. “Whether it’s family detention, messaging about dangers of the journey, or messaging about separating families and zero tolerance, it’s always going to have at best a short-term reaction,” he explained.
But President Trump and his policy makers, having risen to power on the back of Trump’s xenophobic campaign rhetoric, employ a darker and more morally flexible pragmatism. The Times reports that Trump officials began discussing the division of immigrant families at the border soon after taking office, and that the Department of Homeland Security even did some trial runs separating children from their parents last summer in Texas. Implementing the border separation policy has always been part of their plan, it just took a little longer than people like Stephen Miller had hoped. After all, the Trump administration has arguably enjoyed no greater success than in its efforts targeting immigrants and all forms of immigration. Zero tolerance, especially toward immigrants, isn’t just a policy proposal to this president and his allies — it is the ideology that animates the entire Trump phenomenon, and a defining characteristic of the world as they want it to be.
cnn
According to reporting by Washington PostThe , White House officials said President Donald Trump has calculated he will gain leverage in congressional negotiations by enforcing a policy he claims to hate.
"I hate the children being taken away," Trump said Friday morning. But Trump suggested Friday in an interview on Fox News' "Fox and Friends" he would not reverse his administration's policy unless Democrats agreed to his longstanding immigration priorities.On Friday, Trump suggested he would not change the policy unless Democrats agreed to his other immigration demands, which include funding a border wall, tightening the rules for border enforcement and curbing legal entry. He also is intent on pushing members of his party to vote for a compromise measure that would achieve those long-standing priorities.\\\
‘America is better than this’: What a doctor saw in a Texas shelter for migrant children
The small shelter along the Texas border to Mexico held 60 beds and a little playground for children. Rooms were equipped with toys, books and crayons. To Colleen Kraft, this shelter looked, in many ways, like a friendly environment for children, a place where they could be happy.
But the first child who caught the prominent pediatrician’s attention during a recent visit was anything but happy. Inside a room dedicated to toddlers was a little girl no older than 2, screaming and pounding her fists on a mat. One woman tried to give her toys and books to calm her down, but even that shelter worker seemed frustrated, Kraft told The Washington Post, because as much as she wanted to console the little girl, she couldn’t touch, hold or pick her up to let her know everything would be all right. That was the rule, Kraft said she was told: They’re not allowed to touch the children.
“The really devastating thing was that we all knew what was going on with this child. We all knew what the problem was,” Kraft said. “She didn’t have her mother, and none of us can fix that.”
The girl had been taken from her mother the night before and brought to this shelter that had been redecorated for children under age 12, Kraft said staffers told her.
The little girl is among the multitude of immigrant children who have been separated from their family as part of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, meaning any adult who crosses the border illegally will face criminal prosecution. That also means parents were taken to federal jails while their children were sent to shelters.
Nearly 2,000 immigrant children were separated from their parents during six weeks in April and May, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said colleagues who were alarmed by what was going on at the border invited her to see for herself, so she visited a shelter run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“We needed to see what was happening and tell the country and the world about it,” she said.
One thing immediately became clear to Kraft: Those who work at this shelter, whom she declined to name for privacy reasons, were doing what they could to make sure the children’s needs are met. The children were fed; they had beds, toys, a playground and people who change their diapers. But there are limits to what workers could do. Not only could they not pick up or touch the children; they could not get their parents for them.
“The really basic, foundational needs of having trust in adults as a young child was not being met. That contradicts everything we know that the kids need to build their health,” Kraft said.
