"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
The aim of President Donald Trump’s new policy of splitting kids from their mothers at the border is, in a word, deterrence: The White House wants to discourage more immigrants from trying to enter the United States.
Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s secretary of homeland security, is careful not to say this outright — she dodged a direct question on the subject from Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) at a hearing last month.
JOHN MOORE VIA GETTY IMAGES
Central American immigrants walk after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents in February near McAllen, Texas. The Trump administration adopted a policy in May of intentionally separating mothers from their children at the border in order to deter migrants from crossing illegally into the U.S.
There’s a reason Nielsen and other administration officials shy away from attaching the word “deterrence” to the new policy: Changing immigrant detention policy as a way to deter undocumented people from coming to the U.S. is illegal, federal courts have repeatedly ruled. So now she and other Trump administration officials find themselves struggling to defend a family separation policy whose clear ambition is deterrence.
A growing number of mothers have crossed into the United States since 2014, often from Central America and often requesting asylum. Other administration officials were blunter in the past when discussing a policy that would split the families up to scare them away from coming.
The Department of Homeland Security was considering separating children from their parents “in order to deter” undocumented immigration, White House chief of staff John Kelly told CNN while serving as Nielsen’s predecessor last year. And Gene Hamilton, a former aide to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, asked participants at a meeting last August on the policy to “generate paperwork laying out everything we could do to deter immigrants from coming to the U.S. illegally,” according to The New Yorker.
Whether or not the deterrence goal is spelled out, the strategy is likely to backfire. Former President Barack Obama learned that lesson in 2015, when a federal judge in Washington blocked his plans to lock up Central American immigrant mothers and their kids without bond to deter others from trying to cross the border.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled that the federal government can’t detain immigrants indefinitely for the sake of deterrence alone. Instead, the decision to detain needed to be based on whether the immigrant posed a threat to the community or a flight risk.
The Obama administration was forced to provide bond hearings to the migrants in family detention. A separate ruling that year ordered the Obama administration to start releasing people from family detention after three weeks in order to comply with the Flores settlement, a 1997 deal that bars the government from locking up children in detention centers.
The Trump administration hopes to skirt the rulings that got Obama officials into trouble by prosecuting immigrant parents at the border. The federal government can’t jail children while their mothers await trial, so immigration authorities transfer them to the Office of Refugee Resettlement to find a sponsor or to non-secured facility to hold them, as if they arrived by themselves.
But this legal maneuver stands on the same shaky ground.
“Whether the deterrence to seeking protection is being done by detaining families or separating families doesn’t make a whole lot of difference,” said Michelle Brané, the director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “They’re both punishing families for seeking protection, and protection to which they have the right under U.S. law.”
The Trump administration is already running into legal trouble over its policy. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court in Southern California to overturn Trump’s family separation policy, asking U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw for a nationwide injunction to halt the practice. At a hearing on May 4, Sabraw repeatedly asked whether the Trump administration had adopted the family separation policy to deter others.
“If there were a blanket policy to separate for deterrence value, would that be legal?” Sabraw asked, according to a transcript of the hearing. “Would that pass muster under the Fifth Amendment?”
The judge did not receive a straight answer. The government’s lawyer, Sarah Fabian, instead argued that the government wasn’t separating mothers from their kids systematically, and only following existing immigration law to do so.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions undermined her argument three days later, when he announced that the Justice Department’s “zero tolerance” policy for prosecuting border-crossers included mothers who cross with their children.
Lee Gelernt, the lawyer leading the ACLU lawsuit, called the government lawyer’s unwillingness or inability to defend family separation on the merits without resorting to the legally fraught term “deterrence” significant.
“The government still needs a persuasive justification for separating children,” Gelernt wrote in an email. “And the government has not provided one.”
On Wednesday, Sabraw ordered that the case against family separation can move forward, over the Trump administration’s objections. Although he has yet to rule on the case’s merits, his order did not augur well for the federal government.
Implementing a family separation policy to deter other migrants “arbitrarily tears at the sacred bond between parent and child,” Sabraw wrote. “Such conduct, if true, as it is assumed to be on the present motion, is brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency.”
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Ah, the never-ending legal, moral, and intellectual corruption and dishonesty of the Trumpsters!
Take depositions — force them to lie under oath or admit they have been lying publicly. And, as I recently pointed out, most Article III Federal Judges, who actually have contempt of court authority, take a dim view of perjury by Cabinet Officers in their court proceedings.
I also think that even under the Supreme’s restrictive standards, there is an ever increasing possibility of actually imposing monetary damages on Nielsen, Sessions, and others for their intentional denial of Constitutional rights and their dishonest schemes to conceal their true intent. I actually think that when the full truth some day comes out, we will find not only illegal deterrence, but rather clear evidence of racial animus underlying Sessions’s policies. To be honest, Sessions has turned the entire U.S. Immigration Court system into a tool for enforcement deterrence — a huge violation of Due Process, as well as an astounding conflict of interest and violation of ethics.
Also, not surprisingly, the name of Sessions’s restrictionist crony Gene Hamilton has surfaced in connection with this scheme.
MCALLEN, Texas — The words “all rise” were still ringing in the brightly lit South Texas courtroom last week when Peter E. Ormsby slipped unceremoniously into his seat.
“Good morning,” the 62-year-old federal magistrate said as the courtroom filled with the clanking of shackled defendants returning to their wooden benches. “We’re here to take up a number of criminal cases that allege that the defendants violated the immigration laws of the United States.”
Seated in front of Ormsby were 71 disheveled immigrants caught illegally crossing the Rio Grande. The number of defendants has soared amid President Trump’s crackdown on a new surge of border crossers. But the mass hearing was remarkable less for its size than for who it included: parents.
For the first time, federal courtrooms here and across the Southwest are being flooded with distraught mothers and fathers who have been charged with misdemeanor illegal entry and separated from their children — a shift in policy touted by the administration as a way to stop families from trying to reach the United States but decried by critics as traumatizing and inhumane. Last month a Honduran father separated from his wife and 3-year-old son killed himself in a Texas jail cell, The Washington Post reported Saturday.
In McAllen alone, 415 children had been stripped from their parents between May 21 and June 5, according to federal public defenders.
Now, on the morning of June 6, 14 more parents from Central America were facing an agonizing choice with uncertain consequences. They could plead guilty in the hope of speeding up their reunification with their children, but risk damaging their chances of receiving asylum in the United States. Or they could plead innocent and head to trial, a process that could take days or weeks and prolong their separation from their kids.
Seven miles from Mexico and surrounded by brushlands that are home to the border’s busiest smuggling routes, the Bentsen Tower federal courthouse has become one of the anguished epicenters of family separation.
On Wednesday morning, the evidence of that was the tears on the parents’ faces. Many clutched fliers with a phone number they could call to try to get their kids back from the increasingly crowded federal shelters where they are being housed.
. . . .
By day’s end, he would sentence more than 100 people, including 28 parents. Most would receive the lightest punishment possible — time served — before they were handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The frenzied pace of the proceedings was no accident. As Moody emerged from court in the afternoon, she and a colleague exchanged a high-five.
“I said I’d get done by 3:20,” the prosecutor said, checking the time to see she was only nine minutes behind schedule.
‘Prosecuting everybody’
Aleman-Bendiks had arrived at the tall, dark glass courthouse shortly after dawn that morning. After preparing for an hour in an office decorated with her diplomas from Rice University and Harvard Law, the 52-year-old federal public defender headed upstairs to the courtroom, where the air smelled like sweat and the 71 immigrants were already seated. She was representing all of them.
“How many of you were traveling with children?” she asked in Spanish. More than a dozen hands shot up.
“How did they separate you?” she said to a Guatemalan woman whose 8-year-old daughter was taken away.
“How long since you saw her?” she asked a Honduran separated from her 6-year-old girl.
“They just took them?” she said to a Salvadoran whose two daughters were gone.
This is what Trump’s zero-tolerance policy looked like to Aleman-Bendiks and scores of other federal public defenders along the border.
. . . .
For Meyers, the challenge is not only logistics but the wrenching stories of families being torn apart. In a conference call with her assistant federal public defenders last month, she said she told them to force judges to confront the issue.
“We think it’s important for the court and everybody to hear what’s happening,” she said.
On May 22, Aleman-Bendiks asked Ormsby in court to pressure the government to provide more information about the fate of families being separated. On May 31, she and her boss, Kyle B. Welch, met with ten officials from ICE, Border Patrol, the Justice Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for the children separated from their parents as well as “unaccompanied minors”who arrived in the United States on their own.
“The idea was to try and give us a sense of what’s happening here,” Aleman-Bendiks said, but the meeting delivered little clear information.
One Border Patrol official did say agents in and around McAllen had a policy of not separating children under 5 from their parents — although that policy does not appear to be in place elsewhere along the border. Children as young as 18 months have been taken from their parents.
On Wednesday, Aleman-Bendiks asked Ormsby to order the government to hand over lists of children separated from their parents so that immigration attorneys could ensure they were reunited.
“My concern is that there are lost children here in the system,” she said. “We are hearing it every day, your honor, and it’s not right.”
Ormsby noted that “children are not within the jurisdiction of this court. These people are here because they have a criminal case here.”
He invited her to prepare a brief on how he could order the government to provide lists. “But on its face,” he added, “it seems questionable to me that the court would have the authority to do that.”
. . . .
But immigration advocates aren’t so sure. “They are now convicted of a crime,” said Leah Chavla of the Women’s Refugee Commission. “Under U.S. law, that could be a bar to them receiving asylum, so they’d have to get a waiver.”
In the end, those complications mattered less to the parents in Ormsby’s courtroom than seeing their kids again. All of them pleaded guilty to illegally crossing the border and were sentenced to time served.
“Obviously, in each of your situations, you committed a crime and so the government was within their rights to pursue that,” the magistrate said. “Whether or not they should exercise their discretion that way is something that is obviously being debated.”
“As someone who has children myself,” he added, “it would be a terrible situation to be separated under those conditions.”
Then the guards put handcuffs back on the parents and led them out of the courtroom, where their future remained as unclear as the location of their children.
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Read Mike’s complete report at the above link.
As described in Mike Miller’s article, U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter Ormsby appears to preside over a “court” where “justice” for traumatized, obviously bewildered, and coerced migrants is a cross between a sporting event and a bad joke.
The U.S. Supreme Court held that understanding the immigration consequences of a conviction is a critical element in a migrant’s voluntary decision to plead guilty. Many of these migrant defendants obviously wanted to know whether a guilty plea would 1) free them from detention, 2) reunite them with their children, and 3) adversely affect their asylum cases. Neither Judge Ormsby nor anyone else in his courtroom was able to answer accurately. Judge Ormsby had the authority to defer accepting the pleas until the Assistant U.S. Attorney provided the answers. Yet, he did not do so. These guilty pleas appeared to be neither informed nor voluntary. A federal judge therefore should not have accepted them.
No wonder the prosecuting Assistant U.S Attorney “high fived” at the end of this farce. Likewise, the Public Defender’s claim to simultaneously represent 71 non-English-speaking defendants was a remarkable twist on the canons of ethics and professional responsibility.
Would a group of white, middle class, mostly first-time misdemeanor defendants have been treated this way in federal court? I doubt it. Yet, due process applies equally to everyone in the U.S. regardless of status.
Judge rules that challenge to family separation at border can proceed
By Tal Kopan, CNN
A federal judge in California ruled Wednesday that a challenge to the practice of separating parents seeking asylum from children at the border can proceed.
The ACLU brought the case against the Trump administration.
In her opinion, the said “at a minimum, the facts alleged are sufficient to show the government conduct at issue ‘shocks the conscience’ and violates Plaintiffs’ constitutional right to family integrity. Accordingly, Defendants’ motion to dismiss Plaintiffs’ due process claim is denied.”
The ruling is a victory for critics of the administration’s separation of families — though plenty of hurdles remain before the practice is outlawed.
The ruling does not mean the challenge will ultimately succeed — but it is a substantial step for critics of any separating families who say the practice is abhorrent enough that it should be unconstitutional in any case. The judge’s ruling Wednesday keeps that argument alive.
Here’s a copy of Judge Dana Sabraw’s complete order in Ms. L v. ICE. I particularly recommend Part II (E) which sets forth an excellent discussion of how Due Process applies to individuals physically in the U.S. regardless of status.
Interestingly, although the statement of the law of Due Process was basically uncontested by the DOJ attorneys on the case, it conflicts in both tone and substance from most, if not all, of the statements about foreign nationals made by Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, Cotton, Goodlatte, and the rest of the GOP “White Nationalist gang” who seldom acknowledge that migrants coming to our Southern Border are human beings, let alone that they are actually protected by our Constitution!
Thanks to my good friend and “immigration guru” Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr of Cornell Law for sending me this decision!
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I hope that the ACLU will depose Sessions in connection with this case. He has “spun” and lied about what’s really happening to asylum applicants, including those who appear at the border and apply for asylum without making an unlawful entry. Indeed, the “named plaintiff Ms L” is just such an individual who was, for no apparent reason other than cruelty and “deterrence,” separated from her young daughter for 4 months. She was only released when the ACLU filed this case.
Sessions has a history of bias, lawless behavior, and being a less than credible witness under oath. And, a U.S. District Judge might take misrepresentations or perjury more seriously than did the GOP Senators (Sessions’s former colleagues) on the Judiciary Committee.
Although the ultimate resolution of this case might be years down the line, it also raises an interesting question of whether Sessions, Nielsen, and other DHS officials can be held personally liable for a “Bivens Constitutional Tort” if they knowingly and intentionally violated the established Due Process rights of the plaintiffs. If the plaintiffs are correct in their allegations, it certainly seems that this is exactly what happened. Sessions is quickly establishing himself as one of the worst, probably the very worst, “Constitutional Scofflaws” in recent memory.
How bad is Sessions’s lack of respect for the Constitution? Bad enough that the three career DOJ Attorneys assigned to defend the ACA withdrew from the case for ethical reason after Sessions’s latest all out attack on the “rule of law:” His completely disingenuous political decision not to defend further the Government’s previously-established position that the ACA is Constitutional. Seehttps://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/6/8/17442238/trump-aca-obamacare-texas-department-of-justice-rule-of-law
While the scared asylum applicants and their children that Sessions and his cronies seek to persecute present no real threat to our security as a nation, Jeff Sessions and his continuing war on equal justice for all, human decency, the law, ethics, and our Constitution is an existential threat to our national security and future as a democracy. He must be thwarted and eventually removed from office through our Constitutional system before it’s too late for everyone!
When he landed in Michigan in late May, all the weary little boy carried was a trash bag stuffed with dirty clothes from his dayslong trek across Mexico, and two small pieces of paper — one a stick-figure drawing of his family from Honduras, the other a sketch of his father, who had been arrested and led away after they arrived at the United States border in El Paso.
An American government escort handed over the 5-year-old child, identified on his travel documents as José, to the American woman whose family was entrusted with caring for him. He refused to take her hand. He did not cry. He was silent on the ride “home.”
The first few nights, he cried himself to sleep. Then it turned into “just moaning and moaning,” said Janice, his foster mother. He recently slept through the night for the first time, though he still insists on tucking the family pictures under his pillow.
José’s separation from his father is part of the Trump administration’s latest and most widely debated border enforcement policy. Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the government would criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the border illegally, a directive that is already leading to the breakup of hundreds of migrant families and channeling children into shelters and foster homes across the country.
The goal, according to administration officials, is to discourage Central American families from making the perilous journey to the United States’ southwest border, where they have been arriving in swelling numbers this year to claim asylum.
In just the first two weeks under President Trump’s new policy, 638 parents who arrived with 658 children had been prosecuted, administration officials told Congress.
Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, emphasized that separating families was not the aim but merely the effect of a decision to step up prosecutions of those who cross the border illegally. “We do not have a policy to separate children from their parents. Our policy is, if you break the law we will prosecute you,” she told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on May 15.
She said the Trump administration is doing a better job than its predecessors in assuring that migrant children are placed with sponsors who are carefully screened. “We can make sure that the children go to people who are actually family members and who are not traffickers and who won’t abuse them,” she said.
Whether the policy will succeed as a deterrent remains an open question. What is clear is that it is creating heartbreak and trauma for those subjected to it, with parents and children often unaware of one another’s whereabouts.
. . . .
In several letters to the Department of Homeland Security, the American Academy of Pediatrics has urged an end to parent-child separation, which researchers have said can cause lifelong trauma in children. When the policy was unveiled, the academy’s president, Dr. Colleen Kraft, said she was dismayed at its “sweeping cruelty.”
José’s last name and that of his foster family, as well as where they live, are not being published in order to protect their privacy.
Since his arrival in Michigan, family members said, a day has not gone by when the boy has failed to ask in Spanish, “When will I see my papa?”
They tell him the truth. They do not know. No one knows.
José’s father is in detention, and parent and child until this week had not spoken since they were taken into the custody of United States authorities.
Image
Immigrants near McAllen, Tex., in April. Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the government would criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the border illegally.CreditLoren Elliott/Reuters
“I am watching history happen before my eyes. It’s horrendous,” said Janice, 53.
Janice, her husband, Chris, and their two teenage daughters have firsthand experience with underage migrants. They are among a number of families who have in recent years provided a temporary home, called transitional foster care, to minors seeking refuge in the United States, usually after fleeing violence and economic uncertainty in Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala.
In the last two years, 12 children, including two sets of siblings, have occupied the room upstairs with its soothing white-and-light-blue walls and twin beds with colorful bedding. All had arrived in the United States alone and remained in the family’s care for a few weeks or months until a long-term sponsor already in the country, often a relative, was identified and cleared by the authorities to receive them.
“They had access to their parents on a daily basis,” Janice said. “They talked to them on the phone. We have done video chats with Mom and Dad and siblings with every placement — except now.”
José is the first child they have hosted who crossed the border with a parent, rather than alone, then was forcibly separated and left with no ability to contact them. On his flight to Michigan were two other Central American boys in similar circumstances who were placed with families in the area.
The majority of youths apprehended at the border over the past several years have been housed in government shelters and most of them are teenagers who came alone, often expecting to join family members already in the United States. About 11,000 children are currently in these facilities, which are at 95 percent capacity, according to Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. The department has reserved an additional 1,218 beds in various places for migrant children, including some at military bases, he said.
On May 10, three days after Mr. Sessions announced the zero-tolerance policy, the government issued a call for proposals from “shelter care providers, including group homes and transitional foster care” in anticipation of a surge in children separated from their parents who would require housing.
. . . .
“For two days, he didn’t shower, he didn’t change his clothes. I literally had to peel the socks off his feet. They were so old and smelly,” Janice said. “I realized that he didn’t want anyone to take anything away from him.”
Image
A drawing of José’s father. Since the child’s arrival in Michigan, his foster family said, a day has not gone by when he has failed to ask in Spanish, “When will I see my papa?”
The one thing that animated him was discussing his “photos,” as he called the family drawings.
He introduced “mi familia,” pointing to the figures of his parents, brother and younger sister. Staring intensely at the sketch of his father, with a slight mustache and a cap, he repeated his name out loud again and again.
It was “just me and him” on the trip from Honduras, he told Janice one night as he lay in bed shuffling the pictures, taking turns looking at one and then the other.
“He holds onto the two pictures for dear life,” Janice said, through tears. “It’s heart-wrenching.”
Janice does not blame José’s parents for putting him through the ordeal.
In early May, she traveled to Central America to see for herself the conditions on the ground, and returned convinced that gang-fueled violence, extortion and recruitment of children were compelling parents to make the arduous journey over land with their children to the United States. “I have nothing but sorrow and compassion for the families,” she said.
When sirens pierced the quiet of the night last week, José’s eyes widened with fear. “La violencia, la violencia,” he said. The family assured him that it was not violence; it was fire trucks.
In recent days, the boy began attending a multi-age kindergarten at Bethany with about a dozen other migrant children.
. . . .
Earlier this week, José spoke with his parents for the first time since their lives had diverged. The phone calls were separate: His father remains in detention, and his mother is in Honduras.
The calls went smoothly, according to the case manager.
But they changed everything. Somehow, it had sunk in that there was no way of knowing when he would see his family. “It triggered all the separation trauma again,” said Janice.
She tried to offer him his toys, but he erupted in anger, screaming and crying at the kitchen table for almost an hour.
“It was really hard to watch. The look on his face was anguish,” said Janice, her voice breaking.
When his fury subsided, the boy collapsed on the kitchen floor, still sobbing. “Mama, Papa,” he said, over and over.
Nearby lay the family pictures, which he had flung on the floor.
Read the entire, totally disturbing and enraging, article at the link.
Is this the way we want to be remembered by our children, grandchildren, and future generations? As nation that put cruel, arrogant, and inhumane individuals in charge of our Government and then stood by and watched while they abused children, spread xenophobia, enriched the rich, mocked ethics, and thumbed their noses at human decency.
Assuming that the “Joses of the world” live to grow up, there will be a horrible price to pay for future generations of Americans as they are forced to come to grips with the grotesque human rights abuses committed in the name of a perverted nationalism. Very much like the reckoning that the Catholic Church has had to undergo for tolerating and covering up decades and generations of sexual, physical, and mental abuse of youth!
Get out the vote to limit the power of the horrible minority that has taken over our Government and our nation and to eventually remove them from office at all levels. America cannot and will not “be great again” until the stain of Trumpism is removed from our national Government!
The number of migrants attempting to cross illegally into the United States remained high last month, according to administration officials and Border Patrol agents, an early indication that “zero tolerance” measures separating parents from their children and President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops have not had an immediate deterrent effect.
The Department of Homeland Security is expected to publish its closely watched monthly arrest totals in coming days, and Trump administration officials are bracing for a new eruption from the president. He has treated the statistics as a gauge for the success of his hard-line immigration policies, and when border arrests fell to historic lows in the months after his inauguration last year, Trump touted the decrease as a personal triumph.
Since then, migration trends have reversed. In March and again in April, border arrests exceeded 50,000, the highest monthly totals of Trump’s presidency, sending him into fits of rage, aides say. Trump unloaded on DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during a Cabinet meeting May 9, scorching her for nearly 30 minutes over the spike in illegal crossings, while demanding she “close” the border.
The Trump administration is preparing to renew its push for an $18 billion border wall plan that would also tighten asylum procedures and overhaul other laws Trump officials say are encouraging illegal behavior. Trump has threatened to shut down the government this fall if Democrats don’t provide the funds.
But with midterm elections approaching and the president preparing to campaign on his border crackdown, Nielsen and other Homeland Security officials do not appear to be satisfying his strict enforcement targets. May’s arrest totals are expected to be at least as high as the previous two months, administration officials and Border Patrol agents said.
Large groups of Central American migrants have been taken into custody in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas in recent weeks, according to Border Patrol agents, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss operations. During one 24-hour span last month, 434 migrants were processed at the Border Patrol station in McAllen, agents said.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and President Trump have had a contentious relationship as illegal border crossings increase.(Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)
“The numbers have been very high,” said one agent assigned to the Rio Grande Valley, the nation’s busiest corridor for illegal migration. “It’s to the point that we have had to bring in buses to come out and load these folks up, or send four of five vans at a time.”
Another agent said so many migrants were apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley last month that many were diverted to other sections of the border for processing. The Justice Department has reassigned additional prosecutors to the border region to increase the number of migrants it charges with federal crimes, but one veteran border agent said it was “too early to tell” if the tougher enforcement measures were giving pause to migrants thinking of making the journey from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
“It’s going to take longer for the message to get back to those countries,” the agent said.
On Friday, Homeland Security officials would not say whether the tougher enforcement measures were meeting their goals. They said the May border arrest totals were not ready for publication, and they would not confirm whether the figures have been sent to the White House.
“The bottom line is Congress needs to act and close loopholes that serve as a tremendous pull factor for illegal immigration,” said Tyler Houlton, a DHS spokesman. “The Trump administration is restoring the rule of law by increasing prosecutions of illegal border crossers.”
According to a Trump adviser, the president was warned this spring that illegal border crossings were likely to increase. Trump said at the time he would not be satisfied with any such surge and everything needed to be done to block it. That led to the decision to deploy the National Guard.
The number of illegal border crossings “is going to go higher and higher yet,” said the adviser. “You’re going to see a line that goes up all summer long.”
Trump has not been briefed on the May arrest numbers yet, two advisers said.
In a statement late Friday, Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller blamed Democrats for blocking the president’s immigration overhaul.
“The illegal migrant crisis is the exclusive product of Democrats’ shameless refusal to close catch-and-release loopholes that cartels exploit to smuggle illegal aliens into the United States at great cost in taxpayer dollars, jobs and, too often, lives,” Miller said.
Weak border enforcement remains the biggest incentive to illegal migration, according to Miller. “We must end catch-and-release by reforming our asylum laws, and establishing expedited removal, to stop the smuggling and defend the nation,” he said.
As in recent years, many of those taken into custody last month were teenagers or parents traveling with children, and the administration has triggered broad condemnation for separating more families with its push to prosecute anyone who crosses illegally.
More than 10,800 migrant children were in federal custody as of May 31, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, up 21 percent since the end of April. The agency’s shelters are 95 percent full, and HHS officials say they are preparing to add thousands of additional beds to cope with the increase.
A Border Patrol agent in South Texas said the family separation measures were not being applied as broadly as assumed. Some parents who face federal charges are apart from their children for only several hours, then released and assigned a court date, the agent said.
“To us, that’s still ‘catch-and-
release,’ ” the agent said. “People are going to continue to come.”
Arrests along the Mexican border peaked at more than 1.6 million in 2000, then fell sharply during the Obama administration. During the government’s past fiscal year that ended in September, U.S. agents made 303,916 arrests, the lowest total since 1971.
Trump’s fixation is driven, in part, by a view that border security is paramount to his most fervent supporters and that immigration is a winning issue for Republican candidates in November’s congressional elections.
“I’m very proud to say that we’re way down in the people coming across the border,” Trump said in January. “We have fewer people trying to come across, because they know it’s not going to happen.”
The arrest numbers began shooting upward soon after that, from 36,682 in February to 50,296 in March. The yearly total for 2018 is on pace to approach or exceed 400,000, a level more consistent with migration patterns of the past five years, DHS statistics show.
During a visit Thursday to the Nogales border crossing in southern Arizona, Nielsen called the increase in illegal migration a crisis and said Homeland Security officials were working to “end this lawlessness.”
The country’s borders are being violated “by criminals, by smugglers and by thousands of people who have absolutely no respect for our laws,” she said.
“This is changing, it will change, and we will do all that we can to change this,” Nielsen added, emphasizing that the “zero-tolerance” approach announced in April will be applied as aggressively as possible.
“If you come here illegally, whether you’re single, whether you have a family, whether you’re a smuggler or whether you’re a trafficker, you’ve broken the law, so we’re prosecuting,” she said.
On Friday, Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Nielsen and Attorney General Jeff Sessions demanding information on the administration’s enforcement efforts, including the number of children who have been separated from their parents and whether there are formal procedures to reunite them.
Border arrests typically rise during spring months, when seasonal labor demands increase. Farms across the Midwest are becoming desperate for workers, with the U.S. unemployment rate at the lowest level since 2000. Lawmakers from both parties have told Nielsen that worker shortages are squeezing an array of industries in their states, and the DHS said last week that it will issue 15,000 seasonal guest-worker visas.
But border agents said much of the increase this spring seems to be driven by the same groups — families and teenagers traveling alone — who have been straining Homeland Security capacity since the 2014 crisis that left Border Patrol stations overflowing.
Photos of recent mass arrests provided by one agent show migrants of all ages walking through willow groves along the Rio Grande or lined up in federal custody along the river levees, waiting to board government buses.
Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.
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No surprises here. “Toldja so” back when Trump unwisely declared “Victory at Sea” after a few months of reduced border apprehensions. Since Trump is proudly ignorant of history, he apparently didn’t study what happened to Bushie II after he declared “Victory in Iraq” or his “Heck of Job, Brownie” moment. Nor does he have any idea of the actual dynamics driving human migration. That’s the problem with policies driven by racism, bias, xenophobia, and White Nationalism.
Also, trying to rewrite the Constitution and international protection law, as Trump, Sessions, Miller, Cotton, and the rest of the White Nationalist Gang would dearly like to do, to deny established legal rights won’t work either. In fact, it would make things 10X worse.
The laws aren’t the problem! The problem is the people charged with implementing them.
We can diminish ourselves as a nation, (and in fact, we are diminishing under Trump) but it won’t stop human migration!
Since October, more than 700 minor children have been separated from their parents at the border. More than 100 have been under 4 years old.
Some, like an 18-month-old Honduran boy torn from his mother in February, are just toddlers.
“The immigration officers made me walk out with my son to a government vehicle and place my son in a car seat in the vehicle. My son was crying as I put him in the seat,” the boy’s mother said in a sworn statement. “I did not even have a chance to try to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat. I was crying, too. I cry even now when I think about that moment when the border officers took my son away.”
This mom was not trying to “sneak across” the border, by the way. She had crossed an international bridge into Brownsville, Tex., and presented herself to immigration authorities to request asylum from political violence.
Instead of receiving refuge, she lost her child. It was months before they were reunited.
Such stories are enraging and shameful. They also put the lie to sacred principles that Republican politicians have long claimed to stand for, chiefly: family values and rule of law.
For decades, Republicans have championed traditional family values and having parents, rather than the state, take responsibility for their children.
This Republican administration’s inhumane treatment of helpless children — who are ripped from their mothers’ arms, detained in human warehouses and drop-kicked into “foster care or whatever” — reveals such rhetoric to have been a scam.
The Trump administration’s goal is to inflict pain upon these families. Cruelty is not an unfortunate, unintended consequence of White House immigration policy; it is the objective.
After all, if forced separations are sufficiently agonizing, fewer families will try to come here, no matter how dangerous their home countries are. Administration members have argued as much.
Last year, then-Homeland Security secretary John F. Kelly acknowledged he was considering separating children from their parents at the border “to deter” potential border-crossers. Again this month, he said “a big name of the game is deterrence.”
This vile and unpopular policy has been roundly condemned, including by prominent conservatives. So President Trump did what he always does when facing backlash for usingchildren (remember the “dreamers” and children’s health insurance?) as a bargaining chip: Blame the Dems.
“Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there [sic] parents once they cross the Border into the U.S.,” Trump tweeted Saturday.
Got that? Our law-and-order-obsessed president is merely enforcing an evil Democratic law!
There is, however, no statute — supported by Democrats or otherwise — that requires immigrant families to be torn apart.
The most cogent possible point Trump could have been making is one that other Republicans have made: that crossing the border unlawfully is a crime. If you prosecute every border crossing criminally — as Trump’s administration says it now does, even for asylum seekers — that means parents will go to jail.
And as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen put it, when parents go to jail, whether for unlawful entry or another crime, that requires separating them from their children.
Which is true, to a point; prisons generally can’t house children.
But here’s the part Trump apologists neglect to mention: The government is keeping immigrant families forcibly separated even after criminal proceedings are over and the parents get released from jail.
Take the case of a Brazilian family that also crossed the border to seek asylum.
The mother, named in court documents as “Ms. C.,” was prosecuted for entering the country illegally in August 2017, a misdemeanor for which she spent 25 days in jail. Her 14-year-old son was sent to a facility in Chicago.
After she was released, she passed a “credible fear interview” and began the process of applying for asylum. She was sent first to an immigration detention center, then released to a nonprofit shelter in El Paso. This shelter is willing to take in her son.
But the government still refuses to release him. She has been out of detention for five weeks and still hasn’t been allowed to see her boy.
“What they’re really basically saying is that these people don’t have a due-process right to remain with their child,” says American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project Deputy Director Lee Gelernt, who is representing Ms. C. and other asylum-seeking immigrants challenging Trump’s family separation policy. The Constitution, of course, guarantees due process for all, regardless of immigration status.
Cruelty and unconstitutionality: the platform of today’s Republican Party.
Just because Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that every illegal immigrant crossing the border would be prosecuted (resulting in parents being separated from their children), that doesn’t mean it’s morally defensible.
President Trump’s attempt to blame Democrats for separating migrant families at the border is renewing a political uproar over immigration, an issue that has challenged Trump throughout his presidency and threatens to grow more heated as he imposes more restrictions to stem the flow of illegal immigration.
In one of several misleading tweets during the holiday weekend, Trump pushed Democrats to change a “horrible law” that the president said mandated separating children from parents who enter the country illegally. But there is no law specifically requiring the government to take such action, and it’s also the policies of his own administration that have caused the family separation that advocacy groups and Democrats say is a crisis.
In April, more than 50,000 migrants were apprehended or otherwise deemed “inadmissible,” and administration officials have made clear that children will be separated from parents who enter the country illegally and are detained. The surge in illegal border crossings is expected to continue as the economy improves and warmer weather arrives.
“I keep imagining somebody taking my kids from me. My kids are 2 and 4 years old, and that’s the age of some of the children that have been separated from their parents at the border,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), who is helping to organize a Thursday rally in San Antonio to highlight the issue. “When a lot of people hear the story, they get a similar reaction. They can’t imagine why this would be a standard government practice.”
Trump’s deflection offers a familiar playbook, critics of the administration’s policies say. In their view, Trump’s most recent comments are strategically similar to tactics he used when he ended the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and then insisted on hard-line measures in a bill to permanently protect “dreamers.”
“He used DACA kids as a bargaining chip, and it didn’t work,” said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. “So now he’s using vulnerable Central American families for his nativist agenda. It’s shameless.”
. . . .
“The law does not require this inhumane and immoral action – DHS could stop it today. We do not need a law. This is a punt. They literally just ran this bad-faith play with DACA,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) tweeted Sunday. “They are going to use the suffering of children as political leverage for the wall, and we must refuse to participate, because if this kind of hostage taking is ever successful it will never stop.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
No, protections for refugees and children aren’t “loopholes!” They are important protections for those who have a right to seek a fair determination of their applications for refuge in the United States under our laws!
The statement that families can be “deported together” is simply more proof that Trump, Nielsen, and Sessions have already prejudged these cases. Although many are in fact denied, many more would be granted, possibly a majority, if individuals were given fair access to counsel, as the law contemplates, and the Government were actually required to correctly apply asylum and protection laws. Instead, for years the government has been getting away with politically influenced, unduly restrictive legal constructions and also coercing individuals with detention, entering bogus “in absentia orders” against them, or otherwise hustling them through the system without Due Process. Most of these tactics are directed specifically against those seeking protection from the Northern Triangle of Central America — one of the most dangerous regions in the world.
Join the New Due Process Army and stand up against the dishonest scofflaw public officials administering Trump’s sick immigration policies.
The issue is compounded, Rosenstein said, by the fact that these migrant children must eventually be released from detention, and many never show up for their immigration proceedings before a judge. Rosenstein, quoting statistics from the Department of Homeland Security, said less than 4 percent of unaccompanied minors are ultimately removed from the United States.
“We’re letting people in who are creating problems. We’re letting people in who are gang members. We’re also letting people in who are vulnerable,” Rosenstein said. Because many of the migrant children lack families or a similar support system, they become “vulnerable to [gang] recruitment,” the deputy attorney general said,
Thomas Homan, the departing deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said about 300 arrests related to the MS-13 gang were made on Long Island last year. Of those arrested, more than 40 percent entered the United States as unaccompanied minors, he said.
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“So it is a problem,” Homan said. “There is a connection.”
Other federal statistics paint a somewhat different tale. From October 2011 until June of last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials arrested about 5,000 individuals with confirmed or suspected gang ties, according to congressional testimony from the agency’s acting chief, Carla Provost, in June.
Of the 5,000 figure, 159 were unaccompanied minors, Provost testified, and 56 were suspected or confirmed to have ties with MS-13. In that overall time frame, CBP apprehended about 250,000 unaccompanied minors, according to Provost.
. . . .
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Read the full article at the link.
The Trump claims are, as usual, totally bogus. The percentage of gang members who come in as “unaccompanied minors” is infinitesimally small. The vast majority of these kids are gang victims entitled to asylum or relief under the Convention Against Torture if the law were fairly applied (which it isn’t).
Contrary to the suggestion by Rosenstein, when given access to legal representation, approximately 95% of the unaccompanied children show up for their hearings. And the “vulnerability” mentioned by Rosenstein is largely the result of the Trump Administration’s “reign of terror” against migrant communities which has made nearly all migrant children, along with other community members, “easy pickings” for gangs, with no realistic recourse to law enforcement. There are actually strategies for combatting gangs. But the Trumpsters have no interest in them.
Indeed, gangs have recognized that folks like Trump, Sessions, Homan, Neilsen, and now Rosenstein are their best recruiters and enablers. How dumb can we be as a country to put these biased, spineless, and clueless dudes in charge of “law enforcement.”
Interesting that in an obvious attempt to kiss up to Trump, Sessions, & Co and save his job, Rosenstein pathetically has decided that being a sycophant and sucking up to the bosses is his best defense. Particularly when it’s at the expense of kids and other vulnerable migrants seeking protection. Pretty disgusting! And, I doubt that it will eventually save him from Trump. Just tank his reputation and his future like others who have been “slimed for life” by their association with Trump.
Join the New Due Process Army and stand up for kids against the “child abuse” being practiced by the Trump Administration and its corrupt and incompetent officials.
How does President Trump act when he feels on top of the economic and diplomatic world? As his influence solidifies within the GOP? As his poll numbers tick upward?
If a recent Cabinet meeting tirade is any indication, political security has not translated into magnanimity. According to news reports, Trump spent 30 minutes dressing down his homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, for insufficient zeal in closing the southern border to illegal immigrants. One consistent source of tension between the two has been Trump’s desire to use family separation as a deterrent against illegal crossings.
Trump unbound is increasingly impatient with the excessive humanity of some of his own staff. This is not a problem he has, to be clear, with his chief of staff. Asked if family separation was cruel and heartless, John F. Kelly replied, “I wouldn’t put it quite that way. The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States.” He described the family-separation policy as a “tough deterrent.”
No, pulling crying children from the arms of their parents is not heartless at all. They will be taken care of, “or whatever.” For Kelly and Trump, the defining characteristic of these migrants is their illegality, not their personhood or their dignity. This is the definition of dehumanization.
A few points. First, the debate over a border wall is a policy matter. The separation of children from their parents as a deterrent is a human rights abuse. And the Trump administration, at its highest levels, cannot tell the difference.
As usual, Trump and his team are operating in a complete vacuum of historical knowledge. Family separation is not new to America. It was essential to the practice of chattel slavery. If enslaved people were truly property, they could not also be husbands and wives, or constitute true families. If those emotional and moral bonds were conceded as valid, slavery’s whole structure of dehumanization would crumble. Which is exactly why abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe emphasized the cruel separation of families in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Inhuman immigration enforcement is not the moral or legal equivalent of slavery. But a nation with this history should take particular care when contemplating family separation as official policy. Few human beings would treat other human beings in this manner. Which is exactly why Trump and Kelly must present “illegals” as lesser beings defined by their criminality.
Second, if the deterrence of crime is the only standard we employ in immigration enforcement, what is the limiting principle? Why stop at the separation of families? Why not put able-bodied illegal immigrant children to work in salt mines? Why not plant land mines at the border? Why not strafe illegal immigrants from attack helicopters?
The answer, of course, is that America, by definition, has a higher standard than legality. Our country’s most basic commitment — and its limiting principle — is universal human rights and dignity. This does not prevent the government from enforcing reasonable immigration laws. It does forbid the government from inhumanity in the enforcement of immigration laws. And there is no definition of inhumanity that does not include the intentional separation of parents from their children.
The fragmentation of families can be a tragic byproduct of the criminal-justice system. Many American children must visit a parent in prison. But if the breakup of families were proposed as a tough deterrent for crime — as a policy and a punishment — it would rightly be seen as a betrayal of American values. As it would be at our borders.
Third, Trump’s policy of family separation illustrates the swift downward spiral of demagoguery. In 2012, citizen Trump criticized Mitt Romney’s “crazy policy of self-deportation, which was maniacal. It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. . . . He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.” By his candidacy announcement tour in 2015, Trump had discovered the visceral appeal of presenting Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. Now he feels comfortable proposing the punishment of children and the purposeful destruction of immigrant families as a deterrent. And he feels comfortable because the Republican Party has surrendered, step by step, to his agenda of dehumanization.
Other American presidents have used their accumulated political capital for humanitarian goals. Trump is a leader who, as he grows politically stronger, is using his power to attack and exploit the weak and vulnerable. America’s president is the bullier of children.
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Gerson is “right on” in his analysis of the truly reprehensible program of de-humanization of migrants (and indeed of all people of color) being carried on by the Trumpsters.
Gotta ask the question though:
Michael, My Man, where was your “spot on” sense of morality, humanity, and values during the during the Bush II Administration when, as I remember it, you were part of the “spin team” trying to put a favorable gloss on some of the immoral, and sometimes illegal, acts of the Bush II Administration?
On the other hand, I’d have to admit to serving Administrations and private clients whose values I did not always share. So, it’s probably better to attain some moral clarity later in life than not at all.
And, perhaps, having once defended the questionable, marginally defensible, or the indefensible is part of the overall “learning curve” in public service. Upon my “first retirement” from Government, I remember being told by one senior DOJ lawyer that he would miss my “unparalleled ability to provide rational explanations for some of the essentially irrational policies” of my “client.”
The main problem with the Trumpsters is that they appear to have neither second thoughts nor moral qualms about most of the immoral and sometimes illegal actions and positions they are advancing. In the long run, that’s got to be bad for our country and the world. Lack of judgement, courage, and values appear to be the qualifications for service at the higher levels of the Trump administration.
Lawmakers who support DACA say they ‘already have the votes’ to force House debate
By: Tal Kopan, CNN
An effort to force a House vote on immigration didn’t pick up any new supporters Tuesday night, but its backers say they are already sure it will reach enough signatures to hit the floor.
“We are extremely confident we already have the votes,” Republican Rep. Jeff Denham of California said as he walked onto the House floor for the first votes of the week, which was the first opportunity lawmakers had to sign the measure since last week.
He walked into the Capitol with Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, who filed the so-called discharge petition on Denham’s rule, which brings a floor vote on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. DACA protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children, but President Donald Trump has decided to end it, though courts have temporarily paused that plan.
The two lawmakers are leading the charge among a group of moderate Republicans who are bucking their party leadership to push forward the petition, which circumvents leadership and the committee process.
If the petition can pick up 25 Republican signatures and those of every Democrat in the House, leadership would be forced to call four bills to the floor that address DACA. It currently has support from 18 Republicans and one Democrat, who signed earlier than the rest of her party last week because she expected to be out all of this week. The petition’s backers still expect to hit the number of signatures this week.
Denham’s rule would provide for debate and votes on four different immigration-related bills. One would be a bipartisan compromise, one would be a hardline bill supported by conservatives, one would be a Democratic bill to authorize just a version of the DACA program into law and one is completely up to House Speaker Paul Ryan — leaving him free to choose any bill.
Leadership, however, is whipping against the measure, asking moderates to not sign it and emphasizing the importance of House Republicans keeping control of legislation and solving the problem on their terms, according to a Republican leadership aide.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, traveled to the White House “to continue the conversation about addressing our broken immigration system,” Ryan’s spokeswoman AshLee Strong said in a statement.
DHS secretary defends separating families at the border
By Tal Kopan, CNN
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Tuesday defended an agency policy that will result in more families being separated at the border, saying, under a barrage of questions at a Senate hearing, that similar separations happen in the US “every day.”
But Nielsen also agreed with senators that more must be done to protect the children who either come to the US without their parents or are separated from them.
Nielsen was testifying Tuesday at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle raised concerns about what happens to immigrant children who end up in the custody of DHS, who — by law — transfers such minors to the custody of Health and Human Services within two days.
“Once you start taking these children, please, I don’t think any record should reflect that somehow, you are confident or anybody is confident that they’re being placed in a safe and secure environment,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, the top Democrat on the committee.
Nielsen said the department has recently instituted a policy that it will refer everyone caught crossing the border illegally for prosecution, even if they are claiming they deserve asylum or have small children. Any parents who are prosecuted as a result will be separated from their children in the process.
Nielsen said similar things happen in the criminal courts in the US “every day.”
Re DACA: I’d never estimate the ability of the Freedom Caucus, Chairman Goodlatte, GOP restrictionists, and the White House to throw a monkey wrench in any sensible DACA resolution.
RE Kiddie Detention (a/k/a “Government Sponsored Child Abuse”):
Sorry KN, but this isn’t really what happens “every day in criminal courts in the U.S.”
Most first time misdemeanor offenders are either:
Not charged at all;
Sent to a pretrial diversion; or
Released on recognizance or a minimal bond.
Most criminal court judges in the US try very hard to avoidsituations where children have to be placed in government custody, for both cost and humanitarian reasons.
In one criminal case that actually was involved with, the sentencing judge made it a point to sentence the husband and wife, who both were convicted, to serve their terms consecutively so that the children would not be without parental custody and supervision.
Just another of the many examples of the Trump Administration “working to the lowest common denominator” rather than trying to use the power of the Federal government to elevate standards.
According to other reports in today’s news, the DHS is working to place migrant children on U.S. Military Bases. Wow, what a colossal abuse of both the justice system and the purpose of military bases!
KN and her sycophant colleagues will not be able to escape the judgment of history for what they are doing.
Also, kids have long memories. Look at what happened to all of the Catholic priests and their superiors who thought that they would be able to avoid responsibility for child abuse!
Helpless, abused kids eventually grow up to be angry, empowered, and motivated adults who will seek to expose and bring to justice their abusers and tormentors!
It is hard to imagine a more stressful situation for a young child than to be forcibly taken from his or her parents and detained with strangers. Sometimes this unfortunate outcome is necessary when children are the victims of parental violence or severe neglect. But in the case of current U.S. policy as articulated by the attorney general, the “abuser” is the federal government.
Forced separation of children and their parents is “child abuse by government.” And in this case, knowing what we now know about the consequences of severe stress in children, it is no stretch to assert that these new federal policies are not just cruel but also can have lifelong consequences for their child victims.
If Melania Trump meant what she said about children, she might want to organize a heart-to-heart meeting with the attorney general — and with her husband. Maybe the first lady could advocate for policies that reflect the spirit of her new agenda and a commitment to protect vulnerable families seeking safety and opportunity in the United States.
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Read the complete, very disturbing, article at the link. What kind of country with what kind of values puts a child abuser in charge of its legal system?Under Trump & Sessions, America has gone from a defender to an abuser of human rights. Sessions is a refutation of human decency every day that he is allowed to remain in the office for which he was so spectacularly unqualifiedin the first place.
Senator Liz Warren was right. Remember McConnell and the other smug Republicans who put this horrible individual in place to damage our youth and our reputation as a nation of laws, decency, and human compassion.
ATTORNEY GENERAL Jeff Sessions is indifferent about whether undocumented immigrants crossing into the United States are simply seeking a better life for themselves and their families or whether they are fleeing domestic abuse, drug cartels, extortion rackets or political violence. It’s all the same to Mr. Sessions, who said Monday that all those who come into the country illegally would be prosecuted — and separated from their children in the bargain. Thus has the top law enforcement official in the United States enshrined callousness as administration policy.
Will babies be separated from nursing mothers? Will toddlers be housed in institutions far from parents? How many children will be traumatized by being carted away from their parents for weeks or months — or longer? The attorney general doesn’t say or, apparently, care.
Mr. Sessions’s policy of separating parents and children is intentionally and unapologetically punitive. There was no talk from him of developing additional detention centers that could accommodate families while parents await prosecution for the misdemeanor of illegal entry. There was no public recognition of the United States’ historical role as a beacon for refugees, nor its obligation in law and international treaty to accept migrants seeking asylum from danger in their native countries. There were no estimates of how many children will be removed from their parents, for how long, and with what long-term damage to their emotional and psychological welfare.
Instead, the attorney general offered indifference. Proclaiming a new policy of “zero tolerance,” he rebranded the United States as a crueler place than the countries from which people are fleeing. And never mind that, in many cases, parents are seeking refuge in this country in order to escape violence and persecution — and to protect their children.
The impetus for the new stance, of course, is President Trump, who has made clear that his crusade against all immigrants, with or without documents, knows no limits. Having washed his hands of the “dreamers,” mainly teenagers and 20-somethings raised and educated in this country after being brought here by their parents, Mr. Trump need not travel a great moral distance to upend the lives of brand-new migrant families by removing children from their parents.
The administration’s stated justification is a surge in migrants in recent months. The number of apprehensions of those coming into the country without papers, especially from Central America, has spiked from a year ago. However, the overall flow of migrants over the southwest border is near a four-decade low.
In other words, Mr. Sessions’s talk of a “massive influx” of undocumented immigrants is a falsehood. Against his incendiary vow that the administration will not allow the United States to be “invaded” and “stampeded ” is the plain truth that the southwest border is more secure, and less frequently breached, than at any time since the Nixon administration.
Yet Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions propose a breathtaking innovation: wrenching every small child away, as a matter of policy, from his or her family. They have now matched their demagoguery on immigration with malice.
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YUP! In a highly competitive race, Gonzo Apocalypto gets my vote for “Worst Government Official in America!” Willful ignorance, arrogance, incompetence, cruelty, racism, maliciousness, dishonesty, fake religion, and lawlessness all put together in one toxic package.
