"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.
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.
INFANTS, TODDLERS, tweens, teens — Trump administration officials are less interested in the age of an unauthorized child migrant than they are in removing the child from his or her parents as a means of deterring illegal border-crossers. That plan, first floated by White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly last year when he was homeland security secretary, was widely regarded as so callous and such a radical departure from historical practice that it was unthinkable for any U.S. government.
If only.
In fact, not only has the idea of systematically separating undocumented children and parents gained currency among top officials determined to turn the tide on illegal entry, it’s already happening with increasing frequency. The Department of Homeland Security insists it has not adopted the practice as a matter of official policy — despite White House pressure to do so — but administration officials acknowledge that hundreds of children, including scores younger than 4, have been taken from their parents in the past few months.
By now it’s clear that there are few red lines President Trump is unwilling to cross in his crusade to rid the United States of undocumented immigrants. For Mr. Trump, having washed his hands of the “dreamers” — young migrants, most in their 20s, raised and educated in the United States after being brought here as children — it’s hardly a moral leap to inflict lasting psychological damage on younger children by taking them from their parents if it will further his goal of combating illegal immigration.
As reported by The Post’s Maria Sacchetti, top immigration and border officials have recommended that all parents who enter the country illegally with their children be detained and prosecuted, meaning the automatic separation of minors, who cannot legally be held in jails or detention centers designed for adults. Until recently, that was extremely uncommon; most parents who crossed the border with children would be released pending an immigration court hearing, or, in some cases, detained together in a facility designed for families. Prosecuting parents for illegal entry, a misdemeanor under federal law, has been exceedingly rare — specifically because of the harm it would cause blameless children.
In addition, many of the parents who would be prosecuted are eligible under U.S. law to seek and be granted asylum. That’s hardly a stretch for migrants from El Salvador and Honduras, beset by drug cartels, gang violence, domestic abuse and some of the world’s highest homicide rates. In the last three months of 2017, more than two-thirds of the 30,000 asylum seekers crossed into the country illegally — and it is far-fetched to exempt from prosecution only those who announce themselves as asylum seekers at legal ports of entry, as Homeland Security officials propose. Are desperate, impoverished people fleeing violence to be penalized because they enter the United States in the wrong place?
The United States has a legitimate interest in deterring illegal border-crossing. It is within its rights to detain and deport individuals and families who fail to make a persuasive case for asylum. But to splinter families and traumatize children in the name of frightening away migrants, many of whom may have a legitimate asylum claim, is not just heartless. It is beyond the pale for a civilized country.
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Pretty ugly! Eventually our country, particularly future generations, will pay a high price for abandoning civilized values and human decency. The world is watching and the historical record is being made of the Trump Administration’s cowardly response to humanitarian tragedies and the folks who are enabling him and his White Nationalist cronies.
Get on the “right side of history!” Join the New ‘Due Process Army!”
Former Delaware Governor Jack Markell in the Washington Post:
Jack Markell, a trustee of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, was governor of Delaware from 2009 to 2017.
Reading recent stories about U.S. citizens being forcibly separated from their undocumented parents reminds me of a visit I made to South Africa in 1985.
During that trip, I spent several days with the Black Sash in Johannesburg and Cape Town. This group of white women had formed 30 years earlier to protest legislation designed to remove voting rights of “coloured” South Africans. Over time, the Black Sash evolved from protest to advocacy, and by the time of my visit, it had grown to thousands of women who volunteered their time to help black and mixed-race South Africans deal with the horrendous laws and regulations of apartheid.
Among the most painful of the system’s effects was the destruction of families. Meeting with the Black Sash volunteers, I saw teenagers who had been removed from their families and black families forced to move from Johannesburg to a far-off rural “homeland” where they had no relatives.
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Now, in our own country, the Trump administration is preparing to threaten the well-being of 16 million U.S. citizens who live with their immigrant parents.
That’s right. Sixteen million U.S.-born children under 18 would be on the receiving end of a series of new proposals from President Trump’s team that could make it more difficult for parents to stay in the United States legally — and, even if they remained here, would reduce the likelihood that those parents would avail themselves of the services designed to keep their children healthy.
The proposals are embodied in changes to the “public charge” regulations, which limit the cost to the government of caring for immigrants. This concept has been in the law for decades. The difference with these proposals is that they would allow officials to include nutrition, health and other programs among the benefits that can be used to define an immigrant as being too dependent on public aid. That means immigrants availing themselves of those benefits — even for their children who are U.S. citizens — could be barred from obtaining a new visa or becoming a lawful permanent resident.
Our country has historically made sure that a safety net will prevent our most vulnerable children from going hungry or without health care. These proposed changes reflect a betrayal of our core values.
Administration officials claim that they are proposing these changes in order to protect taxpayers. This argument is — at best — penny-wise and pound-foolish. Hungry and unhealthy children are more likely to be chronically dependent on government services and less likely to find good jobs and pay taxes.
Even without the rules being put into effect, we’re seeing massive negative consequences for many of these children. The advocacy group CLASP recently released research that reveals how the combination of fear caused by possible separation from parents and increased economic uncertainty has increased toxic stress among children from families who have members with different immigration statuses.
While these rules have not yet taken effect, once they are introduced, they could become the law of the land within a few months. In the meantime, once the regulations are posted for public comment, it’s critical for those who care about fiscal prudence as well as those who believe that it’s important to help keep our citizen children with their families to act. They must protest on behalf of these vulnerable children and on behalf of our core American values.
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Yup, an Administration of liars and child abusers is about as low as it can go. But, that’s what we have until 2020 and perhaps longer if decent Americans don’t wake up,.get motivated, and vote Trump and his corrupt GOP enablers and fellow travelers out of office!
Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all!
