Family Separation Law That Has Been on the Books Since Clinton
Much of the land is justifiably outraged about the Trump administration's practice of separating undocumented children from their parents. According to Homeland Security figures, most 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in only six weeks, and many are being placed in tent camps in the desert.
In a May interview with NPR, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen stated the administration's case very conspicuously. When asked whether families would exist separated if they crossed the edge illegally, she said the following:
Our policy has non changed in that if you pause the constabulary, we will refer you for prosecution. What that means, however, is if y'all are a unmarried developed, if you are part of a family, if you are pregnant, if y'all take any other status, y'all're an adult and you lot break the law, we volition refer you. Operationally what that means is we will accept to separate your family.That's no different than what we practise every solar day in every part of the United States when an adult of a family commits a crime. If you equally a parent break into a firm, you volition be incarcerated by constabulary and thereby separated from your family. We're doing the same matter at the border.
Secretary Nielsen is absolutely right. What is being done at the border is no dissimilar than what the government does to families every twenty-four hours in the Us. In fact, state-sanctioned family separation has a long history in our country and is a widespread exercise today.
It began during slavery with the cruel, daily and fully legal practice of buying and selling away children from their parents. Nigh the time slavery was abolished, the authorities then began the practice of forcibly removing Native American children equally young equally v years old from their families in guild to "civilize" them in white boarding schools — a exercise that lasted more than 100 years and formally ended only with the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.
Mass incarceration
Currently, the most insidious engine of forced child separation is embedded inside our criminal justice organization. Just equally the forced removal of Indian children became illegal in the belatedly '70s, the The states began an accelerated procedure of mass incarceration that quintupled the number of U.S. prisoners, giving America the highest incarceration rate in the world and paving the way for a new form of legal family unit separation on a massive calibration.
While mass incarceration has gotten increased attending in recent years, few realize that one-half a million of the 2.3 one thousand thousand people backside bars are simply at that place because they are too poor to pay bail.
Whether guilty or innocent, men and women spend weeks, months and fifty-fifty years locked up while they wait trial (even though we know that money bail only marginally impacts court attendance). The event is that many of these generally nonviolent individuals end up losing their jobs, their homes or even custody of their children — all before they've even had a chance to plead their case in court.
The impact upon our children is staggering: Almost 2.7 million boys and girls in the The states accept a parent behind bars, and more 5 million have had a parent locked up at one bespeak in their lives.
Notably, the fastest growing group of prisoners is women (a fourteenfold increment since 1970) and about 80 per centum of these women are mothers — about of them single parents.
More than:Donald Trump is using his power to dehumanize people who aren't white. It tin can exist fatal.
Sorry Jeff Sessions, the Bible doesn't justify terrorizing parents & children on the border
Trump-Sessions immigration policies rip children from parents and shred American values
Racism prevails
Part of the reason that the type of everyday family separation Secretary Nielsen talks near is so widely accepted is that in one case an individual or group is labeled "criminal" in our state, all fashion of treatment becomes adequate. Past labeling Mexican immigrants as murderers and rapists, by referring to undocumented immigrants as "animals," by labeling Republic of haiti, El Salvador and African nations equally "due south--thole" countries, and by opening a special authorities office to highlight the victims of immigrant crimes, (though immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the general population), Trump has been gradually setting the stage for the increasingly cruel handling of immigrants at our southern edge.
Also, by criminalizing virtually every movement of black bodies (driving, walking in the incorrect neighborhood, barbecuing in the park, or sitting in a Starbucks), we accept created a organisation in which peel color predicts arrest more accurately than the actual committee of crimes.
Despite what Democrats volition tell you lot, disdain for blackness people is a bipartisan affair. A 2022 Reuters poll revealed that about half of Trump supporters described blacks as more than "trigger-happy" and "criminal" than whites, while xl percent described them every bit more "lazy." Less publicized was the fact that nearly i-3rd of Clinton supporters described blacks as more "violent" and "criminal," and 1-quarter described them as more "lazy" than whites.
The subtle and not-then-subtle belief that black and dark-brown people are intellectually and morally inferior, that nosotros threaten our country'southward moral and social fiber, and that we are not fully human has always held potent currency in America. Even Attorney General Jeff Sessions' contempo attempt to use biblical justifications for the cruel treatment of immigrant children has a rich tradition: Slave owners cited the same Romans thirteen passage nearly obeying authorities in society to fend off would-be abolitionists (never mind that the United States itself was birthed from the rebellion against the British crown, which considered itself God-ordained, and never listen that Jesus and his parents were themselves refugees who would at present be jailed and separated at the U.Southward. edge).
Trump and his team's "constabulary and society" framework is the same ane articulated by President Richard Nixon in the belatedly 1960s and more subtly invoked by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as they ramped upwardly the drug war and fueled massive prison expansions. Nosotros jail and separate families at the edge to deter illegal immigration; and we jail and divide poor families within our country because they can't afford bail or proper legal representation.
Any parent will tell you that there is nil more than terrifying than the thought of having your child torn abroad. Using terror as a deterrent against the inflow of aviary seekers and destitute families and justifying it with poor Bible teaching is abhorrent. And yet, as Secretarial assistant Nielsen has pointed out, in a state that needlessly separates hundreds of thousands of families each year, this is nothing new.
Antonio Cediel is the urban strategies entrada managing director for Faith in Action and a former school superintendent.
Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/19/separating-families-border-illegal-immigrant-undocumented-column/711086002/
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