YES, IT WAS POLICY

At the very beginning of his campaign,  GOP candidate trump made no bones about the fact that he had a thorough disdain for all immigrants even though he is second generation himself and also married two immigrants.  His rancor, though, is especially vicious these days toward those from Mexico and Latin America. In his opening speech from trump tower in 2015 – more like a tirade – he decried pretty much all those from Mexico and even those living in Mexico and rapists, drug dealers and criminals.  He complained that they were “ not the best” being sent by the Mexican government, as if to say this was a planned migration sponsored by the president of Mexico. He vowed to build a wall to keep this so called criminal element out and he insisted that Mexico would pay for that wall. We have seen how that all has played out and, though this will never happen, it continues to be fodder for his red hat base who are consumed with the mind set that favors a far right, white supremacy, so called nationalist agenda. However,  in spite of all this, one could never predict what has been happening in the recent months at the border with Mexico.

In an historic move in policy – yes,  written policy – the trump administration, with no plan or rhyme or reason other than blind contempt for anyone from South of the border, took the inhumane and possibly criminal measure to forcibly separate parents from their children as they crossed the border  legally seeking asylum from the chaos, violence and war in their own countries. One looks at this policy as being criminal because crossing a border to seek asylum is not a crime. In fact it is legal and is protected by not only U S law but also international law and there are procedures and protocols in place to manage those requests.  We know that these measures were executed under instruction from the White House from documents made public including policy memos written by the attorney general which were confirmed in his public speeches. Also, there are documents from the White House itself encouraging this policy.

As part of the implementation of this policy, several of the legal ports of entry were ordered closed, forcing these refugees to cross the border at non sanctioned crossings, i.e. illegal crossings, where their children were taken from them and placed in holding facilities – unlicensed facilities ill equipped to handle children of school age, let alone infants and two year olds, those of “tender age” while the parents were sent to detention centers without knowing where their children were located.  

 As events became public knowledge the official spin began in full force. The official position taken by some spokespersons was that the treatment of children was as it always is for unaccompanied minors. The problem was, and still is, that these children –  more than two thousand of them – were not unaccompanied when they got to the border. They were only “unaccompanied” when they were separated from their parents by orders from DOJ and the oval office.  The spin continued in spite of clear evidence to the contrary. Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS )  Kirstjen Nielsen asserted on at least one occasion that it “ was offensive to say that trump purposely separated children”…. It should be clear as glass that this administration, giving way to the well known and documented evidence of intolerance at the highest levels, made the policy rooted in bigotry the operational mandate at the border.  As more and more information became available, it was clear that children were being badly treated, dispersed throughout the country and many parents were being deported without their children. Court cases were filed, advocates headed to Texas to make issues known and the press covered the events in as much detail as they could. This was difficult as even members of congress were barred from actually seeing how these thousands of children were being treated.

After weeks of this absurdity and with pressure from advocacy groups and the federal courts, the White House finally backed down and decided that it would be better if the children were reunited with their parents. However, there was no plan for that reunification. There was no plan and there never was a plan. This was a policy specifically designed to punish people whose only crime was that of seeking a better life. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Alex Azar, in several on air interviews, stated  in no uncertain terms, that everything was under control and that reuniting all of these children with their parents could be done with the simple keystrokes on a computer, meeting the recently issued court order.

Here’s the problem. DHS officially cannot account for nearly fifteen hundred children having placed them in various facilities all over the country with having no tracking data. And if found, the reuniting with actual parents would be difficult because DHS/ICE took and destroyed birth certificates and other documents from these families as they were arrested upon crossing the border. One could continue to delineate the human tragedy created by the administration at the southern border but the news coverage – indeed, even the international news coverage – is sufficient to expose the truth.

What is the fact is that, in their dealings with immigrants – either legal or illegal-  no other country in recent history, with the possible exception of Nazi Germany, had and executed a policy to fracture families in the way in which the trump administration did. It was and is sheer bigotry taken to a level of insanity.

To date of this post, under federal court order, out of the approximately two thousand five hundred children in question, most have indeed been reunited. However, approximately six hundred and fifty have not been reunited. The official administration answer to this is that these children are not eligible to be reunited, though there is no explanation as to just what this means or what the criteria is for determining this status. Part of this has to be that many of the parents were deported after clearly rigged administrative hearings on asylum requests while court deliberations were on going with many children being told that their parents abandoned them. Yes,  this is actually what has been happening at our borders.

Far from the wishes of the administration, foreign nationals are permitted to seek asylum and, up until the trump administration and the term of Attorney General Sessions, there was never a policy or legislation which required the removal of children from their families. What the people witnessing this catastrophic mess need to understand is that this all is sheer bigotry made in to policy. What is beyond sad is that, at least from one point of view, there are far too many that find this policy acceptable and, dismissing the plain fact that most who are here, unless their ancestors were here before 1491, started out as immigrants,  a good number coming in to the country illegally. 

The entire episode at the border is truly a black mark on our history – a history built on immigrants seeking a better life, free from oppression and persecution.