The following article by Oliver Willis was posted on the ShareBlue website May 25, 2018:
The Trump administration’s callous policies mean families are being ripped apart at the border. And the U.S. is losing immigrant children.
The Trump administration is abusing helpless children through the new immigration policies it has enacted.
In its zeal to inflict harm on a minority population that Trump has previously denigrated with terms such as “animals” and “rapists,” families of undocumented immigrants are now being ripped apart at the border.
Not only are those families experiencing the brutal trauma of being separated in a strange country, but they’re also losing track of the children affected in the process.
One cruel act is being followed up by another act of cruelty, simply to satiate Trump’s own bigotry and the hatred embraced by his core supporters.
As a result of the policy put in place by Attorney General Jeff Sessions (who has a long history of anti-immigrant sentiment), families at border entry points are being separated.
The Tucson Daily Star reports that yellow bracelets are being placed on people to identify parents who are arrested at the border with their children. Then those children are taken away and put into foster care.
One mother, Alma Jacinto, asked an immigration judge when she would be reunited with her 8- and 11-year-old sons. The paper notes, “There was no clear answer for Jacinto.”
Another judge told Guatemalan immigrant Efrain Chun Carlos she didn’t know where his child was “and suggested he ask officials at the facility where he will be detained.”
Another report reveals that, unbelievably, many of those children may go missing.
The Department of Health and Human Services told members of Congress the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 immigrant children placed in foster custody is unknown.
The New York Times notes that the failure raises concerns “they could end up in the hands of human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.”
The children that are already missing were for the most part unaccompanied minors crossing the border. But now that children who were with their parents are being separated by Trump’s new rules, they are going into the same system.
The Republican Party has often branded itself as the “family values” party. But its wholehearted embrace of punitive measures at the border against a population of people that are so vulnerable exposes that to be a lie.
The motivation to enshrine hatred as part of American policy comes from a president who praised Nazis as “very fine people.”
Trump has directed the government to rip families apart, and when those families are assaulted, their children are being lost. What is happening is not an accident, but the real-world outcome of Trump’s twisted outlook.