The United States is now tearing children from immigrant parents at the U.S./Mexico border as official policy, despite administration officials also admitting that they’ve lost track of nearly 1,500 migrants kids they placed with U.S. sponsors. This child abuse is “hostage-taking,” writes Masha Gessen in the New Yorker, and “a tried-and-true instrument of totalitarian terror,” including one authoritarian who helped sweep Donald Trump into office in the first place:
Last weekend, independent Russian-language media published hundreds of photographs from protests that preceded Monday’s inauguration of Vladimir Putin, who has claimed the office of President for the fourth time. In many of the pictures, Russian police were detaining children: primarily, preteen boys were having their arms twisted behind their backs by police, being dragged and shoved into paddy wagons. According to OVDInfo, a Web site that has been tracking arrests since anti-Putin protests began, six and a half years ago, a hundred and fifty-eight minors were detained by police during the protests, accounting for just less than ten per cent of the day’s arrests.
Ella Paneyakh, a Russian sociologist who studies law-enforcement practices, observed in a Facebook post that the police had clearly been directed to target children. A possible explanation, she suggested, is that social services, which will process the minors, is even less accountable than the regular courts are. While Russian activists have learned to make the work of the courts difficult, filing appeals and regularly going all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, there is no role for defense attorneys and no apparent appeals process in the social-services system. The threat is clear: children who have been detained at protests may be removed from their families. At least one parent has already been charged with negligence as a result of his son’s detention at one of the demonstrations last weekend.
Here in America, “a few hours after Putin took his fourth oath of office, in Moscow, Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed a law-enforcement conference in Scottsdale, Arizona,” where he promised to punish immigrant parents who have already been punished by having their kids stolen from them in the first place. “If forcibly separating children from their parents sounds like something Vladimir Putin would do,” Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) tweeted, “that’s because it is.”