The Republican “pro-life” party of “family values” comes with numerous preconditions and fine print. For example, if you’re a thrice-married adulterer who bragged on tape about sexually assaulting women, it can be overlooked if there’s an “R” next to the name. And families and children are a core of society—unless of course, those parents and children are brown:
The Trump administration on Monday will unveil a new, tougher border enforcement policy to stem the flow of illegal crossings.
The crackdown, which took effect last week and will be formally announced later Monday, will mean that parents bringing children over the border illegally will likely be separated if caught, according to an official at the Department of Homeland Security, who did not want to be identified before the policy was unveiled.
Currently in many cases border agents try to keep family units together by sending all members to the same family detention facility. Now in most cases parents will be prosecuted and children sent to a separate refugee facility, the official said.
Families seeking asylum and presenting themselves at official border crossings will still be allowed stay together as they seek protected status, the official said.
Individuals who cross illegally will no longer be apprehended and bused back over the border, as often occurs currently. Under the new policy, those crossing illegally will be detained and prosecuted.
It’s the latest attack by the Trump administration on the most vulnerable among us. “Over the past month,” The Marshall Project reports, “the Trump administration has taken aim at a previously uncontroversial set of child protection laws created to protect young people who cross into the United States without a parent or guardian … the administration now sees some of these same youths as a threat.”
According to data reviewed by the New York Times last month, the federal government has separated 700 children from their parents since October of last year:
Children removed from their families are taken to shelters run by nongovernmental organizations. There, workers seek to identify a relative or guardian in the United States who can take over the child’s care. But if no such adult is available, the children can languish in custody indefinitely. Operators of these facilities say they are often unable to locate the parents of separated children because the children arrive without proper records.
According to The Marshall Project, the Trump administration’s “new directives appear aimed at detaining more of these youths after their arrival and speeding deportation back to their home countries”:
The campaign is aimed at Capitol Hill, but the Trump administration is not waiting for legislation: In a series of at least a dozen moves across multiple federal agencies, it has begun to curtail legal protections for unaccompanied children who cross the border. Many of these safeguards were created by a 2008 law that provided protections for children who might otherwise be forced into labor or prostitution.
The young people affected by the administration’s measures have been fleeing deadly gang violence in Central America since 2014, when civil strife erupted in the region. They are a less politically shielded group of young people than the so-called “Dreamers,” most of whom came to this country as toddlers with their parents.
“It has been national law and policy that as adults we look out for children,” said Eve Stotland, director of legal services for The Door, a youth advocacy organization in New York. “No longer.”
Among the many new directives, the State Department in November gave just 24 hours’ notice to endangered children in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador before cancelling a program through which they could apply for asylum in the United States prior to getting to the border. About 2,700 of them who had already been approved and were awaiting travel arrangements were forced to stay behind in the troubled region.
Among the children already here, the stories have been no less than horrific. According to federal officials from Health and Human Services (HHS), some 1,500 migrant children who have been placed by the government with U.S. sponsors have not been accounted for:
The official, Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary of the agency’s Administration for Children and Families, disclosed during testimony before a Senate homeland security subcommittee that the agency had learned of the missing children after placing calls to the people who took responsibility for them when they were released from government custody.
Those sponsors “undergo a detailed background check,” and “workers at the department follow up with calls to ensure that the minors continue to live with the sponsors, are enrolled in school and are aware of their court dates.” But when officials tried to reach 7,635 children during a three-month period last year, officials found that not only had some two dozen of the kids run away and another 52 were living with non-sponsors, but that they “were unable to determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,475 children.”
How we treat our most vulnerable dictates who we were not just as a country, but as human beings. So far, this administration has failed the test, and failed us, miserably.