The Trump administration is presently recycling the same playbook it used to strip Dreamers of their deportation protections, and using it to rip children away from their parents. Here's their game: Donald Trump and his officials unilaterally start executing a policy that creates a desperate dilemma, then they claim that a GOP-led Congress—that has proven almost totally incompetent at passing anything—must fix it legislatively, and then they make extreme demands about the legislative fix, rendering it DOA in at least one if not both, chambers of Congress. Finally, the White House and GOP lawmakers then ultimately blame Democrats for failing to fix the problem they created and failed to fix, even though they're running the entire government.
In the inaugural run of this farcical process, Trump used it to victimize people who were brought to the U.S. as minors by their parents, many of whom have never known any other country as their home. This time around, they have dropped all pretense of having even an ounce of sympathy for the plight of people brought here through no fault of their own and decided simply to target the children themselves, rather than waiting for them to reach adolescence or adulthood.
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions first decreed this policy in early April, he directed all U.S. Attorneys along the southern border to "adopt immediately a zero-tolerance policy for all referred for prosecution" under the U.S. Code for improperly entering the country.
What this means is that the administration is "immediately" prosecuting all border crossers, even if they turn themselves over to border patrol agents seeking asylum. Any parent who crosses the border is then separated from their children and sent to federal jail as they await their hearing. At the point, the kids are deemed "unaccompanied" minors and sent to a detention center.
The reason we now have these detention centers overflowing with kids who have been torn from their parents is because Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump dreamed up a draconian policy out of the blue, and set it into motion. It's born of sheer evil, and any deflection that they are somehow not responsible for this growing humanitarian crisis is downright sinister. Just like Trump unilaterally ended DACA protections for Dreamers, he also unilaterally initiated family separations at the border.
At this point, the Associated Press found that, between April 19 and May 31, about 2,000 kids have been separated and locked up in what are effectively child prisons. But that's an undercount, based on New York Times reporting.
The New York Times reported in April that about 700 children had been separated from their parents as they were processed at stations on the southwest border, including more than 100 under the age of 4.
As the media is putting more resources into reporting this story, America is getting a glimpse of these gut-wrenching cases and the torture the U.S. government is inflicting on these parents and their children. A toddler ripped from her mother’s arms while she was breastfeeding her. A little boy with hand-drawn pictures of the father he was torn from and his family back in Honduras crying inconsolably at night, until his sobs eventually turned into moaning. A father who took his own life after being separated from his family at the border.
I am admittedly welling up while I write this because, frankly, it's just hard to know what to do. But our government is visiting this unspeakable misery upon people who will never ever be the same, even if and when they are reunited with their loved ones. Not only is our government doing this in our name, they are lying about it like a pack of sociopaths.
Trump has consistently blamed the policy on Democrats, saying "that's their law" of a mythical law that Democrats are not responsible for, because it doesn't exist. His lies are getting plenty of support from administration officials, including Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who both hid behind their Bibles to justify these unconscionable separations.
“I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law,” Sanders told White House reporters Thursday.
"Don’t you have any empathy?" journalist Brian Karem asked in disbelief at Sanders' callousness. She dismissed his sincere inquiry as a stunt to get attention and moved on to the next question.
On Friday, administration officials held a press call to defend the policy but they demanded anonymity to speak—then they proceeded to lie.
The official also denied that department personnel were using false pretenses to take away children, such as saying that they were going to bathe. But lawyers and members of Congress who have spoken with migrants separated from their children in recent days have reported hearing otherwise.
Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, who recently visited 174 women apprehended at the border and being held in a federal prison facility in SeaTac, said some of them reported having been told that they needed to briefly leave their children to be photographed or see a judge, only to return and find the children had been taken away.
“They were forced to leave their children in this room, and then when they came back, the children were gone, and not a single one of them was able to say goodbye,” Ms. Jayapal said in an interview on Friday.
Not only are Trump and his minions predictably lying about the human rights atrocities they are committing, Republicans are lying right alongside them—enabling this continued persecution of innocent people. It's no accident. On Friday, reporters got ahold of talking points Republicans and then the White House circulated, in which a key objective is to blame Democrats for this monstrous Trump creation.
Under the title "Correcting The Record on Family Separation," Republicans repeated Trump's lie that "it's the Democrats' law" and added the talking point: "Congressional Democrats own family separation by repeatedly voting against common sense fixes to our immigration system that would make American communities safe." In support of that assertion, they listed things like Senate Democrats voting against a bill that would have "cracked down on dangerous Sanctuary Cities."
In case it's not obvious, none of the bills they listed had anything to do with family separation—probably because it's not a law.
At the same time that zero Republican lawmakers stepped up to actually level with the American people that Trump and Trump alone could stop all this craziness immediately, some Republicans began lamenting the fact that their party had given way to being a cult, built not on the strength of its ideas but rather unforgiving fealty to one person.
“It’s becoming a cultish thing, isn’t it?” Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee remarked Wednesday, after practically having an aneurysm on the Senate floor over not being able to secure a vote on his measure to rein in Trump's tariff push.
"We might poke the bear!" said Corker, who is retiring at the end of his term. "My gosh, if the President gets upset with us we might not be in the majority," he said, referring to sentiments he often hears from colleagues.
Corker specifically called out Texas Sen. John Cornyn for shying away from angering Trump, and then Cornyn basically proved Corker's point.
“I think people who lock horns with the president need to understand what the limits are in terms of their ability to win elections,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.). “At this point, he’s the leader of our party, and I think in order for our country to be successful, I think we ought to try to support him and his policies when we think he’s right.”
Naturally, that means doing absolutely nothing when they think he's wrong (assuming that at least some of them do). In other words, total complicity when Trump is doing something as abhorrent as kidnapping children from parents and then locking them up, in a scenario scarily reminiscent of the tactics used by dictators like Adolf Hitler. As Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen noted last month, before this atrocity had begun to sink in to the conscience of a nation: Taking Children from Their Parents Is a Form of State Terror.
We have seen this playbook so many times before in history—the slow dehumanization of a group of people, the seizing of their children, setting up "camps" that imprison them, the use of the Bible to justify state-sponsored terror.
It is pure evil and it leads to a very dark place whenever we begin to see these strains of history replay themselves without a vigorous and fervent response from a country's citizenry.
And let it be noted that while people like Sen. Bob Corker found Trump's tariff power grab so unacceptable he rose to make an impassioned speech on the Senate floor, not a single Congressional Republican seems to have been so stirred by Trump's internment of defenseless children. Don't give me their protestations and say it's worth a damn while they parrot a premeditated lie about who's responsible for inflicting this nightmare on a people.
This is as clear a choice between good and evil as you get—and Republicans have chosen to link arms and march lockstep with evil.