The Texas Monthly has an important interview with Anne Chandler, of the Children's Border Project, describing not only the legal manipulations the Trump administration used to launch their new policy of child separation at the border, but the immediate effects. And the effects of what is happening are horrific. Read it.
That’s one we see again and again. “Your child needs to come with me for a bath.” The child goes off, and in a half an hour, twenty minutes, the parent inquires, “Where is my five-year-old?” “Where’s my seven-year-old?” “This is a long bath.” And they say, “You won’t be seeing your child again.” Sometimes mothers—I was talking to one mother, and she said, “Don’t take my child away,” and the child started screaming and vomiting and crying hysterically, and she asked the officers, “Can I at least have five minutes to console her?” They said no.
The scarring from these separations is going to be lifelong, which makes it urgent that the policy be ended immediately. And despite White House spin–even this administration is fully aware of how monstrous the policy makes them look, and has been furiously trying to shift blame elsewhere–the policy was carefully crafted by Jeff Sessions and the White House to get around current laws and international treaties protecting the refugees.
Many of them then look for Border Patrol to turn themselves in, because they know they’re going to ask for asylum. And under this government theory—you know, in the past, we’ve had international treaties, right? Statutes which codified the right of asylum seekers to ask for asylum. Right? Article 31 of the Refugee Convention clearly says that it is improper for any state to use criminal laws that could deter asylum seekers as long as that asylum seeker is asking for asylum within a reasonable amount of time.
Under international law, asylum seekers may present themselves at the border and the nation is obliged to consider that request. But the administration is both slow-walking asylum requests at legal points of entry and prosecuting asylum-seekers who present themselves to Border Patrol agents anywhere else along the border–using the misdemeanor crime of undocumented entry to imprison those refugee parents, then declaring their children to be "unaccompanied" due to that imprisonment and placing them in detention camps. And there's no assurance that the children thus stripped from their parents will be returned, period. It is cheap regulatory flam-flam meant to provide cover for a willful–and White House admitted–policy of traumatizing children for the sake of "deterring" future refugees, and it is an international human rights crime.
It is unforgivable, and not a single official implementing these policies should be allowed to work in government ever again. From senator to ICE officer to mewing pundit defending child separation as mechanism for frightening future refugees into choosing some nation other than America or for extracting anti-immigrant "concessions" from administration opponents, we cannot claim to be a decent nation unless we purge every enabler of human rights abuses from our national ranks, and permanently. We are not a fascist country; we will not go down that odious path so willingly.