In a televised cabinet meeting on Thursday, Donald Trump admitted that the executive order he signed on Wednesday would still "lead to separation ultimately" because it doesn’t address existing court rulings concerning detaining children. The comment only reinforced the futility of Trump’s order which was designed to—and did—receive unwarranted credit for “ending” a crisis that he created intentionally through the institution of his “zero tolerance” policy.
The heart of that crisis isn’t family separation. Family separation is only a side effect of Trump’s zero tolerance policy. Even as he was signing his executive order, Trump made it clear that zero tolerance would continue. And during his Thursday cabinet meeting, he reinforced that idea.
Trump: If you took zero tolerance away, you would be overrun. There would be millions of people. … There would be a run on this country the likes of which you have never seen.
Trump’s evidence that people from other countries would gather up their “few belongings” and make a run on the United States is … there is no evidence. They were not doing so before the policy began, and there’s no reason to think that would change. The thousands of children now being warehoused for profit around the nation have built up since Jefferson Sessions announced Trump’s zero tolerance program on April 6. Family separations are the result of zero tolerance. And only ending zero tolerance can end family separations.
When multiple Democratic politicians stated that Trump could end the problem of children taken from their families with a phone call, they were not saying that he should keep families locked up together. They were saying that Trump need only call Sessions and end zero tolerance. Because zero tolerance is the issue. The executive order pretending to end family separations without ending zero tolerance is like handing out Band-Aids in the middle of a shooting—and letting the shooting continue.
Zero tolerance makes absolutely no sense. To justify it, Trump has been pressing the lie that 97 percent of immigrants skip out on their asylum hearings. That is not true. It’s an enormous lie. In fact, until last year, there was a program in place asylum seekers to come to their hearings—a program that was 99 percent effective. Trump shuttered that program. Because creating a crisis was required before he could take credit for ending it.
Despite how Trump has pounded the table about immigrants not appearing for hearings—a claim he made during his wandering across the White House lawn last week, his signing of the executive order, and again at his rally on Wednesday night—Trump has done everything he can to make the situation worse. As the Christian Science Monitor reported last year, ICE takes a number of steps to ensure that immigrants appear for hearings. Fully 40 percent of applicants are fitted with GPS-equipped ankle bracelets, like those used for dangerous criminals out on bond, while they are waiting for hearings.
But there are better options. The Family Case Management Program operated as a counseling service, staying in touch with immigrant families, and helping them to understand what they needed to do and when they needed to appear. That program had a 99 percent success rate in getting immigrants to their court dates.
So naturally ...
The Trump administration is shutting down the least restrictive alternative to detention available to asylum-seekers who have entered the US illegally, The Associated Press has learned.
Trump deliberately and systematically removed or weakened alternatives to detention. Then he imposed a policy that required detention.
There’s nothing accidental or unforeseen about the outcome. This chaos, this pain and cruelty, is absolutely by design.