Donald Trump’s policy of holding migrants indefinitely is affecting not just those who seek admission at the US border, but also thousands who have been in the United States for years or decades. The truth about the US “catch and release” policy that Donald Trump so often rails about is, there is no such policy. Instead there’s simply the law that says those seeking asylum in the United States should get a hearing on the merits of the case, and the fact that there are so few immigration judges that the average wait time for that hearing exceeds 500 days. The right answer to dealing with this would be appointing enough judges to bring the time for hearings down to something more reasonable, but in the short term the immediate question is: What to do with those seeking admission in the United States while they are waiting on their hearing.
Previous to Trump, the answer in many cases—particularly those involving families—was to give those people a hearing date and allow them into the country on a provisional basis. And, contrary to what Trump has stated, the rate of those who are admitted who appear for their hearings is very high. In fact, a program instituted under President Obama to keep track of these families resulted in an appearance rate of 99 percent. Donald Trump canceled that program.
Instead, Trump has instituted a “zero tolerance” program, under which everyone seeking entry into the United States is simply locked away awaiting their distant day in court. It’s a boon to the private prison system, but not to anyone else. Paired with regulations that, rightly, keep children from being locked away for long terms in jails meant for adults, it generated the family separation crisis—intentionally.
But that policy doesn’t just apply to those waiting at border crossings and trying to explain their issues to agents at ports of entry. It’s equally brutal for those who have been in America for an extended period. As Reuters reports, immigrants who have long been established in communities across the country, are finding their lives upended and their families torn apart. Take the case of a woman who was brought into the US as a teenager, and had lived here for 23 years before being picked up for a traffic violation—and whose six children are now hundreds of miles from their mother who will be in a detention center for months, and whose prospects of ever returning home are dim.
In one of the letters Vasquez’s children sent to the immigration court during their mother’s incarceration, 9-year-old Kevyn pleaded: “Pless. Pless. (Please. Please.) I want my mom to take care of me and my little brother. I don’t want my mom to go to Salvador.”
This is the kind of horror that ICE is creating every day, and in fact, has been creating since Trump took office.
Just because, in the case of Morena Vasquez, she is locked up, while her children are still “free”—if removed from the only home they knew—doesn’t make it any less awful. And throwing someone out of the nation over a traffic stop after more than two decades of hard work and raising a family doesn’t represent a win for anyone. There’s no sense in which the country is more “secure” or anyone involved more safe or more justly treated by locking up Vasquez on the way to sending her back to a country she hasn’t seen in 23 years.
Morena Vasquez is just one of thousands of immigrants in a similar situation since ICE began coming down hard on those who have lived in the United States for an extended period. The stories of parents picked up at school bus stops and soccer games and even hospitals have been a steady back beat on the news. So have those about immigrants who lost homes they purchased, or businesses they built.
Somehow none of that seemed to bring on the same kind of national furor as was generated by the increase in the number of children taken from their parents over the last few weeks. But it should have. In fact, it’s easy to see why the Trump White House would have been surprised that people got upset about crying children at the border—they didn’t react this way when it was crying children watching their families torn apart right in their own hometowns.
President Trump has often pointed to Central American gang members and other criminal “animals” as the main targets of his strengthened immigration-law enforcement. But as his administration has expanded its dragnet under a series of executive orders, ICE has locked up thousands of people like Vasquez – people with little or no criminal history, with deep roots in their communities, who present little flight risk.
The executive order that Trump signed was not only free of any substance, it addressed only a symptom of a situation that itself is just the tip of a giant iceberg of hatred, racism, and injustice.
Before Trump’s policy went into effect, most of those picked up by local police, or even by ICE, would have been returned to their families to await the results of their hearings. And those people—with families, with homes, with jobs—are not just the kind of people most likely to appear for their hearings, but those who are also the ones who have already demonstrated that they can, and do, fit into American communities. American stories.
Because as much as Republicans like to talk about the American dream, the idea of America isn’t two cars, a fancy house, or a swimming pool. It’s that someone can come here with nothing, and make a life for themselves and their family. Someone like Morena Vasquez. That’s exactly the dream that Trump is out to destroy.