In a Mother Jones piece about Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions' orders that domestic abuse and gang violence victims would no longer be considered as having valid asylum claims upon their arrival in the United States, is a brief mention of one particular asylum-seeker who Sessions has victimized all over again.
Among them was a mother from Central America who recounted how her husband drank heavily, grew violent, and sustained multiple affairs. When she went to court against her husband, a judge said putting up with the abuse was part of her duty as a woman. After fleeing the country and seeking asylum at the border, US officials separated her from her 12-year-old child.
That's the sort of person Jeff Sessions has decided poses a new danger to the nation, and the sort of person he's been taking multiple cruel steps against. Her child was spirited away because that's the new policy now. She is on a fast track to deportation because Jeff Sessions doesn't think domestic violence should "count" when weighing asylum claims. This is mostly being done not because any government official seriously considers this mother a threat, but due to a new White House policy aimed at deterring future asylum seekers from daring the trip—because, in the words of White House chief of staff John Kelly, they are "overwhelmingly rural people" who "don't integrate well" or "have skills."
But this one mother's case is a prime example of why domestic violence victims have, until Jeff Sessions and his fellow white nationalists came along, been considered candidates for asylum. This mother with child is not fleeing from domestic violence: she is fleeing a judiciary that has ordered her to accept the violence as "her duty." It is a human rights case.
In response, mother and child fled from their country to America and sought asylum in our nation, upon which this mother was arrested, jailed, and had her child taken from her at the orders of Jeff Sessions and the Trump White House. She will likely be forcibly returned, with or without her child, to the national government that dismissed the violence against her. All of this is being done in our name.
And that is obviously inhumane.