If impeached president Donald Trump could force every single business that has halted services due to the novel coronavirus pandemic to fully reopen this very second, he’d do it, and our lives be damned. But there is something he reportedly wants to keep shut down: “The Trump administration is preparing to extend travel restrictions and stringent border control measures this week related to the coronavirus pandemic, according to two administration officials,” CNN reports.
This includes a possible extension of the Stephen Miller-led public health order that experts say is blatantly unlawful and has already resulted in the deportation of 600 kids in the span of one month alone. The administration claimed to the public that the policies were supposedly temporary, but it always intended to keep them around as long as possible because this pandemic is exactly what Miller had been waiting for. In fact, CNN reports: “Since first implementing the measures, the Trump administration has extended them once, in April.”
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The Associated Press reported earlier this month that some of the kids who have been quickly deported in blatant violation of U.S. law have been as young as 10. “In interviews with The Associated Press, two recently expelled teens said border agents told them they wouldn’t be allowed to request asylum,” the report said. “They were placed in cells, fingerprinted and given a medical exam. Then, after four days, they were flown back to their home country of Guatemala.”
Hundreds of public health experts have issued a number of calls for an end to these cruel and inhumane changes. Earlier this month, more than 700 doctors, nurses, health workers, and public health professionals said in a letter to CDC Director Robert R. Redfield that “this order directly endangers tens of thousands of lives and threatens to amplify dangerous anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia.” In a second letter to Redfield and Health and Human Services Sec. Alex Azar this week, another two dozen experts from leading public health institutions slammed the order as “based on specious justifications and fails to protect public health.”
“We urge the CDC and Department of Health and Human Services to withdraw—not extend or expand indefinitely—this policy and instead direct U.S. officials to use rational, evidence-based public health measures to safeguard both the health of the public and the lives of adults, families, and unaccompanied children seeking asylum and other protection,” they wrote. “The nation’s public health laws should not be used as a pretext for overriding humanitarian laws and treaties that provide life-saving protections to refugees seeking asylum and unaccompanied children.”
But remember, this state-sanctioned child abuse is also happening within our borders and communities. Last week, immigrant rights advocates warned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were presenting parents detained with their kids at migrant family jails in Texas and Pennsylvania with a cruel “binary choice”—either agree to have their kids released without them, or remain jailed together indefinitely. “I can’t even imagine the pain and despair they must feel and the shock of it all,” Sueños Sin Fronteras cofounder Laura Molinar told San Antonio Express-News. “To have to make that horrible of a choice.”
