I guess everybody’s heard by now that the Trump Administration is separating children - even as young as just over one year old - from their parents when they try to cross into the U.S.
And of course, Trump’s blaming it on the Dems, because that’s what he does. (He’s even demanding that people pressure the Dems to end the law forcing these separations. All I can figure is that while the GOP-controlled House has passed a bill ending the law, the Dems are filibustering it in the Senate. (WHY WON’T THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA REPORT ON THE DEMOCRATIC FILIBUSTER?! Please excuse the sarcasm.)
Of course, he’s lying every which way. It’s his Administration’s policy, there is no law to repeal, they’re just doing it because they’re cruel and they can.
I don’t know if this qualifies as a crime against humanity, but it’s the sort of thing we used to take in refugees for if other countries were practicing such abuses. AFAIAC, everyone enabling this horrible policy should be frog-marched to The Hague to stand trial.
Just to remind everyone, improper entry into the US is a misdemeanor.
Can you think of any other misdemeanor that would warrant separating kids from their parents? I can’t either.
Our attorney general believes that separating families will deter folks from crossing the border illegally. But what if your child was taken from you and lost in the system? Wouldn’t that motivate you to try to come back into the country to look for them?
Entering the US to request asylum isn’t even a misdemeanor, as far as I know. Those people get detailed (sometimes) because there’s a risk they will disappear. But there’s zero reason to separate kids from parents in these cases. It’s just a way to punish the victims of violence elsewhere.
Yeah, let’s inflict permanent mental trauma on defenseless kids to punish their parents for daring to come to the US without the proper papers.
Also, are these separations supposed to be temporary or permanent? Not that the former would make this disgusting, utterly inhumane policy any better. I just haven’t seen any reporting that explains how or where the kids are ever supposed to be reunited with their parents.
The upsetting thing is that there are Trump supporters who will acknowledge this as an atrocity that Trump is causing but they still feel justified in supporting him because of his other policies. And these aren’t wild-eyed crazies. These are people who are intelligent enough to semi-convincingly pose like intelligent people.
And you can’t point out to them that this kind of thinking is what led to the Nazi’s rise, because any Godwinesque argument is grounds for derision nowadays. But…what else can we compare it to that is as fitting?
To me, this issue represents a line in the sand like no other issue to date has. If Trump holds on to the same level of approval despite this, then god help the next person who tries to convince me that Trump supporters are being unfairly painted as bigoted assholes.
Taking children away from their parents. Actually, for realsies, taking kids away from their parents. How does the GOP look at themselves in the mirror every day? Is this really the kind of America that almost half their population want?
America, 1858: Black parents and children are forcibly separated.
America, 2018: Brown parents and children are forcibly separated.
All I can say is, the next time the Dems are in charge, I don’t want to hear any “look forward, not back” crap. There’d better be a reckoning this time.
They can look at themselves in the mirror because at least no fetuses are being taken away. And at least none of the kids that are being snatched away are white. Brown kids don’t get traumatized liked white kids do.
Definitely. I’m preparing a huge stockpile of laughs for whoever complains about the lack of bipartisanship from now on, or anyone who says “well, look at how bad President SoAndSoAfterTrump is”. It’s difficult to even conceive of a future comparison worthy of bringing up.
To be fair the ACLU claimed there was thousands of incidents during Obama’s administration of beatings, sexual abuse, food and medical deprivation of minors. The ACLU doesn’t exactly strike me as liars in this regard.
I’m not a big fan of illegal immigration or even granting asylum to huge numbers of people because I just don’t think in the long-term we will be able to support all of them, and I don’t think it’s really our job to take care of the rest of the world.
That said I don’t think children should suffer like this for no reason and especially the idea of being separated from family I find abhorrent. It strikes me more as a problem of individual federal agents and I’m not sure how or if Obama addressed these alleged abuses, but it’s probably fair to say under Trump they will have free reign to do whatever they want. They probably need a total overhaul and thorough examination of the personnel working on the ground and make sure these are the right people for the job, it’s clear that there are a lot of sociopaths hurting people for no good reason. I doubt we will see any such attempts under Trump, and if anything he seems to be encouraging unchecked abuse, this is completely unacceptable, and as a guy who has fathered a whole bunch of children you would think on some level he would see this evil for what is is…
Maybe not so much. Short version: they’re only ‘lost’ in the sense that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), having placed them with a family, doesn’t know where they are now. But due to a memorandum of agreement between ORR and ICE earlier this month, if ORR knows where they are, so will ICE. If they were placed with undocumented relatives, the family they were placed with can be deported. For many of these kids, it’s probably best that they stay ‘lost’.
Since this is the pit, I do know that Hurricaneditka does think that the same separation takes place when guys committing crimes get arrested, and that we should not worry about the kids or the family that loses a parent or both, as in being “too bad” or that we as a society are not helping those kids.
So I knew that kids of refugees or undocumented are not able to see their accused parents for a long time, but many conservatives are very quick to play the inhuman card and tell themselves that worse things are fine. So to Ditka and others in GD or Elections you are inhuman bastards for forgetting that the kids, besides being removed from also seeing friends or other relatives, are put in many dangerous situations by the separation by the actions and disdain of the current administration.
The Federal bureaucracy is a big place, and being one small part of that bureaucracy, I can tell you that what we do usually doesn’t change much from one Administration to the next. Budgets are expanded or cut, priorities shift somewhat, but if you want the Executive Branch to be a thing that works, a President can’t change everything at once. He’s only got so much time and attention, and plenty of other battles to fight.
So are you saying this was a case of “Obama made this happen” or “this was something Obama didn’t fix”? Because in the case of the immigrant families being separated, we know this is a new policy that the Trump Administration is directly responsible for. They caused this change to happen.
I don’t either, but in many parts of the world, our actions helped cause a refugee crisis. Our invasion of Iraq displaced millions of families, at least in the short run. I don’t know how many of them eventually returned, but I think you can appreciate the reality that Iraq is still a net contributor to the refugee problem in that part of the world, rather than being in a position to absorb an influx of refugees from Syria.
Before that, of course, we were intervening in Central America with great regularity, and a lot of the problems there now are the repercussions of our actions down there during the 1980s.
Someone recently suggested that before we militarily intervene in some new corner of the globe, we ought to be polled on how many refugees we’re willing to take in when our involvement there goes bad.
Rick Santorum, that saintly family man, blames most of this on the sponsor families who haven’t bothered to communicate or check in regarding these kids, who aren’t really lost at all:
He blames the rest of it on the parents of the kids, naturally.
After the 2008 election, Obama gave the Bush Administration war criminals a free ride for their shit. The Trumpistas have been screaming about locking up the Clintons and Obamas since before the 2016 election.
If the next Democratic President does not have Trump and his people prosecuted for high treason, I shall be writing a very angry letter to the Times.
(1) Unaccompanied minors who entered the country illegally, were apprehended, and then placed with a sponsor can in some cases not be found by ORR. This is generally a good thing, in my opinion.
(2) Minors who entered the country illegally with their adult guardian(s), were apprehended, and then deliberately separated from their adult guardian(s). This is a bad thing.
(3) Conflating the two cases – talking about forcibly separated children who are now “lost,” by ORR, for example, as has been done in this thread – is a stupid thing that shows no understanding of the issues but an intense desire to signal how virtuous you are. Shut up.