I practice in child abuse and neglect cases very frequently in my state. If a parent commits a crime in the presence of his or her child, every judge that I know finds that to be child abuse and/or neglect because of the dangerous situation that the parent placed the child in. No, I’m not talking about speeding, but DUI, battery, shoplifting? Absolutely.
And yes, you do try to place the child with the other parent, but when there is no other parent or he/she cannot be located, the government does not place the child in the jail cell with the parent.
Just to be clear that we are talking in many cases about women who have a well-founded fear of persecution based on domestic violence:
[According to a 2011 study, El Salvador has the highest rate of femicide, or gender-motivated killing of women, in the world. Guatemala is third, and Honduras is close behind at sixth. These rates have been increasing precipitously in recent years.
And those are just the reported cases - as in many places, most cases of domestic violence are never reported because the victims don’t believe it makes a damn bit of difference to report domestic violence. And not without reason.
Why isn’t “catch and release” used to describe folks who commit any number of other offenses?
Hint
Xenophobia!
Oh, man. You gotta help me out here. Surely this is some next level Modest Proposal bullshit, suggesting that taking these children away from their parents is a kindness for the kids. The problem is that we live in a post-satirical age: it’s actually plausible that someone would say something so cruelly bonkers and mean it sincerely. So would you mind reassuring me that you meant that as satire?
Right. BUT THEY DON’T REMOVE THE CHILD FROM THE HOME, do they?
I say this because you might work in child abuse cases, but I work with plenty of kids whose parents are convicted of misdemeanors. The only times I’ve seen kids removed from the home was when the child abuse happening was far, far more severe: sexual abuse, for instance, or a case where the father regularly beat the children and mother and the mother helped him violate his no-contact court order.
The idea that this is similar to other cases is trivially disproven by the lack of tent cities for the children of tax cheats.
Right, but if a guy is sitting at his kitchen table on his laptop cheating on his taxes, the child is not aware of the crime and it does not harm him/her. If you take your child with you on a criminal adventure, like a DUI, or a shoplifting, or to beat the neighbor’s ass, you do indeed get the child taken away from you, or placed with a relative.
Since the relatives of these people crossing cannot be identified, then they need to be placed somewhere. Maybe, indeed, it should be with the parents. I just don’t understand why the strictures of humanity require such a thing when we separate children from their parents all of the time when these types of acts occur.
For how long? And why is desperately trying to bring your child into a country for a better life more analogous to going to beat up a neighbor than it is to cheating on taxes?
What on Earth are you talking about? The children’s relatives *are crossing with them.
ORR requires proof of family relationship before children are released to relatives, documentary or sometimes even DNA.
If anyone is interested in learning more about how Guatemala got as screwed-up as it is in the human rights department, I recommend this incredibly cheerful report. It actually reads pretty quickly if you can skim through all the NGO bureaucratese.
Interesting conjecture. Maybe so. So, say we offer the parents a deal. We take the kids, promise to do the best we can finding them homes, but guarantee that they get to stay. Permanent residents they don’t get to vote, but their kids would.
How many parents would take that deal, and give up their kids if they got to be Americans? Are they that desperate? Because if they are, to any significant degree…the nightmare is just beginning,
…is the correct way to separate children from their parents to tell the parent “we are taking your child for a bath” and then pop them on a plane and fly them across the country? And then when the parent asks “where is my child?” the response is “you are never going to see them again.”?
Because that is what is happening right now. And there has been no indication from the Trump administration that they will be changing the way that the people who are managing the situation do their jobs.
Lets stop fucking pretending that this is just an extension of how you normally do things. This is not fucking normal. This is not comparable with anything else in American society. It doesn’t work this way.
If you want to defend this policy you need to demand that things change. If you are happy with the separation policy as it stands then you need to demand that it happens in a humane manner first. We have reports that 16 year-olds are having to take care of 2 year-olds that are not related to them. Changing their diapers. There are reports of facilities with only 4 adults working in them. This is what you are defending.
We don’t know where the girls are. We don’t know where the infants are.
This is not a policy you want to be defending. You will be on the wrong side of history.
Blurb on tv says New Yorker prints that there are no procedures in place to keep track of which kids belong to which people. No planning was assigned or funded. Its improv.
Right, they place them in a cage (as described by the government) for seven weeks. That is how it works, right? This is your area of expertise – tell us about the cages you’ve seen for kids of parents who’ve been arrested.
No, really, fill us in. When a three year old witnesses their father cheating on his taxes, what cage is the kid put in for seven weeks? I’m sure you have cites handy. This is exactly the same, right?
I’m stunned there are people defending this. Just stunned.
I had no direct knowledge that they were “just making stuff up.” But my “chaos theory of everything” predicted it. And I have a few predictions about where things are gonna go, but they are to depressing to post here at the moment. Suffice to say there is only one way to fix this: and that is to vote the bastards out.
Well, how about then the current situation? Where a cad of a ruler had planned to change current policy right after his election so it would result in the abuse of many children? (It may have been plausible to say that the administration did not know about the expected results, if they had apologised and changed the policy, instead, they are doubling down; that is why I do say that they expected and want the results that we all are seeing)
And yes it is abuse. And the main perpetrator can fix this, but he is not doing so.
And therefore those relatives are suspected of committing the same crime as the parent and are not eligible to have custody.
I understand that the motives are pure, just like a poor parent shoplifting a loaf of bread. But it remains against the law to enter this country without a proper visa. As much as some would like to open the borders to all, that is not the law, and if parents are suspected of violating the law, they go to jail, and the kids don’t go with them…just as is done to U.S. citizens.
One more question: are you sincere in your analogy here? I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and to recognize that folks can see things differently–but you’re ignoring such a huge question (hint: people arrested for shoplifting generally don’t spend the night in jail, so the separation is short; deportation hearings average more than a year), that it’s very difficult for me to continue to give you the benefit of the doubt here.
Wyeth Ruthven has a publicly-shared Facebook post. I’m putting it here, since I can’t figure out how to create a direct link to it; then I’ll report it in case it’s not kosher to do so (I think it is, given the public nature of the post, though).
Again, people charged with misdemeanors like shoplifting, are often unable to post bond. Illegal immigrants are not good candidates for a low bond.
Further, if people are caught shoplifting with their children present, they are likely to have an abuse and neglect petition filed against them where the state takes the children pending court proceedings to remediate the parent’s further commission of crimes with the child.
I must say, if there were ever to be a Netflix film based on Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden, the statement above would definitely be apart of it. It’s the same statement white folks said about Native Americans before white folks slaughtered them. It’s the same statement white folks said about African-Americans before they enslaved (discriminated, lynched, medically experimented, terrorized, and mass incarcerated) them. It’s the same statement white folks said about Japanese Americans before they pushed them off into concentration camps. And it’s also the same statement white folks are using to separate asylum seekers and their children. Morally, nothing has changed since 1818.
Trump? Girl, please. White folks racism is like a nimbus of blazing, orange fire straight out of Dragonball Z (anime alert). Far as I’m concerned, if white folks want to vote Trump in for another 4 years to deliberately isolate this country from the rest of the world, then that’s all good with me. You want to know why? Because America can stop trying to say “we’re not racist”, “we’re a force for good”, or my favorite “we elected Obama, so we’re not racist”. It’s all lies and bullshit. White folks deliberately elected a man bragged about sexual assault and affirmed that his daughter was a “piece of ass”. That’s two strikes right there. Third strike was in Alabama, where the majority white folks deliberately and overwhelmingly supported a pedophile. No one is taking white folks serious anymore, even the North Koreans got white folks stop the military exercises for . . . a signed piece of a paper and a photo-op. But I digress. You’ll never see me hate on Trump, ever: he’s doing a good job representing white folks, which is precisely why Trump enjoys a plurality of their support.