According to your site: “If no one is available to take responsibility for the child, the airline may have to turn over the child to the local authorities”
Would it similarly be kidnapping if local authorities held the kids until a parent or guardian showed up?
What about if the airline held the kids until a parent or guardian showed up? Would that be kidnapping?
Did you read the post you are citing?
The airlines are acting in loco parentis, i.e. they are making the decisions in lieu of the parents. It’s not kidnapping, because the parents have explicitly put their kids in the hands of the airlines.
If the airline held the kids until the parent (or duly notarized alternate) showed up, that’s precisely their responsibility and something that should be outlined in their corporate policy before the parents put their kids in the hands of the airline.
ETA: If the airline held the kids in violation of their own policies, well, yes, that could be construed as kidnapping. The point is, there’s a procedure involved, and there’s no reasonable world in which CBP should be inserting themselves in that process.
More than zero, the number of desperate parents who have gotten their children over the border, and then “abandoned” them to the care and comfort of America. Which is better than MS-13 pimps and gangs. How many more than zero, when one is too many?
Cry, the beloved country.
I’m pretty sure that it’s reasonable for law enforcement and other similar agencies to hold children until their parents show up. I’m pretty sure that happens across the country thousands of times per day. I don’t see a lot of headlines similar to “Local police kidnap children until their parents show up to get them” or “Principal holds child hostage until parents arrive at school”
I personally don’t see much difference between an airline holding kids until a parent shows up, or CBP holding them until a parent shows up.
Ever since 9/11 this whole country has been in military mode. Military at the airports. Military at border crossings. Militarized police forces in cities across the country.
My guess is that the children were travelling with an adult, and the airline just let them leave the plane like they do with every other passenger. Then all 4 of them went do the CBP checkpoint without any airline representatives, because they didn’t need any.
Once they got there, CBP determined somehow that the adult couldn’t enter the country. Now, the kids are there without any airline representative nor adult to go with them. At this point, what is CBP supposed to do? Let them go on their way at 3 AM? Call the airline? Call the parents? I think it’s perfectly reasonable for CBP to try and contact the parents of the children and have them come pick the kids up and have the kids wait there until the parent shows up. I have absolutely no idea why the Mexican Consulate would be involved in 3 American Citizen children waiting for a parent or guardian to pick them up.
You mean, like a passport and a valid visa for entry?
I don’t think the bolded part applies to this situation, tho, and that’s why it’s a problem: CBP would not release the kids to a guardian, only the parents… who happened to be people they were trying to apprehend. They used the kids as bait; there was no actual concern for the welfare of the children.
“Come get your kids… If you dare”
This isn’t something that’s just happening. Trump and his administration knowingly made choices which are causing the family break-ups. So they bear the moral responsibility for the consequences of their choices.
As you note, there are circumstances where a child must be separated from their parents. So the question we should be asking in those circumstances is whether the separation is justified. Is there a sufficiently good reason to require us to take the step of breaking up a family. And in this case, there is not. Having crossed the border illegally in the past is not a big enough crime that it justified harming children.
Finally, there’s the issue of doing harmful things in the least harmful way; when you have to do something bad, you do it in the way that is least bad. The Trump administration has failed at this. They knew that they were going to be rounding up thousands of people but they failed to make plans on how they were going to hold all those people in adequate conditions. They knew they were going to be taking children into custody but they failed to make plans on how they would adequately care for those children. They knew they would be separating children from their families but they failed to make plans for how they would keep track of which children were part of which family. (It’s called fingerprinting and it’s 19th century technology.) And knowing that they we’re ready, the Trump administration went ahead with the round up anyway.
Normal people understand all this is wrong. But to put it in terms a conservative can understand, it’s like back in the nineties when you people claimed that the Clinton administration was going to lock people up in camps. Except this is real.
In 2017, CBP was checking IDs of every passenger getting off a domestic flight.
They were sued by the ACLU, and no longer do that. But it just shows how far they will go to test the public’s willingness to submit to authoritarian tactics.
I tried to find out what documentation the guardians who showed up had, but that type of detail is scarce.
As far as bait, I’m not seeing it. When do you think this trap was set up? 3 US Citizens show up at CBP, and then CBP somehow knows that their mother is here illegally, and then decide right then and there to set a trap to lure an illegal immigrant to the airport so they can arrest her?
Thank you for this impassioned response that has absolutely nothing to do with the story at hand.
They were with their aunt.
To give us a pause in the great child debate, I give you for your shock and amusement, Trump meeting with 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad in the Oval Office:
As one viewer commented : “What’s really appalling is the look on his face after she explains this to him. Then, when she’s done, he cheerfully pipes up “and you got a Nobel Prize?” The pained look on her face when he chirps that is hard to watch. He simply lacks the part of the brain capable of empathy.”
July 19, 2019
The Individual 1 administration floated the possibility of admitting zero refugees next year during a recent meeting with officials from the Department of Homeland Security, State Department, the Pentagon and other agencies, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
Oh hell, that was no debate. Thanks for shaking it up!
Their aunt was denied entry. So yes, they would have been sent on their way at 3 AM without a parent or guardian.
Yeah, that sudden look of pain mixed with disbelief, disappointment, confusion and some more pain on top is truly haunting. Especially in juxtaposition with Trump’s “yes, yes, uh-uh, yadda yadda” expression.
ETA : that was in reply to CalMeacham’s post obviously
So convenient that their aunt was denied entry.