June 13, 2018
Page 13
O PINION
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Stop Piling Children into Immigration Detention
Trump harms
children to scare
parents
p eter C erto
Most morn-
ings lately, I’ve
woken up to two
things. First I
hear my toddler,
sounding off that
it’s time to get
up. Then I see the news stories
about other toddlers our immigra-
tion authorities ripped away from
their parents.
For weeks, I’ve felt the gnaw-
ing need to write something, any-
thing, about it. But God, where
even to begin?
First, there are the stories. The
Congolese asylum seeker who
heard her six-year-old scream
“Don’t take me away from my
mommy!” and couldn’t reach
her. The woman forced to put her
18-month-old in a car seat in an
ICE van, the door slamming shut
before she could even say good-
bye. The man who hasn’t seen his
son in six months.
by
Then there are the photos. The
rows of children sleeping on thin
mats behind chain-linked fences.
The kids being led by guards to
make phone calls, hands tied
behind their backs. The prison
van full of infant car seats.
These are just the earliest
fruits of the Trump adminis-
tration’s ghastly new pledge to
prosecute every last undocu-
mented immigrant who cross-
es our border. If they have their
children with them, the kids are
seized and warehoused in some
overflowing detention facility.
The New York Times counted
over 700 kids who’d been sepa-
rated from their parents this way
from October to April. But in the
first two weeks of May alone,
authorities disclosed that they’d
taken nearly 700 more — an as-
tonishingly rapid increase. The
ACLU puts the second wave at
1,000 over five weeks.
Already the warehouses are
filling up, leaving authorities to
prepare holding pens on military
bases for the inevitable overflow.
In theory, the children should
be released to other family mem-
bers within 72 hours. But with the
administration essentially threat-
ening to deport any undocument-
ed caretakers who come forth to
claim them, more and more chil-
dren are languishing in cells for
months. NBC reported recently
that over half the kids currently
detained had been held past the
limit, and that half of those were
under 12.
“It appears we’re setting up a
long-term incarceration system
for children,” a former immigra-
tion official told VICE. Children
whose only crime was having
parents who tried to take them to
safety.
The jackboots orchestrating
this plot openly admit they’re
willing to harm children to scare
off parents.
“If you don’t want your child
separated, then don’t bring them
across the border illegally,” men-
aced Attorney General Jeff Ses-
sions. “A big name of the game
is deterrence,” chimed in Trump
chief of staff John Kelly, who
promised the captured children
“will be put into foster care — or
whatever.”
The administration isn’t just
arresting ordinary migrants. It’s
also arresting asylum seekers who
legally present themselves at ports
of entry — people fleeing war,
crime, and trauma few Americans
could understand — and taking
their kids, too.
These detention facilities are no
place for kids. Even going back
to the Obama era, immigration
agents have been reported raping,
beating, and threatening kids in
their care. When U.S. Senator Jeff
Merkley tried to inspect a holding
site this month, operators locked
him out and called the police.
What were they hiding?
The United Nations has warned
these detentions constitute “a
child rights violation” and should
be “halted immediately.” Sen. Di-
anne Feinstein has introduced a
bill to end family separations for
asylum seekers, while Senator
Kamala Harris and Rep. Pramila
Jayapal want to halt the expansion
of new detention facilities.
Those would be welcome steps.
But if you ask the dad in me, they
should shut down the whole agency.
Peter Certo is the editorial
manager of the Institute for Policy
Studies and the editor of Other-
Words.org.
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