By Will
Weatherly in Rhode Island’s Future
Sen. Jack
Reed and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse renounced
the Trump administration’s separation
of immigrant families at the U.S.-Mexico
border during a meeting of immigration advocates, community
leaders, and pediatricians at Dorcas
International Institute of Rhode Island on Monday.
Both senators
have announced their support for the Keep
Families Together Act, introduced by California
Senator Dianne Feinstein, which seeks to put an end to a practice widely
critiqued as irreparably destructive for undocumented families and violently
traumatic for undocumented minors.
Border and customs
officials forcibly tear children away from their parents as a result of arrests
of undocumented immigrants crossing the border.
Those children are then
transported to “sponsors” within the country or detention centers, in many
cases thousands of miles away, and within facilities as
decrepit as the boarded-up Walmart Texas Senator
Jeff Merkley tried (and failed) to enter in Brownsville, Texas on June
3.
Trump’s family separation policy was drafted as an attempt to deter a growing number of undocumented immigrants crossing the border since last November, as first reported by the Washington Post.
It
has since led to a 40 percent surge in deportation arrests, with the Trump
administration racing to support an exponential increase in detainees.
The
White House has sought to fund more than 51,000 additional beds for detention
centers, and has started sending more than 1,600 undocumented immigrants to federal prisons in the lack of other available
accommodations.
The New York Times reported on April 20 that over 700 children had
been separated from their families by border officials since October of last
year.
On May 7, President Trump announced a “zero tolerance policy,” in which
every immigrant crossing the border—including those seeking asylum—will be
arrested and prosecuted for entering the country illegally.
The Times reported on June 8 that more than 50,000
individuals were arrested at the border last month alone.
The Keep Families
Together Act would allow enforced familial separation “only in the event they
are being trafficked or abused by their parents.
To provide an additional layer
of protection, the bill provides for an immediate review by a superior upon the
recommendation to separate, and only after consultation with a child welfare
expert,” according to a description of the bill on Feinstein’s website.
A letter to the
president, signed by Reed and Whitehouse along with 38 other senators, urged,
“Your Administration’s decision to separate children from their parents at the
border is cruel, unnecessary, and goes against our values as Americans.”
The letter also cited
new attempts on the part of the Trump administration to make the placement of
seized immigrant children with sponsors more difficult, such as a recent
memorandum mandating that ICE perform
background checks on those sponsoring children, as described in this Mother Jones interview with an expert on
immigrant detention.
These new tactics, the letter argued, “raise serious
concerns.”
A press release sent
from Reed’s office highlighted the traumatic psychic and medical harm caused by
forced separation and detention of children.
It cites a statement from the
American Academy of Pediatrics, which asserted that practices of violently
isolating children from their families “contradicts everything we stand for as
pediatricians — protecting and promoting children’s health.
In fact, highly
stressful experiences can cause irreparable harm, disrupting a child’s brain
architecture and affecting his or her short and long-term health.”
The senators’
announcement coincided with U.S. Attorney
General Jeff Sessions’ decision to overturn asylum protections for
victims of domestic violence and gang-related violence, on the basis that both
groups do not pertain to membership in a “particular
social group” as stipulated in asylum law.
In barring both,
Sessions utilized the attorney general’s almost total control of immigration
law and spurned multiple court precedents allocating “PSG” status to
both categories.
Against Sessions’
additional claim that both groups do not constitute persecuted parties, in a
strict skew of the term meaning that their governments “condoned” violence or
“demonstrated an inability” to protect those seeking asylum, one might point to the well-documented link between
government-sponsored trade deals with Mexico and Central American countries,
including the connections the prominent U.S.-backed North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) and both gang violence and forced migration.
This
stipulation, while not exactly framed in Sessions’ own language, can provide an
illuminating view into our government’s participation in both forms of
violence.
“Many of the children
and families arriving at our Southwest border have escaped horrific violence
and persecution in their home countries,” the letter to the president read.
“The decision to use this separation tactic as a ‘deterrent’ is not only
frighteningly callous, but demonstrates willful ignorance of the violence and
unlivable circumstances many families are risking their lives to escape.”
Will Weatherly
is a contributor to RI Future and a senior editor at the College Hill
Independent. He lives in Providence, RI. You can follow him on Twitter
@willbweatherly.