The Biden Administration Continues Its Daunting Task of Reuniting Families Subjected to Trump-era Immigration Crimes
The daunting task continues amid all the other messes the Biden administration and congressional Democrats have to clean up, as they always do after a republican administration leaves the White House.
Photo by Metin Ozer on Unsplash
On his first day in office, President Biden sent Congress a bill creating for undocumented individuals a pathway to citizenship, signed a memorandum directing the Homeland Security secretary to protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and an executive order repealing “the former guy,” Donald Trump’s, Muslim ban.
A month later, Biden ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to review Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), commonly known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and issued an executive order to create a task force for the purpose of reunifying families separated at the US-Mexico border under the Trump administration’s 2018 “zero tolerance” policy.
By mid-August last year, the Biden administration successfully reunited almost 400 children torn away from more than 5,000 families, on whom the Trump administration kept no records.
More than 600 children have been reunited to date.
There are, however, still about 1,000 yet to be located, many Central American migrants, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
According to HuffPost, 148 children are presently engaged in the reunification process and 183 families have been contacted to be reconnected.
Even though it isn’t a new issue, “The Border” has become one of those terms right-wing hate media and their sycophantic republican lawmakers exploit to promote coded racism and concomitant xenophobia against brown-skinned economic and climate refugees.
Why else would we not hear a thing about the 50,000 undocumented Irish immigrants living here?
Separating children from their families is not unique to the Trump administration either. Just read the turn-of-the-twentieth century short story by Maude Eaton, aka Sui Sin Far, “In the Land of the Free,” wherein a Chinese immigrant family confronts the 1882 “Chinese Exclusion Act” when American immigration officials place their young son in an orphanage until his parents produce the payment necessary to get him back.
We also forcibly placed Native American children in “Christian re-education” schools, and are just now beginning to reckon with it.
Immigration is, of course, what made America, and using it as a political cudgel is as American as the Statue of Liberty and the Grand Canyon.
But this does not mean the lies and white-washed history surrounding it should be perpetuated.
It’s typical on the right to hear, “Obama separated families too.”
Even if the Obama administration had done it, it would still have been wrong.
Except Obama didn’t do it.
Hours before signing the order to rescind the family separation policy in 2018, Trump defended it, claiming the Obama and Bush administrations also practiced it:
This has been going on for 50 years — longer. This has been going on under President Obama, under President Bush, this has been going on for many many years. We are gonna see if we can solve it. This is not something that happened just now.
While technically true, it is misleading.
According to Vox:
It’s not that no family was ever separated at the border under the Obama administration. But former Obama administration officials specify that families were separated only in particular circumstances — for instance, if a father was carrying drugs — that went above and beyond a typical case of illegal entry…We don’t know how often that happened, but we know it was not a widespread or standard practice…Both presidents prosecuted many border crossers. But Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy created family separation.
Migration Policy Institute policy analyst, Sarah Pierce, commented:
Bush and Obama did not have policies that resulted in the mass separation of parents and children like we’re seeing under the current administration.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is unable to point to statistics regarding the number of children the Obama administration supposedly separated from their parents.
While we can argue we have always, in some manner, treated certain immigrants poorly, the Trump-era policy was unique in that it sought to outpace previous anti-immigrant policies in cruelty.
Back in 2018, Donald Trump’s senior adviser and immigration policy architect, Stephen Miller, pronounced to Trump administration senior officials that not enforcing the “zero tolerance” immigration policy “is the end of our country as we know it,” and opposing it would be “un-American.”
Simply, the child separation policy was a feature, not a bug.
It was the backbone of the Trump immigration stance.
Within the ensuing two years, Trump administration’s war on immigrants perpetrated the following crimes against humanity:
Created a phony university to entice undocumented immigrants;
Suggested fortifying Trump’s racist border wall with a snake- or alligator-infested moat (after suggesting CBP shoot migrants in the legs);
Refused to inoculate detained migrant families from deadly diseases;
Ended deportation deferrals for immigrants suffering from serious medical conditions like cancer and HIV;
Administered DNA testing to identify migrants posing as families;
Disqualified legal immigrants relying on public assistance for green card eligibility;
Committed what the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics characterized as “government-sanctioned child abuse”;
Transferred $9.8 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) disaster relief budget to ICE for more migrant detention camps;
Engaged in nasally force-feeding at least half a dozen detainees engaged in hunger strikes;
Penned hundreds behind chain-link razor wire fencing, forcing them to sleep on the ground in a temporary outdoor detention camp;
Threatened to deport international university students enrolled in online classes, forcing many of them to opt for in-person instruction amid the COVID-19 pandemic;
Proposed denying green cards or visas to immigrants who rely on public benefits like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, Medicaid, and Section-8 housing;
Subjected women detained in the private prison company LaSalle Corrections-owned Irwin County detention center in Georgia to involuntary hysterectomies;
Ordered psychotherapists to submit confidential session notes to Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), which then used the information against children in immigration court to deny asylum status and deport them.
Interestingly, many of the same people clutching their pearls over brown-skinned migrants seeking asylum supposedly through “open borders” are the same extolling ICE.
If our borders are “open,” what are all those agents doing?
Have we ever heard a single Democrat announce the “border is open”?
No.
Because the border is not, has never been, “open.”
There is no evidence of people just “walking across our border.”
Like “out-of-control crime in democrat-run cities,” “democrat policies gave us out-of-control inflation,” “gas prices are all Biden’s fault,” and anything about “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” the “open borders” lie is another cynical ploy republicans have made their stock in trade to distract information-starved Americans from how badly the wealthy and corporations are picking their pockets.
But before we dismiss it as simply more mendacious red meat to the right-wing hate media crowd, we need to consider its intent.
“Open borders” isn’t just a panic-inducing rallying cry.
It’s a strategy republican politicians employ to increase presence at the Southern border during Democratic administrations.
It just so happens we’re likely to hear it the most right around election time.
In the months leading up to the 2016 election, Fox so-called “news” was all in a tizzy over the “migrant caravan.”
It was again just before the 2018 mid-term elections (and then dropped it the day after election day.)
And 2014.
And 2012.
And 2010.
It happened also during Bill Clinton’s tenure in 1994 and 98.
Why the sudden “border crisis” only when Democrats are in office?
It’s because the republican “open borders” lie gets amplified across social media and the internet in Mexico and Central America, leading to unassuming asylum seekers and those just taking advantage of our “free-trade” looking for work to believe Democratic administrations have “opened” the border to them when they haven’t.The first few months of the Biden administration, the right-wing Washington Examiner engaged in a quest to find a single Democrat advertising an open border.
Guess how many it found.
None.
The closest it came was WV Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema calling the situation on our Southern border “a crisis.”
A Michigan member of the House used the word “surge” when referring to immigration at the border.
A Democratic Texas mayor said it was a crisis.
Not a single one, nor any other Democrat, spoke the dreaded two words: OPEN BORDER.
Republicans, though…
They know how to stay on message, even if that message is complete BS.
In fact, republicans are so committed to securing our borders, a grand total of two voted to increase funding for it in a recent House bill.
191 voted against it while 227 Democrats voted for it.
The daunting task continues amid all the other messes the Biden administration and congressional Democrats have to clean up, as they always do after a republican administration leaves the White House.
What Trump did should be a prosecuted as a crime against humanity.