Trump’s Mistreatment of Migrant Children Reaches New Lows
On This Day In 2018
Trump’s personal disdain for immigrants was well documented. Then, once he had the chance to re-mold the government in his own image, we began to learn just how awful his policies could be for so many of them.
In Sept 2018, The NYT published an astonishing report. It revealed that OTDI 2018, and in the preceding weeks, hundreds of migrant children had been taken from shelters across the country, in the dark of night, and shipped to a barren tent city in the desert of West Texas. No parents. No school. And how long would they be there? No one could say.
Many of them were minors who had crossed the border by themselves; others had been separated from their parents by the government--and the parents had been deported. “The moves are carried out late at night because children will be less likely to try to run away. For the same reason, children are generally given little advance warning that they will be moved,” noted the NYT.
As California Senator Kamala Harris noted:
This followed another report that, for the second time in a year, the Trump Administration had lost track of about 1,500 children who had been forcibly separated from their parents. Even a Republican senator was astounded.
"The fact that HHS…doesn't know the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 of them is very troubling," said Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH). "Many of these kids are vulnerable to trafficking and abuse, and to not take responsibility for their safety is unacceptable."
The problem grew worse. When the number of migrant children in U.S. immigration custody had risen to nearly 14,000, Trump’s intentions were no longer something he could hide: “They can say it’s just to vet; but (actually) it’s to target parents and to put fear on immigrant families,” said Sophia Gregg, an attorney for Legal Aid Justice Center, told CNN.
The number of children getting detained would eventually exceed 100,000 annually. And many of those detentions came after a judge ordered the Trump Administration to stop doing this.
Editorial note: We heard from an “undecided” friend recently that it’s completely reasonable for the government to abduct children from “criminal” migrants. After all, when American adults commit crimes in this country they get forcibly separated from their children too, right? And isn’t illegally entering the country a crime…by definition?
It is our view that many “undecideds” resort to tortured and incomplete reasoning like that to try to appear “evenhanded” or “intellectual” about today’s American political scene. It is our view that those people are…trying too hard. It may be easy to simply state “Trump is awful for literally hundreds of reasons.” But here, as is often the case, the easy way is the correct way. 😊
Btw 1) Melania Trump was once an illegal immigrant to this country too. (But Barron was not taken from her and trucked to Texas, as he hadn’t been born yet.)
Btw 2) these articles detail the "record number" of migrants who were coming across the border. These records, of course, were smashed during the Trump Administration. Keep that in mind the next time you hear Trump complain about "Kamala Harris' numbers." Remember also that the current flow is now lower than in Trump's peak times.
Dive Deeper
Note: This pic was snapped by fellow House member Jackie Speier. She has recently retired from national politics after a lengthy and occasionally tragic career in DC--and is returning to the same elected position in local politics she first held 45 years prior.
The NYT has the story on migrant children being uprooted under cover of darkness
CBS News reports on nearly 1,500 separated children unaccounted for
CNN reports on record number of migrant children in US custody