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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFirst they separated families. Now they're incarcerating children. - Washington Post Edit. Board
By Editorial Board
September 7 at 7:49 PM
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ripped more than 2,600 migrant children from their parents arms with no plan or procedures for reuniting them, resulting in some 500 children remaining effectively orphaned even today, five months after the fact. Now it proposes a new policy for jailing migrant children indefinitely, one that ensures they are treated with dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors.
That assurance, along with its rich irony, is offered by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has proposed the policy in a brazen attempt to escape the strictures of a two-decade-old court settlement forbidding the long-term incarceration of minors who cross the border seeking asylum in the United States.
Ms. Nielsen, who was instrumental in executing the zero-compassion policy that traumatized so many toddlers, grade-schoolers, tweens and teens this spring and summer, now would have Americans believe her department recognizes children as particularly vulnerable human beings, deserving of dignity and respect. How will that dignity and respect be meted out when those children are confined, along with their parents, in long-term detention facilities that the administration now proposes to build?
Ms. Nielsen, along with immigration hard-liners such as White House adviser Stephen Miller, are convinced that so-called catch-and-release policies are largely to blame for the flow of families across the southern border. Among the factors contributing to those policies is the 1997 court agreement known as Flores, which arose from abundant evidence that migrant children had been harmed by long-term detention, and forbade it.
The reality is that Flores has been in effect for more than 20 years, during which migrant flows have dipped and surged. When the Trump administration tried, just a few months ago, to amend the Flores agreement to permit long-term detention of families, U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee rejected its argument that the agreement was to blame for a recent surge in border crossings. Any number of other factors could have caused the increase in illegal border crossings, including civil strife, economic degradation, and fear of death in the migrants home countries, the judge wrote.
The administrations proposal sets up a new court fight, one that will test Homeland Securitys risible insistence that the new policy would satisfy the basic purpose of the Flores agreement while freeing the government to get tougher on migrants. The basic purpose of Flores was to protect children from harm; confining them defeats that mandate.
It is legitimate to take concrete steps to ensure that migrant families appear in immigration court when ordered to do so. Ankle bracelet monitors, bail and other means of achieving that have been effective, and their use can be expanded. Whats less effective, and at odds with American values, is the administrations abiding faith in punitive measures where children are concerned. Theres no evidence that they work to cut illegal border-crossing; theres plenty of evidence of their cruelty.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/first-they-separated-families-now-theyre-incarcerating-children/2018/09/07/affedb90-b21b-11e8-aed9-001309990777_story.html
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,043 posts)lark
(23,156 posts)His top 4 donors (minus Russia) were given the contracts and are being paid $700/day to torture, cage & drug babies and children. The babies & children don't get sufficient food, don't have enough room to move, and are kept freezing cold and given only thin "space blankets". They have been killed and raped while in custody and nothing changes. They never intended to reunite them and what they actually did intend is a mystery. Did they want slaves, sex slaves, or sellling the pretty children to donors? They obviously wanted to destroy them out of racial hatred, but what were their intentions then? What are their intentions now? Now I think they just want to profit from the caging, torturing & drugging and have already counted their money and refuse to let it go. So now they are trying to con the courts into permitting their child abuse with page after page of total lies. I really hope the courts won't go along with this and still want them to find the government in contempt and put Sessions and Neilsen in jail. Come on, it's the least they deserve. They really should be jailed for torture & kidnapping.