If you can measure the moral fiber of a nation by how it treats children and the vulnerable, then its easy to see that the United States under Donald Trump has shed any moral leadership it once carried.
News and images coming out of Border Patrol detention facilities over the last few weeks show heartbreaking images of parents, searching for a better life than the violence of drug gangs who feed American addictions, being forcibly separated from children as young as just a few months old. We see pictures of small children locked in cages inside warehouses, sleeping on hard floors and not being allowed sunlight and space to move.
This, put simply, is highly immoral. What we as a nation are doing to these people and these children is evil and goes against human nature, not to mention, against God.
And, lest we be fooled that these actions are “inevitable” or “necessary,” remember that, prior to recently, we did not do this. Under Donald Trump, the Border Patrol has been empowered to change policy to ensure these kinds of inhumane actions are taken as some sort of sick, soulless deterrent in order to maintain some xenophobic and racist war against the growing reality of a more black and brown America.
Typically, people apprehended crossing into the US are held in immigration detention and sent before an immigration judge to see if they will be deported as unauthorized immigrants.
But migrants who’ve been referred for criminal prosecution get sent to a federal jail and brought before a federal judge a few weeks later to see if they’ll get prison time. That’s where the separation happens — because you can’t be kept with your children in federal jail…
First-time border crossers don’t usually do prison time. After a few weeks in jail awaiting trial, they’re usually brought before a judge in mass assembly-line prosecutions (according to Lomi Kriel of the Houston Chronicle, one courtroom in McAllen, Texas, has been hearing 1,000 cases a day in recent weeks) and sentenced, within minutes, to time served — as long as they plead guilty. “
Again, this is a conscious choice we are making, to separate children from their parents and house them like animals. And, our Border Patrol is doing it in the most immoral and cruelest ways possible. Lind notes that agents lie to families to get them to hand over their children, assuring the parents they are being taken to a bath or to answer a few questions, and then never being brought back. Can you even imagine? Being a parent, having your child taken from you?
Newsweek reports that, in the past, the Border Patrol has even be accused of physically and sexually assaulting child immigrants who enter their care. This treatment is being meted out to children feeling countries like Nicarauga and Honduras, which have some of the highest rates of murder in the world, and Mexico, which has been wracked by intense violence between drug gangs.
Even some asylum seekers, fleeing violence in Central America, and presenting themselves at border crossings – not, it should be understood, illegally crossing, but instead giving themselves up legally to border agents in the hope they will be given relief from the violence of their home countries – even these people are being separated from their children and criminally prosecuted. Prosecuted, jailed, and families destroyed, all because they want a better, more stable, less violent life in a nation they have been told is the greatest on the planet, but which is proving itself to be anything but. This is not only despicable and cruel, it violates both American and international law that protects refugees.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal got the opportunity to meet with some of the asylum seeking mothers who had been separated from children. This is what she encountered:
I met with 174 women, in three different pods. I went from one pod to the next. The vast majority were Spanish speaking, but there was a group of Chinese speakers and some others. We had a Spanish interpreter. The women would all answer at once sometimes. I did a lot of “raise your hand” questions. “How many are asylum seekers?” The majority lifted up their hands.
Thirty to 40 percent of these women came with children who had been forcibly taken away from them. None got a chance to say goodbye to their children—they were forcibly taken away. One said she was deceived, because they were in detention together. Then the CBP officers told her she was going out to get her photograph taken. When she came back, she was put in a different room, and she never got to see the child again. Some of them said they could hear their children screaming for them in the next room. The children ranged anywhere from one to teenagers.
One of the mothers told me DHS officers threatened to take away her 6-year-old daughter, right in front of them, and her daughter started screaming. She was separated from her daughter on the second day of custody and hasn’t had contact in over a week. But in some ways, she was one of the lucky ones, because her daughter was placed with family in Los Angeles.
Another woman came from Guatemala with her children, 8 and 12. Her husband was in prison for raping a 12-year-old child, and he was coming out. She was afraid her children would be raped either by him or some of his fellow gang members. She had been separated from her two children, she didn’t know where they were.
Another woman came fleeing gang violence, she had a 14-year-old child killed nine months ago. Another child in a wheelchair, paralyzed in a gang shooting. So she came with her third child, just to get one of them to safety.
Another woman came with her two sons, 11 and 16—for whatever reason, her older son is going to be reunited with his father in Virginia, but the younger son is staying in custody, which is crazy.
This is government by cruelty at its peak. This is the form of governing wished for and chosen by the conservative movement in America, a form of government that institutionalizes cruel and inhumane treatment of the least and the last. Donald Trump is the embodiment of the pure conservative Id, cruel and malicious and heartless, and anything but Christian, fed a steady diet of Fox News and culture war anger and racist fear mongering against everyone different, even babies and children who had nothing more than the bad luck to be born on the wrong side of an invisible, arbitrary line.
The Bible is unequivocal about how we are to treat the stranger and the immigrant. Exodus says, “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child.” And Jesus himself, in the Gospel of Matthew, tells his disciples, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.” Jesus himself was an immigrant and a refugee, fleeing violence in his home country by going to Egypt with his parents. Even the Egyptians were not so cruel as to separate the baby Jesus from his mother. Do we really want to be on the side of Herod?
Our moral obligation is clear: we are to treat immigrants as we would treat ourselves, because they are human beings, worthy of all the dignity, respect, and love we can muster. What we are doing, as a nation, is far from that. What we are doing to these families is cruel, inhumane, immoral, and goes against God. We are failing, as a nation and as human beings. May we wake up from this nightmare we have become soon.
Justin DaMetz 