According to a report from the New York Times, the mean motherfuckers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have given the Trump administration’s evil plan to separate parents from children caught at the U.S./Mexico border the green light. “The forceful move is meant to discourage border crossings, but immigrant groups have denounced it as draconian and inhumane”:
Under current policy, families are kept intact while awaiting a decision on whether they will be deported; they are either held in special family detention centers or released with a court date. The policy under discussion would send parents to adult detention facilities, while their children would be placed in shelters designed for juveniles or with a “sponsor,” who could be a relative in the United States, though the administration may also tighten rules on sponsors.
This cruel and horrific plan has the fingerprints of the ghoulish Stephen Miller and John Kelly all over it. Kelly first proposed the plan when he was Department of Homeland Security secretary, but then backed off it following outcry from members of Congress and immigrant rights advocates. With Kelly now wielding power over the White House and his handpicked successor in his old job, the plan may come back like a white supremacist zombie that just won’t die:
The policy is favored by the White House, and has been approved by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to three officials at the Department of Homeland Security and one at the White House who have all been briefed on the proposal but declined to be named because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The officials said that the new Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, who has final approval power, has yet to sign off on the proposal.
With thousands of families fleeing for their lives to our border annually—many are Central American families escaping gang violence and some of the worst murder rates in the world—advocates say there are already 150 documented cases of parents and children being separated. “It interferes with due process, and is really just cruel,” said Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice. “Children feel that they are being abandoned, literally being ripped out of their parents’ arms.”
Contrary to anti-immigrant fear mongering from Donald Trump and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, families don’t try to evade Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. In fact, after making the dangerous journey north, families fleeing violence for the safety of the U.S. surrender themselves to border agents. These vulnerable people are seeking refuge, but instead, have been getting torn apart:
One of those parents, José Fuentes, presented himself to immigration officers at the border, along with his 1-year-old son Mateo, to claim asylum in November. The family had fled El Salvador with a caravan of asylum seekers because of gang violence, said Mr. Fuentes’s wife, Olivia Acevedo.
After four days of being held in custody together, Mr. Fuentes was transferred to a detention facility more than 1,000 miles away, in San Diego, Calif., while their son was held in a facility for children in Laredo, Tex.
For six days afterward, Ms. Acevedo said, she, her husband and their lawyers could not confirm where Mateo was. They were terrified. “Can you imagine?” she said in Spanish in a telephone interview from Mexico, where she remains with the couple’s other son, Andrée, who is 4. “It’s inhuman to take a baby from its parents.”
Prior administrations have also struggled with how to deter families coming to the border, but it’s the Trump administration’s diabolical attempt to further traumatize families who have made this treacherous journey north that is truly evil. Implementing the new policy proposal "could create lifelong psychological trauma," Marielena Hincapie, executive director at the National Immigration Law Center, said about Kelly’s initial attempt to implement this policy. "Especially for children that have just completed a perilous journey from Central America."