The good news is that just under 3,000 of the 4,000 children separated from their families by ex-President Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy at the southern U.S. border have been reunited. That policy was lambasted as cruel and inhumane by critics. It has taken years for government officials to reconnect relatives with their young children.
Nearly 1,000 children still need to be reunited with their relatives. It is the second anniversary of the task force created to help with the reunifications. Many of those kids are Central American migrantswho were separated from their parents at the border and placed in detention centers. That method was part of the Trump administration’s hardline approach to immigration and was meant to deter millions of migrants from seeking asylum in the US during his term in the White House.
“We understand that our critical work is not finished,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. “We remain steadfast in our commitment to fulfill President Biden’s pledge to reunify all children who were separated from their families under the ‘zero-tolerance’ policy to the greatest extent possible, and we continue to work diligently to incorporate the foundational principle of family unity in our policies and operations.”
“We have made significant progress toward reunifying families and providing them with necessary services and support,” the Dept of Homeland Security said. “This critical work will continue until all separated families that can be found have been provided the opportunity to reunify.”
My husband told me about this story several days ago. Of course, I do care. It is abominable what the US border policies have done in separating children from their natural parents. You can read the transcript at this LINK> NPR Investigation reveals how government bureaucracy failed to stop family separations with Ari Shapiro talking to The Atlanticimmigration reporter Caitlin Dickerson. The Atlantic also has the story, though I am not a subscriber and have used up all of my “free” article allowance. You can access that at this LINK> The Secret History of Family Separation or under this headline – “We Need To Take Away Children: The Secret History Of The U.S. Government’s Family Separation Policy.”
The Trump administration was known for immigration policies that were chaotic and extreme, yet even by that standard, family separation was in its own category. Kids as young as infants were removed from their parents at the border, more than 5,500 children total. Hundreds are still not reunited. Caitlin Dickerson chronicled those policies in real time, first for The New York Times and now for The Atlantic. And her latest cover story for The Atlantic is an exhaustive investigation into how the family separation policy came about.
Caitlin Dickerson says, “The Trump administration . . . was very focused on trying to curtail immigration, both illegal immigration, as well as asylum seeking. The reason this exhaustive an account was necessary was because it’s the most extreme implementation of consequences. And some families, hundreds of them, still have not been reunited today.” She goes on to say, “. . . hawks, like Stephen Miller, were going to push for these really aggressive policies. But it’s actually the bureaucrats, the career experts who went along with zero tolerance and family separations who are really important. They told me they were very concerned about separating families, but they stayed quiet. And when I asked why, they said, well, it wasn’t strategic to speak up in these meetings or, you know, I couldn’t alienate myself before Stephen Miller, given how much power he had in the administration. They figured someone else would intervene, and because of that, this policy was put into place.”
Dickerson goes on to say that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen wishes she had not signed the memo authorizing family separations. She didn’t have good information when she made this decision. Career immigration officials said we have systems and processes in place to ensure it’s going to be implemented smoothly. And that wasn’t true. Based on their advice, she made that decision.
Sadly, there is still the desire by some former Trump administration officials to see this policy implemented again in the future. The separation trauma is immensely destructive for the kids who were in the very early stages of development and this is going to be a lifelong story for them.
I did some research and found two other articles – LINK> PolitiFact noted in February 2021 that the Biden administration had rescinded the Trump-era policy that led to systematic family separations and that he had established a task force to reunite families that were separated under the Trump administration.
However, a LINK> Vera.org piece noted – Children Are Still Being Separated from Their Families at the Border. This one is dated June 23, 2022 written by Erica Bryant. She makes the point that – “A better system would place Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) officials at the border to immediately evaluate family relationships. This should be done in trauma-informed and developmentally appropriate settings, rather than in jail-like holding centers. Medical and mental health services that children might need should also be available on site. If ORR confirms the family relationship and rules out risks of trafficking and other immediate dangers to the child, children should be released with their relatives immediately.”
Anne Meeropol, adoptive mother of Robert and Michael Rosenberg
Ethel Rosenberg was a 37 yr old mother when she became the first and only woman ever executed for espionage in the United States. Her sons were only 3 and 7 yrs old when their parents were arrested. They were 6 and 10, when their parents were executed. Now mature men, Michael and Robert took their adoptive parents’ surname (for obvious reasons).
It would appear that their mother was scapegoated and treated very unfairly. The prosecution laid all of the blame on her as the older spouse. Ethel’s younger brother, David Greenglass, had been arrested first for that same crime of espionage. A month after her husband, Julius was arrested on July 17 1950, Ethel was seized by the FBI and charged. She called Michael at home and told him that she, like his father, had been arrested.
“So you can’t come home?” he asked.
“No,” she replied.
The seven-year-old screamed.
Historian Anne Sebba (author of Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy) likes writing about women who have been misunderstood and she says, few have been more misunderstood than Ethel Rosenberg. Her brother, David Greenglass had briefly worked as a machinist at Los Alamos. He was arrested as a link in the chain of persons passing secrets about atomic technology on to the Soviets. David quickly admitted his guilt. His lawyer advised him that the best thing he could do for himself (and to give his wife immunity) would be to turn someone else in. And actually, it was his wife, Ruth Greenglass, who said that Ethel had typed up the information David had given Julius to pass on to the Soviets. David then changed his story the week before his trial to corroborate his wife’s version.
Michael and Robert never saw the Greenglasses again after the trial. Robert says that when he thinks of his family before his parents were arrested – he has, “this feeling of a golden age, of a wonderful loving family before it was ripped apart.” Ethel Rosenberg was a particularly devoted mother, with a progressive interest in child psychology. Though at first the boys were sent to live with Ethel’s mother Tessie, she resented the situation. So the boys were sent to a children’s home. Julius’s mother Sophie tried to rescue them but she was too frail to handle young boys.
On June 16 1953, the children were brought to Sing Sing prison in New York State to say goodbye to their parents. Ethel kept up her usual brave appearance, but on this occasion Michael – who was 10 yrs old by that time understood what was happening. Her outward calm upset him. Afterwards, Ethel wrote a letter to her children: “Maybe you thought that I didn’t feel like crying when we were hugging and kissing goodbye huh… Darlings, that would have been so easy, far too easy on myself… because I love you more than I love myself and because I knew you needed that love far more than I needed the relief of crying.”
Because no extended family was willing to look after the boys, they were eventually adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, an older leftwing couple. They could finally grow up in anonymity among loving people who told them their parents had been brave and admirable. On this Juneteenth, it is interesting to know that Abel Meeropol wrote the civil rights era song Strange Fruit. The boys enjoyed a happy, academic, leftwing upbringing as Meeropols. They told almost no one their real surname, and Robert, who was a toddler when his parents were imprisoned, never considered reverting to it. It was more complicated for Michael, who could remember playing ball games with his father in their apartment.
In 1973, local media unmasked the boys’ identity, ignoring pleas to respect their anonymity. The boys then wrote their memoir, We Are Your Sons. They sued the FBI and CIA under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained more than 300,000 pages of once secret documents. In 1995, the Venona papers were declassified. These were messages sent between Soviet intelligence agencies that had been intercepted and decrypted by US counterintelligence from 1943 to 1980. It is clear that Julius Rosenberg and the Greenglasses were definitely spying for the Soviets. There was very little about Ethel. She didn’t have a codename like Julius and the Greenglasses. She was simply “a devoted person” (ie a communist) but it was stressed that “[she] does not work” (ie she was not a spy). With these, the boys began to believe in their mother’s innocence.
The boys realized reading the Venona transcript that Julius and Ethel didn’t do the thing they were executed for. Ethel didn’t work for the Soviets and Julius wasn’t an atomic spy but more accurately a military-industrial spy. Although Julius passed on weapon details, he wasn’t passing on details about the atomic bomb. Morton Sobell – who had been convicted for espionage along with the Rosenbergs, served 18 years in Alcatraz – eventually he gave an interview to the New York Times. He said that he and Julius had been spies together, and confirmed that Julius had not helped the Russians build the bomb. “What he gave them was junk,” Sobell said of Julius, probably because he didn’t know anything about the bomb. Of Ethel, Sobell said, “She knew what he was doing, but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.”
In 1996, David Greenglass finally admitted he lied about his sister: “I told them the story and left her out of it, right? But my wife put her in it. So what am I gonna do, call my wife a liar? My wife is my wife. I mean, I don’t sleep with my sister, you know. I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember.”
Robert launched a campaign for Ethel’s exoneration in 2015 – not for a pardon, because that would suggest she had done something wrong, but a full exoneration. Anne Sebba says, “I think she just had other concerns: she was looking after her children and trying to be present for them. She gave up activism when her children were born. Her main identity was as a wife and a mother, and that’s what mattered to her.” In 2019, Michael’s daughter, Ivy, made a documentary about Roy Cohn, who was the prosecutor of the Rosenbergs. In Bully Coward Victim, she made the connection between her grandparents’ execution and Trump.
“There’s a very binary idea of the political world, in which people are guilty or innocent, right or wrong. But understanding nuance is essential to understanding how politics work and how society works,” says Robert. He is hoping that President Biden will look at exonerating Ethel favorably. “That the US government invented evidence to obtain a conviction and an execution is a threat to every person in this country, and to not expose that is to become complicit in it. The personal stuff is obvious, but the political stuff is equally powerful,” Robert says.
Anne Sebba finds the two sons delightful to talk to: wildly intelligent, always interesting, completely admirable. She wonders how on earth did they triumph over such a traumatic childhood? Sebba says the two men have an extraordinarily high level of intelligence. Second, she finds that they had amazing adoptive parents. And now knowing how important those early years of life are, she believes Ethel must have given those two boys so much in the few years she had with them, enough to last all their lives. She believes that Ethel must have been an extremely good mother.
I love history and found this story fascinating and in that it intersects with adoption made it irresistible for me to share with you today in my blog. The much longer story, from which this blog was excerpted, can be read here in The Guardian by Hadley Freeman, The Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Can their sons reveal the truth?
January 2017 – a group of identical-looking white men in dark suits look on as their president signs an executive order banning US state funding to groups anywhere in the world offering abortion or abortion counselling.
Such a despicable lot. So glad these smug, self-serving members of the male gender are gone now. This morning I’ve been reading in The Guardian an article by Jacqueline Rose titled “Damage: the silent forms of violence against women.” How does this relate to adoption ? It reminds me of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – making women carry babies in the hopes that infertile, Christian couples will be able to adopt their baby.
I am unabashedly pro-Choice. Not that I like abortions. I’ve had one and it has haunted me the rest of my life – even though it was legal, even though I still feel justified by the circumstances – the pro-Life contingent has caused my heart to sorrow even so. I am a mother – 3 times now. I’ve seen my babies growing in my womb on ultrasounds. I’m not immune to the sentimentality of baby stuff. However, no women should be allowed to die from a poorly performed illegal abortion. And to be brutally honest – no woman should be forced to incubate a baby that she cannot afford and does not want to raise. 9 months of her income producing life potentially cut short. For many, a kind of non-COVID lockdown to preserve their future prospects, if they do decide to relinquish their baby to adoption. And my constant bottom line is this – the planet is already over-populated. There is no need to produce more humans than are being naturally produced by willing carriers already.
Thankfully, one of President Biden’s early acts in office was to rescind this executive order of Trump’s.
In June 2019, Kate Gilmore, the UN deputy commissioner for human rights, described US policy on abortion as a form of extremist hate that amounts to the torture of women. “We have not called it out in the same way we have other forms of extremist hate,” she stated, “but this is gender-based violence against women, no question.”
It is a characteristic of such mostly male violence – “violence regnant”, as it might be termed, since it represents and is borne by the apparatus of state – that it always presents itself as defending the rights of the innocent. These men are killers. But their murderousness is invisible – to the world (illegal abortions belong to the backstreets) and to themselves. Not even in their wildest dreams, I would imagine, does it cross their minds that their decisions might be fueled by the desire to inflict pain. Neither the nature nor the consequences of their actions is a reality they need trouble themselves about. Such violence in our time thrives on a form of mental blindness.
Violence is a form of entitlement. Unlike privilege – which can be checked with a mere gesture, as in “check your privilege”, and then left at the door – entitlement goes deeper and at the same time is more slippery to grasp. As if hovering in the ether, it relies for its persistence on a refusal to acknowledge that it is even there.
I’ve often been glad I wasn’t born a male. It must be an awful burden at times. No man comfortably possesses masculinity (any more than, other than by killing, one person is in total possession of anyone else). Indeed, such mastery is the very delusion that underpins the deranged and most highly prized version of masculinity on offer. Prowess is a lie, as every inch of mortal flesh bears witness. But like all lies, in order to be believed, it has to be endlessly repeated.
If sexual violence arises from a form of tunnel vision, and from burying those aspects of the inner life that are most difficult to acknowledge or see, it is also the case that raising violence to the surface of public consciousness is not always transformative in the ways we would want it to be. Recognizing an injustice, and bringing it to the world’s attention, is no guarantee that the offence will be obliterated and justice prevail.
Trans experience, also the target of violence, belongs here, too, as it clearly binds the issue of sexuality to that of political struggle – freedom achieved and withheld. Despite being far more widely accepted than ever before, transgender people are still being killed for daring to present the world with the mostly unwelcome truth that sexual identity is not all it is cut out to be. Not everyone comfortably belongs on the side of the inaugurating sexual divide where they originally started, or to which they were first assigned. Some cross from one side to the other, some see themselves as belonging on neither side, others on both (these options are by no means exhaustive). Sexuality creates havoc. Kicking it back into place – a doomed project – is one way in which an oppressive culture tries and fails to lay down the law.
“Supremacist feminism” is the Spanish sister term to “feminazis”, coined by the late US rightwing radio host Rush Limbaugh to describe radical feminists – who, he claimed, “want to see as many abortions as possible”. In September 2019, protesters in more than 250 towns and cities across Spain declared a “feminist emergency” after a series of high-profile rape cases and a summer in which 19 women were murdered by current or former partners (the worst figures for more than a decade).
“We’re only saying what everyone is thinking” is the common justification and refrain. They wrap themselves in the mantle of redemption, as if they were saving the world from burning injustice (righteousness raised to the pitch of frenzy is the particular skill of the far right). We are all subjects of violence, not least because we are embedded in a violent social world. There is always a point in any ethical position or turn – the struggle against injustice, the fight for a better, less violent order – where it starts and stutters, trips and breaks, before setting out on its path once more.
If we do not make time to think about the causes of violence, we will do nothing to end violence in the world, while we will surely be doing violence to ourselves by complicity.
The article from which most of today’s blog is taken is a long one but can be read at the title linked at the beginning of this blog.
Missing Mom 