Tag: Trump Administration

Family Separations

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 Atlantic immigration 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.”

Mother/Child Separations

Black babies separated from slave mothers. Native American children separated from their families to indoctrinate them into white standards of living. White babies separated from their mothers in the 1930’s through the 1960’s because they were a profitable and valuable commodity in the adoption market (if you were a black unwed mother you could keep your baby as it was no longer a financially lucrative commodity after the Emancipation Proclamation). And most recently, Hispanic babies separated from their mothers at the southern border of the United States.

These may seem wildly different situations but actually they are the same. Society does not value natural families nor do we support keeping children in the families they were born into. We do this at great harm to the children and equally emotional and psychological harm for their mothers.

In regard to Africans enslaved in America, though they most definitely experienced an assault on their personhood, but never yielded. Because misogyny has been dominate until recently, it is no surprise that women’s voices, both in their own time and in later scholarship, remained largely silent. They reproduced, labored, and died in near anonymity. Slave women did not have ready access to birth control and experienced great pressure to bear children. After the abolition of the international slave trade in 1808, the South’s dependence upon natural reproduction increased. Slave women experienced pressure to bear children from a culture that gloried motherhood and from masters who personally benefited from slave offspring due to their financial value.

In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania was a government-backed institution that forcibly separated Native American children from their parents in order to kill the Indian in him, and save the man. For decades, this effort continued. Native American boarding schools were a method of forced assimilation. The end goal of these measures was to make Native people more like the white Anglo-Americans who had taken over their land. By removing them from their homes, the schools disrupted students’ relationships with their families and other members of their tribe. Once they returned home, children struggled to relate to their families after being taught that it was wrong to speak their language or practice their religion.

The Baby Scoop Era was a period in the history of the United States, starting after the end of World War II and ending in the early 1970s, My parents adoptions were just a little bit ahead of their time but Georgia Tann, through whom my mom was adopted was certainly already profiting when my mom turned up, 5 mos old with blond hair and blue eyes, Tann’s most desired commodity. This time period was characterized by an increased rate of pre-marital pregnancies over the preceding period, along with a higher rate of newborn adoption. It is estimated that up to 4 million parents in the United States had children placed for adoption, with 2 million during the 1960s alone. Annual numbers for non-relative adoptions increased from an estimated 33,800 in 1951 to a peak of 89,200 in 1970, then quickly declined to an estimated 47,700 in 1975. By 2003, only 14,000 infants were placed for adoption. The number of hopeful adoptive parents remains far beyond the number of babies available which set off the international adoption boom and the abuses and exploitations in that field.

Most recently has been the horrendous treatment of Hispanic families at our southern border.

Long before the Trump administration implemented its “zero tolerance” immigration enforcement policy in 2018, it was already separating children from their parents as part of a “pilot program” conducted in the El Paso, Texas, area (where I spent my childhood, I am familiar with border issues and politics). Under the El Paso program, begun in mid-2017, adults who crossed the border without permission – a misdemeanor for a first-time offender – were detained and criminally charged. No exceptions were made for parents arriving with young children. The children were taken from them, and parents were unable to track or reunite with their children because the government failed to create a system to facilitate reunification. By late 2017, the government was separating families along the length of the US-Mexico border, including families arriving through official ports of entry. It is suspected that many of these children were placed in foster homes and may have even been placed into adoption as it has proven almost impossible for some parents to relocate their children.

Sometimes, humanity makes my heart hurt.