Pointing out the rampant hypocrisy on the part of Democrats.
Family separation and the Nazi comparison
It’s a meme that’s been cropping up with some regularity on the left: the detentions at the border, and in particular the separation of children from parents, is Nazi-esque.
Yesterday a commenter named “holmes” (who used to be an episodic regular here but who hasn’t been around for a couple of years as far as I know, and who seems to have had one of the rare right-to-left transitions—I believe courtesy of the candidacy and then election of one Donald Trump) made the comparison: “and for Jewish conservatives not to squint at all of this and think ‘Hmm, looks vaguely familiar’ is a disgrace.”
But this really isn’t about holmes, who is of course free to believe and think as he wishes. However, his comment reminded me to take the opportunity to clear something up, since holmes is hardly the only one making Nazi comparisons lately. In fact, his statement is relatively mild compared to what some are saying on the subject.
So: no, there is nothing familiar, not even vaguely, to the Holocaust, and it is a disgrace to suggest that there is.
I’m not going to go into a long post describing the Holocaust, but it is clear to all who study history that the death camps and even work camps were not refugee detention centers, and the people in them (Jews and others) were not illegal immigrants asking for asylum or seeking to become German citizens (or Polish citizens for that matter, the country where the Germans located most of the death camps).
In Nazi work camps, many people (if relatively able-bodied to begin with) were set to “work” to be starved, tortured both psychologically and physically, and killed in droves by disease and exhaustion because of the terrible conditions. In Nazi death camps they were killed at the outset, although a very small percentage were spared briefly to help with the cleanup of the mass killing in exchange for a few more months of life, or to work at certain other tasks for a while under conditions that would ordinarily kill them rather quickly (within months as a rule). The object was to eliminate them as a group from the face of the earth, and certainly from Europe.
That was the stark reality, and it is obscene to make the comparison so many people are making.
What’s more, the idea that small children (younger than teen years) were often taken from their mothers in Nazi camps is actually an error, because what usually happened is that mother and young child stayed together because both mother and child were ordinarily killed together on arrival. Teenagers who seemed strong enough to work were often spared, however. Here’s how it went:
Many children died on the trains or on arrival in the gas chambers. Two camps – Auschwitz and Majdanek – operated a selection policy where the fittest were chosen for slave labour, while babies, small children and their mothers were sent straight to the gas chambers. Teenagers had a better chance of surviving selection, particularly if they claimed to have a skill.
Long term survival was rare and most of those selected to work died eventually of exhaustion and disease. The conditions were so extreme that even the fittest people rarely survived more than a few months in the camps. Some children were kept back from the gas chambers so they could be used for horrific medical experiments.
Anyone who sees a similarity between that and the situation taking place near the border in the US has lost all claim to logic or truth.
If you want to find the facts on what’s been happening to illegal immigrant children at the US border, good luck. The headlines scream “Children kept in cages!!!”—as they apparently also were during the Obama administration, although there are now a lot more of them because of the Trump zero tolerance policy.
But how long are they kept in these fenced enclosures? All of the articles I’ve read so far (and I’ve read quite a few) make it difficult to tease out that information. As best I can tell these “cages” are initial holding areas limited to a 72-hour stay, and then the children are placed in other facilities with beds and services, or foster homes in some cases (see this article, for example).
If vast numbers of unaccompanied children or families cross a border illegally, there has to be some mechanism for holding the people while decisions are being made for further placement. It’s hard to see what other kind of arrangements could be made unless a huge new outlay of money were to be appropriated.
Nearly 60 miles away, in the town of Brownsville, some 1,500 boys are being housed inside a building that was once a Walmart superstore. The boys, aged 10 to 17, were all caught illegally crossing the border. It is America’s largest facility for such minors, and numbers have increased in the past month by several hundred…
…[T]he accommodation was likened to dorm rooms inside a giant warehouse. To accommodate for the growing numbers since the new “zero-tolerance” policy went into force, cots have been added to sleeping areas in the Casa Padre.
The New York Times described it as “clean, massive and brightly lit”, with the children given classes six hours each week day and outdoor play time for two hours a day. They have 48 medical staff and three on call doctors on hand…
Officials say they are trying to keep siblings together and not separate children under four or younger from their parents.
There are anecdotal reports of a few such separations happening, however, although I wonder how many are accurate. There is so much fog and propaganda around this that it’s impossible to tell what’s really going on. But it sounds like the majority are unaccompanied minors, and it sounds like this is a makeshift response to a bad situation—including the fact that many of these children have almost certainly already been traumatized before they even get here, by conditions (and predators) on the journey itself, among other things.
Most of the descriptions in the MSM of the conditions focus on the cages, because that reliably elicits the most outrage. And I would guess that most people probably think the children are held there indefinitely instead of for up to 72 hours and then transferred elsewhere. Here’s another a description of what “elsewhere” is like (by someone not friendly to the Trump policy):
They have classrooms, some of them are in old schools, some of them are in new buildings. This one is an old Walmart. There are rooms with bunkbeds. There are classrooms where children are given English classes and basic education courses.
…When a child comes into the Office of Refugee Resettlement, they’re provided with a know your rights presentation. There are legal service providers located anywhere there’s a facility. They explain to them they’re in removal proceedings and what their rights are. They explain a little of the court system and what to expect. But no child is expected to understand. They’re children and they’re explaining things in another language to them. We have to contextualize this all that way. They’re given a legal screening and evaluated for immigration legal release, it could be asylum, a juvenile visa or visas for victims of trafficking. There are some services, giving them some information about what they’re doing there. My sense is the kids understand kind of what’s happening but don’t really understand. They’re kids.
I’m curious to see what effect Trump’s EO will have on any of this. One of the problems is that the zero tolerance policy was instituted with what seems like a lack of preparation. No one has mentioned this in any article I’ve read, but I seem to recall that illegal immigrant entry numbers had been way down a while back and only recently climbed again, and that may be part of the reason for the lack of preparedness for the large scope of the problem. Now that the EO has been issued, if the shelters still just don’t have enough beds, what will happen? If the Flores ruling isn’t changed, will children be able to be housed with their parents for longer than 20 days? And if so, won’t the left complain about caged families?
Of course they will. The left will not rest until one or both of two things happen: the GOP adopts catch-and-release, or the GOP loses the 2018 election.
Trump’s executive order on family separation
Here is the bulk of it:
It is the policy of this Administration to rigorously enforce our immigration laws. Under our laws, the only legal way for an alien to enter this country is at a designated port of entry at an appropriate time. When an alien enters or attempts to enter the country anywhere else, that alien has committed at least the crime of improper entry and is subject to a fine or imprisonment under section 1325(a) of title 8, United States Code. This Administration will initiate proceedings to enforce this and other criminal provisions of the INA until and unless Congress directs otherwise. It is also the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources. It is unfortunate that Congress’s failure to act and court orders have put the Administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law.
…The Secretary of Homeland Security (Secretary), shall, to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations, maintain custody of alien families during the pendency of any criminal improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their members…
(b) The Secretary shall not, however, detain an alien family together when there is a concern that detention of an alien child with the child’s alien parent would pose a risk to the child’s welfare.
(c) The Secretary of Defense shall take all legally available measures to provide to the Secretary, upon request, any existing facilities available for the housing and care of alien families, and shall construct such facilities if necessary and consistent with law. The Secretary, to the extent permitted by law, shall be responsible for reimbursement for the use of these facilities.
(d) Heads of executive departments and agencies shall, to the extent consistent with law, make available to the Secretary, for the housing and care of alien families pending court proceedings for improper entry, any facilities that are appropriate for such purposes. The Secretary, to the extent permitted by law, shall be responsible for reimbursement for the use of these facilities.
(e) The Attorney General shall promptly file a request with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California to modify the Settlement Agreement in Flores v. Sessions, CV 85-4544 (“Flores settlement”), in a manner that would permit the Secretary, under present resource constraints, to detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings.
Sec. 4. Prioritization of Immigration Proceedings Involving Alien Families. The Attorney General shall, to the extent practicable, prioritize the adjudication of cases involving detained families…
There will be a ton of criticism—no doubt it’s already starting. From the hard right: he caved! From Trump opponents right and left: he said he couldn’t do it, and he lied! Or, they’re still detaining children!!! (complete with heartrending photos).
I think it’s an excellent start, and might rob the entire issue of some of its force despite the continuation of the propaganda efforts of those opposed. Problems abound, however, The order is titled “Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation.” Well, it’s an opportunity, but somehow I doubt Congress will take it. In addition, there probably won’t be enough facilities to house families; that’s been one of the many problems right along, as I described in previous posts on the subject. What’s more, the prioritizing of the “adjudication of cases involving detained families” is one of the other stumbling blocks; there just aren’t enough judges, and in the meantime these families could be in detention for a long time, affording opportunity for more propaganda.
Part (e), the request that the Settlement Agreement in Flores v. Sessions, be modified “in a manner that would permit the Secretary, under present resource constraints, to detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings,” is an excellent idea as well. It puts the ball in the court where it belongs, and highlights the legal impediments that need redressing.
And the has-beens of Hollywood continue to cover themselves with glory by foaming at the mouth with rage and threats
One wouldn’t think it possible that another Hollywood oldster could make Robert De Niro look like a model of restraint, but Peter Fonda has managed that difficult task.
Apparently Fonda has since deleted the tweet, but I found it through a post at Legal Insurrection:
WE SHOULD RIP BARRON TRUMP FROM HIS MOTHER’S ARMS AND PUT HIM IN A CAGE WITH PEDOPHILES AND SEE IF MOTHER WILL STAND UP AGAINST THE GIANT ASSHOLE SHE IS MARRIED TO. 90 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE STREETS ON THE SAME WEEKEND IN THE COUNTRY. FUCK.
And in another tweet, apparently since deleted, Fonda writes of the DHS head:
Kristjen [sic] Nielson is a lying gash that should be put in a cage and poked at by passerby. The gash should be pilloried in Lafayette Square naked and whipped by passerby while being filmed for posterity.
Sadomasochistic fantasies about women and children of political opponents. Lovely glimpse into the leftist mind of a famous actor, scion of the Fonda family.
Each tweet got a large number of “likes,” by the way.
I think these tweets in response make some excellent points:
Wonder if he’ll get the same treatment as Rosanne and if @SonyPictures will stop the release of his film for the most vile of comments. How sickening…what kind of person says these things about a child or anyone for that matter https://t.co/fSNI2BhRar
— Sara A. Carter (@SaraCarterDC) June 20, 2018
Can anyone tell me why Peter Fonda – @iamfonda – still has a Twitter account or is threatening sexual violence against children allowed now?
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) June 20, 2018
It’s not just Peter Fonda doing the threatening of Trump offspring, either. There’s this, for example, from a guy who’s apparently a Canadian comedy writer desirous of some of that exciting Twitter action that Peter Fonda seems to have cornered:
In case you’re wondering what @patdussault said here it is. He’s stalking Don Jr’s daughter online and threatening to take her. Chloe is 4 years old. pic.twitter.com/H6xGKXd5YN
— Cristina Laila (@cristinalaila1) June 20, 2018
So funny I forgot to laugh.
I continue to think Twitter is a trap for impulsive angry people, particularly if they’ve been drinking or abusing other substances. It must be so tempting to up the ante and top the others in your rageful comments, in a sort of feeding frenzy, when you think you smell enemy blood in the water.
This is what happens with mob violence, only then it escalates to actions.
The FBI has been alerted to Fonda [correction: the Secret Service], by the way, but I doubt anything will be done about it.
Andrew C. McCarthy: the Clinton server, the FBI, and intent
Andrew C. McCarthy discusses what the IG report ignores:
…their analysis left out the best intent evidence, namely, Clinton’s willful setting up of a private, non-secure server system for all official business...
A detailed description of the grossly improper communications system Clinton established would have illustrated that she knew full well the risk she was running. A large percentage of the secretary of state’s job involves classified matters. We are not talking merely about the exchange of documents marked classified but, more commonly, constant deliberations about sensitive intelligence in classified documents, briefings, and conversations. Clinton’s willful concoction of a home-brew communications network — not a harried official’s occasional, exigent use of private email for official business, but her rogue institution of a private, non-government infrastructure for the systematic conduct of State Department business — made the non-secure transmission and storage of classified information inevitable.
Indeed. And furthermore, intent isn’t even required in order to have committed this offense, as many have been saying for a long time, but as the IG report seems to gloss over:
In order to conclude that there was no prosecutable offense, the Obama Justice Department and FBI still had to rewrite the applicable statute (the Espionage Act, codified in Section 793 of the federal penal code). That’s because, for all the supposed obsession about whether investigators had enough evidence of criminal intent, the law does not actually require such evidence — if one is an official who has been schooled in the handling of national defense secrets, gross negligence will do.
Please read the whole thing.
Trump about to issue executive order on separation of illegal immigrant families at border
[NOTE: I will update as news develops.]
Here’s the report:
President Donald Trump said he would be signing an executive order later Wednesday that would end the process of separating children from families after they are detained crossing the border illegally.
“We want to keep families together. It’s very important,” Trump told reporters during a White House meeting with members of Congress. “I’ll be signing something in a little while that’s going to do that.”
The AP story goes on to add that Trump has wrongly said the policy can only change by an act of Congress, but then states “Justice Department lawyers have been working to find a legal workaround for a class-action lawsuit settlement that set policies for the treatment and release of unaccompanied children who are caught at the border, or crafting an order that would defy the settlement and force it back into court to argue for changes.” In other words yes, ordinarily this could only be done by an act of Congress, but they’ve been trying to craft a way to get past this, to “work around” it, in some clever lawyerly manner. In addition, that report fails to state the Trump also said his order should be followed by an act of Congress.
It is the judicial system that has ruled that children must be separated from detained parents (liberal courts, actually):
In 2015, a federal judge in Los Angeles expanded the terms of the [Flores] settlement, ruling that it applies to children who are caught with their parents as well as to those who come to the U.S. alone. Other recent rulings, upheld on appeal, affirm the children’s rights to a bond hearing and require better conditions at the Border Patrol’s short-term holding facilities.
In 2016, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that child migrants who came to the border with parents and were held in custody must be released.
Stay tuned. This could be very interesting indeed.
My guess is that Trump—who is pretty good at reading the political winds—has decided that this is not the hill he wants to die on, and that he wants to finesse the Democrats and take away this particular emotionally-laden talking point. No doubt the opposition will find fault with whatever he does, because they want to keep this issue alive, and also because their goal is catch and release.
We should find out later today what the details are, but here’s his announcement:
The conscious universe
Food for cosmic thought [hat tip: commenter “Mrs Whatsit”).
I don’t really buy the application of the multiple personality template to the universe as a whole. I have, however, read a number of fascinating articles recently on the idea of consciousness being part and parcel of the universe, and basic to it. These rely heavily on discussions of quantum phenomena. I can’t say I fully understand them, because I don’t.
We certainly don’t understand consciousness, that’s for sure. And by the way, I’m with the set that believes consciousness is a stumbling block to creating a true AI that mimics life forms.
But this is one of the most interesting findings reported in the linked article:
In 2015, doctors in Germany reported the extraordinary case of a woman who suffered from what has traditionally been called “multiple personality disorder” and today is known as “dissociative identity disorder” (DID). The woman exhibited a variety of dissociated personalities (“alters”), some of which claimed to be blind. Using EEGs, the doctors were able to ascertain that the brain activity normally associated with sight wasn’t present while a blind alter was in control of the woman’s body, even though her eyes were open. Remarkably, when a sighted alter assumed control, the usual brain activity returned.
Fascinating, but to me unsurprising. The mind and body are connected in a loop, so that each influences the other (and “mind” and “body” may not really be separate entities at all). I also recall from my childhood, when I first read about the case of Eve and her multiple personalities (a pseudonym; her real name was Chris Costner Sizemore), that the doctors treating her noted that one of her personalities had an allergy to nylon stockings. I’m doing this from memory, but I recall that when that personality “came out,” the patient removed her stockings because otherwise she would actually get hives. The hives were visible to the doctors, and did not occur with the other personalities.
Now, hives may be especially susceptible to mind-body (psychosomatic) influences. But so are a great many physical processes—perhaps including the amount of activity in the part of the brain that processes vision.
Fascinating stuff, but to me it doesn’t have much to do with the way the universe functions.
Ted Cruz suggests a possible solution to the child separation issue
You can find it here:
The provisions of the legislation, according to the news release, include:
Doubling the number of federal immigration judges, from roughly 375 to 750.
Authorizing new temporary shelters with accommodations to keep families together.
Mandating that immigrant families be kept together, absent aggravated criminal conduct or threat of harm to children.
Providing for expedited processing and review of asylum cases so that ”” within 14 days ”” those who meet the legal standards will be granted asylum and those who do not will be immediately returned to their home countries.
I noticed on other blogs that discussion of this Cruz proposal unleashed a barrage of anger at Cruz for some sort of perceived betrayal. I disagree. I think that this is a situation that needs addressing, both for practical political reasons (its use as propaganda by the opposition) and for more basic reasons (it’s a problematic policy that could and should be improved on, although not at the cost of enforcing our immigration laws).
The question is: can this, or something like it, pass? And if so, will it really help the situation?
The anti-Trump forces think the separated children will be the magic bullet
I wrote two posts yesterday about the illegal immigrant family separation issue (this and this) in an effort to get at the facts and the law behind the tsunami of MSM propaganda on the theme.
It wasn’t easy, but it can be done, and there are plenty of people on the right trying to do it. But will it matter, considering the full court press of the MSM and the left, as well as the moderate Republicans joining in? It certainly seems that they believe they finally—finally!—have the formula for slaying the Trump/GOP dragon that has so far eluded them no matter what they’ve launched at it.
The story is the perfect vehicle. It features the seemingly hard-hearted right being cruel to children—children! What monsters can be so cruel to children? The visuals are useful, the rhetoric and emotion heated. The entire campaign was initially launched with a photo of children in “cages” that came from the Obama era, and yet that was forgotten in the barrage of information and misinformation that followed, and the accusations against Trump.
Will it work? I don’t pretend to know. However, it seems to me that the anti-Trump anti-GOP forces believe it will. Of course, they’ve believed that many times before and it hasn’t been the case. But I perceive something different about this one, or at least about the fervor of their belief in this one.
Commenter “M J R” had this to say:
…[F]rom what I’m experiencing based on my Facebook contacts from the Dark Side, the left has finally found an issue that can stick and will have legs. I wish I were wrong.
We know that that other side to the story will never reach the Dark Side, but I genuinely fear that too many otherwise reachable people are going to fall for the appeal to emotion this time around ”” threatening the tentative success of *our* “resistance” to creeping leftism, already on life support.
Appeals to emotion and the desire to protect children are time-honored propaganda methods. The details may change, but the tactic remains. Think Mohammed al-Durah (see this and this). Then there was the photo of the napalmed South Vietnamese girl (see this and this). The first incident was almost certainly staged and fake, but was highly successful in turning European opinion against Israel. The second was true, but the underlying facts were distorted by the press to increase popular opposition to the Vietnam War.
The stories about the children separated at the border are in the latter category: true, but the underlying facts, as well as the law, are being distorted by the MSM in its fervor to appeal to emotion. Emotion is—well, it’s emotional, and children are a sure-fire way to stir it up.
Another commenter at this blog, steve walsh, has remarked that ” nearly all the talking heads selected to comment and pontificate about this issue are women; at least on CNN, CBS, NBC, etc.” I have no idea whether that observation is correct, because I almost never watch TV news and haven’t watched any of the TV coverage of this story, but it wouldn’t surprise me. But the sentiment and the emotional approach is hardly limited to women—it has broad appeal, because we are all wired to want to protect children and families. The left is well aware of that, and acts accordingly.
More on the separation of children from their illegal immigrant parents
I already wrote a tome today on this issue, focusing on the propaganda aspects as well as the origins of the policy and the law that governs.
But I just found some absolutely must-read articles on the subject. The first is the most clear statement I’ve read yet. I saw it at Powerline, and it consists of a letter from U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow to AG Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Here are some quotes, but I urge you to read the whole thing at the Powerline link:
The reason parents and children are separated is the law: When an adult illegal alien is prosecuted for unlawful entry, that person is taken into the custody of the U.S. Marshals and the children are taken into custody by HHS. Nonetheless, unless the adult applies for asylum, the unlawful entry is resolved relatively quickly and the separation is brief. But if the adult applies for asylum, the process”“-and separation”“is lengthier. That is because the 1997 Flores Consent Decree (and the Ninth Circuit’s interpretation thereof) stipulates that children may be held no more than twenty days. The asylum process is much longer.
If the U.S. were detaining the children with their parents, the Commission majority would surely issue a statement condemning the Departments for detaining children. Thus, the only way to avoid separating children from illegal alien parents that would be acceptable to the Commission majority would be to release both parents and children into the U.S., contrary to law. The bottom line is that the Commission majority is opposed to enforcing almost any immigration laws pertaining to illegal entry.
People who have potentially valid claims for asylum can present themselves at ports of entry and request asylum. They will be processed normally and will not be separated from their children because they are following the law.…
…It is unwise to release detained individuals into the United States, because they are then very likely to abscond into the interior and fail to appear for their immigration hearing…
American parents are separated from their children every day when they are arrested or incarcerated. According to HHS, during Fiscal Year 2016, 20,939 American children entered foster care because their parent is incarcerated. This is more than ten times the number of children who have been separated from their parents due to entering the United States illegally.6 People who cross the border illegally have committed a crime, and one of the consequences of being arrested and detained is, unfortunately, that their children cannot stay with them…
…there is no super-statute that decrees that aliens must be treated better than Americans. If Congress decides to change the law, that is its prerogative. But until such time as Congress changes the law, the Department of Justice should continue enforcing existing law and prosecute every case of illegal entry.
Well stated.
Other good articles to read are those cited in this Powerline post. They make the point that (a) international law says that those seeking asylum should apply in the first safe country they enter, which in this case would ordinarily be Mexico, and (b) many of these minors are raped along the way, or in this country when placed with fake “relatives.”
Unless I’m mistaken, though, US law overrules international law, and the asylum process is dictated by US law once the asylum-seeker is here. Congress might change that if it wanted, but I very much doubt it will.
The illegal immigrant “family separation” meme and its origins and consequences
The left and the NeverTrumpers on the right believe they have a winner in the drumbeat against “family separation” of illegal immigrants. You can tell by the coverage, which is widespread and emotional, culminating in propaganda like this:
Former CIA director Michael Hayden defended Monday his comparison of the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement policy to the treatment of concentration-camp prisoners in Nazi Germany.
Hayden, who tweeted a picture of the Auschwitz concentration camp Saturday with the caption “other governments have separated mothers and children,” said during a Monday appearance on CNN’s New Day that he made the incendiary comparison because “he wanted to grab people’s attention.”
Well, d-uh.
If I want to grab people’s attention, should I tweet a photo of Goebbels next to one of Hayden, and write “separated at birth?” ?
The full-court press is on because the visuals are so heart-rending. After all, who would want parents to be separated from children? Do the reasons matter? Of course they do, but not to propagandists and not to those whose hearts rule their minds.
If you want a statement of the reasons the problem and the policy exists, and its pros and cons as well as the alternatives and possible solutions, look here for a very quick summary take:
The separations have been attacked as immoral by congressional Democrats and a handful of Republicans, who advocate a return to the previous policy of releasing individuals awaiting trial for trying to immigrate illegally with their children. But Nielsen placed blame for family separations squarely on lawmakers, citing legislative inaction on immigration reform as the central obstacle to changing the system. She also suggested that previous administrations are partly to blame for incentivizing child trafficking by providing “free passes” to adults who try to cross the border with children.
“From October 2017 to this February, we have seen a staggering 315 percent increase in illegal aliens fraudulently using children to pose as family units to gain entry into this country,” she said. “This must stop. All this does is put the children at risk. To address these issues we’ve asked Congress to change the law to allow for the expeditious return of unaccompanied children, regardless of their country of origin. We are also asking Congress to allow us to keep families together while they are detained.”
Don’t sit on a hot stove till Congress does something about this. It’s much too valuable as a talking point and photo-op, I’m afraid.
See also this:
To be clear, there is no official Trump policy stating that every family entering the US without papers has to be separated. What there is is a policy that all adults caught crossing into the US illegally are supposed to be criminally prosecuted ”” and when that happens to a parent, separation is inevitable.
That’s not necessarily true, by the way, because people asking for asylum (a large group) are not necessarily criminally prosecuted; they must await a hearing on the merits of their asylum claims, which might indeed be granted, and it’s during the wait that their separations occur.
(And by the way, when a citizen parent is incarcerated for any reason there is a separation from his or her children, and this happens every day, although the children themselves are not detained by the government.)
The Trump administration’s policy is meant to correct the previous Obama administration approach, described here:
When an influx of families and unaccompanied children from Central America arrived at the border in 2014, Barack Obama’s administration detained families.
This was harshly criticized and a federal court in 2015 stopped the government from holding families for months without explanation. Instead, they were released while they waited for their immigration cases to be heard in court. Not everyone shows up for those court dates, leading the Trump administration to condemn what it calls a “catch and release” program.
This Vox article says: “Trump’s insistence that family separation is happening as a result of a Democratic ‘law’ is simply not true.” But that’s way oversimplified. This more in-depth article explains more:
For the longest time, illegal immigration was driven by single males from Mexico. Over the last decade, the flow has shifted to women, children, and family units from Central America. This poses challenges we haven’t confronted before and has made what once were relatively minor wrinkles in the law loom very large.
The Trump administration isn’t changing the rules that pertain to separating an adult from the child. Those remain the same. Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings.
It’s the last that is operative here. The past practice had been to give a free pass to an adult who is part of a family unit. The new Trump policy is to prosecute all adults. The idea is to send a signal that we are serious about our laws and to create a deterrent against re-entry. (Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, illegal re-entry a felony.)
When a migrant is prosecuted for illegal entry, he or she is taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. In no circumstance anywhere in the U.S. do the marshals care for the children of people they take into custody. The child is taken into the custody of HHS, who cares for them at temporary shelters.
The criminal proceedings are exceptionally short, assuming there is no aggravating factor such as a prior illegal entity or another crime. The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE.
If the adult then wants to go home, in keeping with the expedited order of removal that is issued as a matter of course, it’s relatively simple. The adult should be reunited quickly with his or her child, and the family returned home as a unit. In this scenario, there’s only a very brief separation.
Where it becomes much more of an issue is if the adult files an asylum claim. In that scenario, the adults are almost certainly going to be detained longer than the government is allowed to hold their children.
That’s because of something called the Flores Consent Decree from 1997. It says that unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so.
So it may be that what Trump is claiming is that the family separations of the children are a result of the Trump enforcement of our immigration laws coupled with its compliance with a ruling of the 9th Circuit concerning the 20-day limit. The 9th Circuit is a liberal court—thus, the “Democratic law”?
I’ve just spent about an hour trying to sort out the real origins of the complex laws regarding the separation policy (Democrat or Republican or bipartisan) and whether previous administrations followed similar practices on a smaller scale. I really cannot find a definitive answer. The best article I’ve found, however, is this one written about three years ago during the Obama administration, which discusses the history of such policies:
While the treatment of immigrant minors has been protected by legal settlements and codified into law, the lack of family detention standards beyond the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) discretionary power has reignited court battles over the applicability of an 18-year old legal settlement known as the Flores Settlement Agreement. The Flores Agreement created legal standards for the detention and treatment of immigrant minors, which generally grants them a “policy favoring release” without unnecessary delays. If detained, children should be placed in the least restrictive setting possible in “unsecured” facilities licensed to care for children.
So Flores was originally a court settlement, not a law passed by either party in Congress (although the 20-day limit was a ruling by a liberal court, as previously discussed). Here’s more:
Immigration detention is the practice of holding unauthorized immigrants in detention facilities while they wait to appear in immigration court or are removed from the United States. The federal government has broad authority to detain unauthorized immigrants, and detention has been used throughout the country’s history. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prioritizes detention space for immigrants that are subject to mandatory detention, pose a risk to public safety if released, or are at risk of absconding.
Family detention refers specifically to holding unauthorized immigrant parents and children in detention facilities awaiting their immigration court hearing. According to ICE, “like single adults, family units apprehended at the border may be placed into expedited removal proceedings and detained,” but this practice has been limited because DHS generally maintained only 90-100 beds for family units in the Berks Family Residential Facility in Pennsylvania. Additionally, before the early 2000s, family units were hardly ever detained, but rather processed and released with a notice to appear at immigration court, especially if they met the credible fear of persecution criteria for a claim to asylum. After the September 11 attacks, ICE began to tighten its “catch and release” policy for all apprehended unauthorized immigrants, including family units, citing their failure to appear in court and concerns that adults were renting or taking children to pass off as a “family.” Due to lack of space, ICE began detaining parents while transferring children to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is common practice for unaccompanied children.
Congress in 2005 became aware of the practice of separating children from their parents and directed DHS change their policy and encouraged the agency to release families or use alternatives to detention whenever possible, adding, “When detention of family units is necessary, the Committee directs DHS to use appropriate detention space to house them together.”
Although Congress seemed to indicate that detention should be a last resort, ICE expanded their detention capacity by opening the T. Don Hutto Correction Center in Texas in 2006. The Hutto facility, which was previously a medium-security prison, added 512 beds to ICE’s family detention capacity. After settling lawsuits brought forward by ACLU, which accused DHS of holding children in prison-like conditions in violation of the Flores Agreement (discussed below), and critical news coverage, ICE stopped detaining families in the Hutto facility in 2009. Between 2009 and 2014, the small Berks facility was the only family dentition facility in operation.
Clearly, arguments over what to do about this have a long and complex history. One problem has long been a lack of family detention facilities (and the 20-day limit on keeping children in them), as well as a lack of facilities in general to handle the influx of illegal immigrants (and children) that were encouraged by the Obama administration. After that increase (2014) the pressure got worse, however, and there were other court battles over the issue:
In FY 2014, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended a total of 68,445 family units, a 361 percent increase over FY 2013’s 14,855. The administration announced that it would begin detaining families throughout the duration of their immigration proceedings. In addition to its small existing Berks facility, DHS opened family detention facilities in Artesia, NM (650 beds), Karnes, TX (532 beds), and Dilley, TX (2,400 beds). The facility in Artesia was closed in December amid a lawsuit on behalf of immigrants detained at the facility accusing DHS tactics of preventing families from exercising their right to seek asylum and attempting to rush removal proceedings. At the time, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson stressed that expanded detention was devised as part of a strategy to deter further immigrants from coming. In February of this year, however, a federal judge barred DHS from detaining immigrant families solely “for the purpose of deterring future immigration.”
While the detention of minors, particularly unaccompanied minor children, has long been codified in law and regulated and protected by legal settlements, the detention practices and standards involving families has been generally more ambiguous and left to DHS discretion and policy, leading to controversy and differing interpretation of applicable regulation. While ICE has its own guidelines for the detention of family units, there are no codified national family detention standards in law.
The treatment and detention of unaccompanied minors has primarily been regulated through the Flores Settlement Agreement of 1997 and the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. For the purposes of family detention, the Flores Agreement has been the most relevant [emphasis mine]: “The terms of the [Flores] agreement grant minors a “general policy favoring release” without unnecessary delays unless there is a public safety risk or a need to ensure appearance in court. The agreement also lays out specific legal standards when the temporary detention of children is necessary: children must be housed separate from unrelated adults in non-secure facilities that are licensed to care for children and meet minimum requirements to house them, including providing access to toilets and sinks, drinking water and food, medical assistance, temperature control, and contact with family members.”
There’s much much more, but it seems that both the Bush and the Obama administrations were practicing some family detention and at times separation of children from parents, that facilities were way too limited, and that both Bush and Obama claimed (for reasons I can’t glean from the article) that Flores did NOT apply to children who came with parents, but that the courts said otherwise.
The law supports the Trump administration’s separation of children from families. But it is a discretionary policy of the administration on illegal immigration in general—and how to treat illegal immigrants—that has resulted in the increase in the phenomenon. The policy is not focused on the children at all, but the children give the opposition tremendous talking points to oppose Trump as a cruel barbarian (and Nazi, of course).
Speaking of NeverTrumpers on the right, Former First Lady Laura Bush has written an op-ed on the subject that appeared in the WaPo. The entire Bush family hates Trump (for very good reasons, I might add) and are quintessential NeverTrumpers, and although I’ve always liked Laura Bush, she is failing to show understanding of what this policy is actually about and giving Democrats some wonderful talking points:
I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.
Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso. These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history…
2018, can we not as a nation find a kinder, more compassionate and more moral answer to this current crisis? I, for one, believe we can.
I would have had a lot more respect for Laura Bush’s op-ed if she had gone on to suggest some of these answers. I certainly don’t like the policy and would absolutely prefer to find a “kinder, more compassionate and more moral answer to this current crisis.” But such a policy can only be discussed by considering the reasons it has been instituted and the better alternatives, if they exist.
My own “better alternative” would be to immediately build more family detention facilities. That’s the only way to both protect the law regarding illegal entry and to keep families together—although I have absolutely no doubt that the left would paint such facilities as awful and as equivalent to those Japanese detention centers during WWII (which applied to many citizens, making it a false analogy).
But as best I can determine, under current law children could only be held in a family detention center for up to 20 days in cases of asylum (and not at all if the parent is arrested, although that process goes more quickly), and then another solution would have to be found. Perhaps that’s why both Bush and Obama didn’t want Flores to apply to family detention? If Congress passed a law allowing family-based detention of children in facilities, with their parents, for longer than 20 days, would that help or would the left just start opposing that, because what they really want is catch and release (I strongly suspect the latter)?
In short (although nothing about this post has been short!), the situation is complicated and fraught with difficulties, but propagandists are determined to simplify it.
Open season on Jordan Peterson
Jordan Peterson has become so effective a messenger—and not just in Canada—that it was inevitable that the MSM, the left, and academics (but I repeat myself) would put forth effort to discredit and discount him. So if you’ve been paying attention you’ll have noticed a recent spate of articles and statements saying just where he went so grievously wrong, how he draws his support from bigots and alt-righters (and/or is one himself), and fails to understand this or that or the other thing on which the critic/writer is an expert. Here’s a recent example of the latter (hat tip commenter Artfldgr), and there are plenty more of the former as well such as this one from NBC.
Watch that last video; it’s less than two minutes long, and it’s instructive—not about Peterson, but about the way the MSM approaches the topic of “explaining” him. Most of these hit pieces are relatively subtle, as is this one (“Who is Jordan Peterson, favorite figure of the alt-right”), which hardly talks about what Peterson actually says, gets some of that wrong when it does (beginning with saying he refuses to be pigeonholed and then offering as an example of that him speaking about an entirely different subject, his refusal to automatically use left-dictated pronouns for transgendered people), but quickly delivers its main message of “bigots love him, therefore he’s tainted.”
The goal is quite clearly to make him persona non grata to people who’ve never watched a video of his or read anything he’s written, making him so toxic that they will pigeonhole him (“alt-right bigot”) and never indulge whatever curiosity they might have by going to the source, Peterson. These pieces are not meant to actually inform; they’re meant to block any desire the listener might have to inform him/herself. After all, life is short, we have a finite amount of time here, and why waste it listening to a bigot or a figure beloved by bigots?
Pieces such as that first one I linked have a slightly different approach. They are ostensibly more “academic” and purport to debunk Peterson on those grounds. Their authors don’t necessarily have a clue what they’re talking about, but they do have some academic credentials to wave, and most readers don’t know squat about the topics involved and therefore have no way to evaluate what they’re reading and know whether it makes sense.
But such pieces are not necessarily meant to be read; it’s their headlines that really count, and maybe the first paragraph or two. If the reader goes off bored after that, even better, because the person will already have gotten the basic message, which is contained in the title of that piece: “The Tragic Folly of Jordan Peterson.” Who wants to pay attention to someone like that? Don’t waste your time—and few probably will.
Peterson is a frightening figure to the left. Handsome, articulate, charismatic, knowledgeable, intense, and dedicated to getting a message out, he’s been way too successful for the left’s comfort and must be stopped. Since his speech can’t entirely be banned (at the moment, anyway), this is the next best thing. Of course, it runs the risk of giving him more publicity than he had before, and therefore driving more traffic to him, but if it’s done carefully—once his fame has reached a certain critical mass anyway—the calculation is that these sorts of pieces will be effective at stopping the spread of his message.