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Don’t Look Away From the Children Yet
Posted on Jun 21 2018
Trump’s executive order creates new dangers for migrant children.
June 21, 2018—Trump tried to shut down international outrage with yesterday’s executive order on family separation. Treating that order as if it solved the crisis he created for children and families would be a mistake. The president’s action actually ordered that children and parents be imprisoned together—likely on military bases—for unlimited periods of time and in direct violation of court ordered protections in place since 1997.
The executive order makes no provision for the reunification of migrant parents with the 2,342 children who have already been taken from their mothers and fathers. These children have been scattered across the country, without notice to their parents, and often without records of who and where they are. Hundreds of these stolen children were flown to New York “under cover of darkness” in recent days. Babies were among those sent to Detroit: an 8-month-old and an 11-month-old. Despite the change in policy, administration authorities refuse to prioritize the reunification of these children, and Trump did not even hint at a plan to bring these children back to their parents.
“The chaos created by this administration’s cynical child separation policy has been replaced by an equally ill-conceived family detention policy with nowhere to put them,” says John Keller, executive director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. “The family detention he ordered would violate the child protection requirements of the Flores decree. Trump’s solution is to ignore child protection, get rid of the Flores decree, and lock up indefinitely asylum seekers and their children.”
None of the Republican bills coming up for votes today ends family separation. All of them hold children and parents in internment camps and gut the nation’s asylum system. Instead of listening to the condemnation by medical professionals, 350 advocacy, legal, and service-provider organizations, including ILCM, religious leaders, media influencers, and even other members of the Republican Party, Trump’s order and Republican bills continue to exacerbate the on-going humanitarian crisis.
“In an awful irony,” says Keller, “Trump issued his order on World Refugee Day. As Trump ordered asylum seekers to be locked up with their children, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement saying, ‘We will continue to help the world’s most vulnerable refugees, reflecting the deeply held values of the American people.’ Yesterday’s executive order is one more demonstration that neither Trump nor Pompeo gives a damn about those American values.”