Dr. Michelle Martin is a researcher and professor at California State University, Fullerton. She has a Masters of Social Work, Masters in Global Policy, and a Ph.D. in Peace Studies (Political Science). She teaches Social Welfare Policy in the Master of Social Work program.
The following is her write-up on the separation of families at the border. She dispells a lot of common myths going around and provides sources which are linked. This might be helpful in your personal debates and discussions.
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There is so much misinformation out there about the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy that requires criminal prosecution, which then warrants the separating of parents and children at the southern border. Before responding to a post defending this policy, please do your research…As a professor at a local Cal State, I research and write about these issues, so here, I wrote the following to make it easier for you:
Myth: This is not a new policy and was practiced under Obama and Clinton.
FALSE. The policy to separate parents and children is new and was instituted on 4/6/2018. It was the “brainchild” of John Kelly and Stephen Miller to serve as a deterrent for undocumented immigration, and some allege to be used as a bargaining chip. The policy was approved by Trump, and adopted by Sessions. Prior administrations detained migrant families, but didn’t have a practice of forcibly separating parents from their children unless the adults were deemed unfit.
Myth: This is the only way to deter undocumented immigration.
FALSE. Annual trends show that arrests for undocumented entry are at a 46 year low, and undocumented crossings dropped in 2007, with a net loss (more people leaving than arriving). Deportations have increased steadily though (spiking in 1996 and more recently), because several laws that were passed since 1996 have made it more difficult to gain legal status for people already here, and thus increased their deportations (I address this later under the myth that it’s the Democrats’ fault). What we mostly have now are people crossing the border illegally because they’ve already been hired by a US company, or because they are seeking political asylum. Economic migrants come to this country because our country has kept the demand going. But again, many of these people impacted by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy appear to be political asylum-seekers.
Myth: Most of the people coming across the border are just trying to take advantage of our country by taking our jobs.
FALSE. Most of the parents who have been impacted by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy have presented themselves as political asylum-seekers at a U.S. port-of-entry, from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Rather than processing their claims, according to witness accounts, it appears as though they have been taken into custody on the spot and had their children ripped from their arms. The ACLU alleges that this practice violates the US Asylum Act, and the UN asserts that it violates the UN Treaty on the State of Refugees, one of the few treaties the US has ratified. The ACLU asserts that this policy is an illegal act on the part of the United States government, not to mention morally and ethically reprehensible.
Myth: We’re a country that respects the Rule of Law, and if people break the law, this is what they get.
FALSE. We are a country that has an above-ground system of immigration and an underground system. Our government (under both parties) has always been aware that US companies recruit workers in the poorest parts of Mexico for cheap labor, and ICE (and its predecessor INS) has looked the other way because this underground economy benefits our country to the tune of billions of dollars annually. Thus, even though many of the people crossing the border now are asylum-seekers, those who are economic migrants (migrant workers) likely have been recruited here to do jobs Americans will not do.
Myth: The children have to be separated from their parents because the parents must be arrested and it would be cruel to put children in jail with their parents.
FALSE. First, in the case of economic migrants crossing the border illegally, criminal prosecution has not been the legal norm, and families have historically been kept together at all cost. Also, crossing the border without documentation is typically a misdemeanor not requiring arrest, but rather has been handled in a civil proceeding. Additionally, parents who have been detained have historically been detained with their children in ICE “family residential centers,” again, for civil processing. The Trump administration’s shift in policy is for political purposes only, not legal ones.
Myth: We have rampant fraud in our asylum process, the proof of which is the significant increase we have in the number of people applying for asylum.
FALSE. The increase in asylum seekers is a direct result of the increase in civil conflict and violence across the globe. While some people may believe that we shouldn’t allow any refugees into our country because “it’s not our problem,” neither our current asylum law, nor our ideological foundation as a country support such an isolationist approach. There is very little evidence to support Sessions’ claim that abuse of our asylum-seeking policies is rampant. Also, what Sessions failed to mention is that the majority of asylum seekers are from China, not South of the border.
Here is a very fair and balanced assessment of his statements: [ source ]
Myth: The Democrats caused this, “it’s their law.“
FALSE. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats caused this, the Trump administration did (although the Republicans could fix this today, and have refused). I believe what this myth refers to is the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which were both passed under Clinton in 1996. These laws essentially made unauthorized entry into the US a crime (typically a misdemeanor for first-time offenders), but under both Republicans and Democrats, these cases were handled through civil deportation proceedings, not a criminal proceeding, which did not require separation. And again, even in cases where detainment was required, families were always kept together in family residential centers, unless the parents were deemed unfit (as mentioned above). Thus, Trump’s assertion that he hates this policy but has no choice but to separate the parents from their children, because the Democrats “gave us this law” is false and nothing more than propaganda designed to compel negotiation on bad policy.
Myth: The parents and children will be reunited shortly, once the parents’ court cases are finalized.
FALSE. Criminal court is a vastly different beast than civil court proceedings. Also, the children are being processed as unaccompanied minors (“unaccompanied alien children”), which typically means they are in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS). Under normal circumstances when a child enters the country without his or her parent, ORR attempts to locate a family member within a few weeks, and the child is then released to a family member, or if a family member cannot be located, the child is placed in a residential center (anywhere in the country), or in some cases, foster care. Prior to Trump’s new policy, ORR was operating at 95% capacity, and they simply cannot effectively manage the influx of 2000+ children, some as young as 4 months old. Also, keep in mind, these are not unaccompanied minor children, they have parents. There is great legal ambiguity on how and even whether the parents will get their children back because we are in uncharted territory right now. According to the ACLU lawsuit (see below), there is currently no easy vehicle for reuniting parents with their children. Additionally, according to a May 2018 report, numerous cases of verbal, physical and sexual abuse were found to have occurred in these residential centers.
LIKELY FALSE. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on 5/6/18, and a recent court ruling denied the government’s motion to dismiss the suit. The judge deciding the case stated that the Trump Administration’s policy is “brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency.” The case is moving forward because it was deemed to have legal merit.
The Trump administration is not only doing everything it can to discourage immigration of all sorts, it intends to launch an effort to identify naturalized American citizens it believes cheated the naturalization process and strip them of their American citizenship. The extraordinary process of denaturalizing an American citizen has occurred very rarely, with the Justice Department filing an estimated 300 civil denaturalization cases since 1990. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna, however, told the Associated Press that the agency is ramping up its efforts to identify citizens who, for instance, assumed new identities in order to avoid deportation and claim a green card or citizenship.
Cissna said his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of suspected fraud. “We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
While there is certainly a legitimate government interest in not allowing people into the country under assumed identities—previously this effort targeted literal Nazis and suspected war criminals trying to escape prosecution under assumed identities—the potential for the effort to be used as a means of intimidation and to find small discrepancies or errors in an individual’s naturalization paperwork is problematic. The Trump administration says it does not plan on pursuing deportations based on technicalities, but this is also an administration that is savagely separating families at the border as a form of deterrence to would-be undocumented immigrants.
Here’s a call script for your Senators and/or representatives – scroll down to “Tell your members of Congress: Condemn the Trump administration’s separation of families.” This is especially important if you live in a red state.Trump is trying to claim that the separation of families is due to a “law” enacted by Democrats – there is no such law. This is a Trump administration policy. It’s important for Republicans to know we don’t believe his lies, and that we know exactly who is responsible for this. Calling Democratic members of Congress helps, too – even if they already support keeping families together at the border, it will help to continue to encourage them to take action.
…is what the architecture and layout of Six Flags reminds me of?
Hmm. “Thrills” and emotional rollercoaster rides. Superficial, performative joy with ugliness underneath (Employees eating on food stamps). Always under surveillance, no place for true rest. And a gift shop. Sounds about right.
Shortly after the election, I had an odd moment while checking Facebook. A friend of mine whose family is going to be extremely vulnerable to Trump’s minions had posted a reply to one of my posts saying she was scared. She lives in a red state bordering my blue one. I started typing something out about how, you know, if the red state gets to be too much you can always come visit us…and I had a kind of little mini panic attack.
Because part of me meant, “Come out and see us sometime, it’ll be fun.” And part of me meant, “If you ever need to escape, you can stay with us.”
At that moment I realized: whatever happens, we will be resisting it. That’s who I am, that’s who I married, that’s who I’m raising.
It didn’t make me feel good about myself. It made me feel sick to my stomach. For a while. Because if in fact it gets that bad, people like me and my family are fucked. Some people can keep their heads down and come through it unscathed. We are not going to be those people. We can’t be those people and at the same time be ourselves. Without the will to resist, our family itself cannot exist.
I think my brain did that to me as a kind of dry run. As a way of saying, this is who you are, so start thinking about what that’s maybe going to mean.
As part of that, I’ve been thinking about heroes, and how distorted our understanding of heroism and bravery has become. I think this is damaging because we need to know that heroism as we see it in popular culture is a myth. We in the real world are not heroes and that’s OK because we don’t need to be heroes. We only need to be ordinary people with compassion for other ordinary people.
Feeling this again today, definitely. Also, this was bracing to reread: “We’re going to be feeling, all the time, as if we’re failing the test, because it isn’t over yet.” It is easy to get demoralized by the feeling that you are not brave and good enough to do enough. But since none of us is alone, none of us has to do it all, and certainly none of us can do enough to end this crisis. But if you do something, it’s better than nothing, which is a start.
Hearseeno 