The Kids Again

By Mickey Friedman
October 19, 2018

There was a time when I wouldn’t watch the news or read the national newspapers. Now that I occasionally comment about national and international affairs, I feel compelled to daily check the Times, Washington Post, online news outlets, and to monitor cable TV news. And quite frankly I am emotionally exhausted from absorbing the constant, shrill rants of our President, the daily assault on our dignity and the near complete erosion of mutual respect. We careen from one crisis to another.

Correspondents as different in temperament as Omarosa, Anonymous, and Bob Woodward have revealed a government so fraught with chaos that senior White House advisors, former Wall Street multimillionaires, ex-CEOs of the most powerful multinational corporations, even former generals call our President an effing moron.

I’ve experienced one emotional roller coaster after another: the revelation of Russian interference in our election, firing Comey, the attempt to end Obamacare, Charlottesville, the continuing threats to fire Sessions, Rosenstein, Mueller, now the elevation of Justice Kavanaugh. And because I’m so very tired, I’ve forgotten about the children. Most of us have forgotten about the children.

Meanwhile the number of migrant kids in custody is now close to thirteen thousand. While our attention has been elsewhere, the New York Times reports “the overall number of detained migrant children has exploded to the highest ever recorded … Population levels at federally contracted shelters for migrant children have quietly shot up more than fivefold since last summer.”

The reason isn’t an increase in the number of children crossing the border but the fact that our government has slowed down releasing these kids. Most crossed into America by themselves. And the increased fear of ICE immigration enforcement has kept family members, friends and other potential sponsors – largely undocumented themselves – from coming forward to provide homes for them.

The Times notes “despite the Trump administration’s efforts to discourage Central American migrants, roughly the same number of children are crossing the border as in years past. Shelter capacities have hovered close to 90 percent since at least May, compared to about 30 percent a year ago. Any new surge in border crossings, which could happen at any time, could quickly overwhelm the system, operators say.”

Thanks to the Washington Post, we now know that despite repeated denials Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen signed off on family separation. Their April 26, 2018 memo declares: “DHS could ‘permissibly direct the separation of parents or legal guardians and minors held in immigration detention so that the parent or legal guardian can be prosecuted.’ It outlines three options for implementing ‘zero tolerance,’ the policy of increased prosecution of immigration violations. Of these, it recommends “Option 3,” referring for prosecution all adults crossing the border without authorization, ‘including those presenting with a family unit,’ as the ‘most effective.’”

Spurred on by public criticism, the Office of Inspector General of DHS conducted secret inspections of Customs and Border Control and ICE facilities in Texas in June. Their September 27, 2018 report states: “DHS was not fully prepared to implement the Administration’s Zero Tolerance Policy or to deal with some of its after-effects …During Zero Tolerance, CBP also held alien children separated from their parents for extended periods in facilities intended solely for short-term detention.
“DHS also struggled to identify, track, and reunify families separated under Zero Tolerance due to limitations with its information technology systems, including a lack of integration between systems.
“Finally, DHS provided inconsistent information to aliens who arrived with children during Zero Tolerance, which resulted in some parents not understanding that they would be separated from their children, and being unable to communicate with their children after separation.”
The report detailed several major failures: “at least 860 migrant children were left in Border Patrol holding cells longer than the 72-hour limit mandated by U.S. courts, with one minor confined for 12 days and another for 25. Many of those children were put in chain-link holding pens in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas. The facilities were designed as short-term way stations, lacking beds and showers, while the children awaited transfer to shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services …

“Based on observations conducted by DHS inspectors at multiple facilities along the border in late June, agents separated children too young to talk from their parents in a way that courted disaster … Border Patrol does not provide pre-verbal children with wrist bracelets or other means of identification, nor does Border Patrol fingerprint or photograph most children during processing to ensure that they can be easily linked with the proper file.”

Why are we here? Here’s what the President who brought us Zero Tolerance wrote on Twitter: “If you’re really, really pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people. And if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart.” At least he got the second part right.

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“The Kids Again” was first published on October 11, 2018.

For more information:

DHS Special Investigation Family Separation
https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2018-10/OIG-18-84-Sep18.pdf

https://www.texastribune.org/series/separated-immigrant-families-zero-tolerance/

“Detention of Migrant Children Has Skyrocketed to Highest Levels Ever”
Caitlin Dickerson, September 12, 2018, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/us/migrant-children-detention.html

“Trump’s family separation policy was flawed from the start, watchdog review says”
Nick Miroff, Maria Sacchetti, Seung Min Kim, October 1, 2018, Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trumps-family-separation-policy-was-flawed-from-the-start-watchdog-review-says/2018/10/01/c7134d86-c5ba-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html?

https://www.texastribune.org/2018/10/01/border-asylum-port-of-entry-texas-mexico/

https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/20/politics/ice-arrested-immigrants-sponsor-children/index.html