The government's policy of separating the children of immigrants and asylum seekers from their parents during detention has rocketed into the national discussion this month. While I briefly addressed it when it was announced last month, recent press access to facilities where children have been "housed"- read imprisoned - and the heartbreaking personal stories of parents separated from their children have fueled a moral outcry against the policy.
One thing I have found lacking in the reporting on the new policy is how it is part of a much larger campaign of persecution targeted at immigrants of all kinds. Before the child separation policy, the administration stopped or sharply curtailed the numbers of refugees the country was taking in. Many of those who managed to get here were sent back because of small problems in their paperwork.
Meanwhile, people who had been granted asylum and have been here for years or even decades are finding their protected status has been revoked for no apparent reason. Hondurans who sought refuge here after a debilitating natural disaster there in 1999 found that this year, after they have spent twenty years building lives here, their protected status will no longer apply and they must find alternative protections or leave. There are 86,000 of them. They are not the only large class of refugees to face this treatment.
Moreover, the administration has increasingly used its authority to deport "criminal aliens" to round up residents who got here and have stayed here using entirely legal means because they committed misdemeanors, some resolved and forgotten years or decades ago. They have families and children here, and they face deportation. There have been multiple reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claiming that legal immigrants are involved in gang activity on flimsy or nonexistent grounds to justify deportations.
Yet the demonization does not end there. The use of public assistance is being very strictly construed by the administration to justify maltreatment of immigrants - again, with all the appropriate paperwork to be here. While immigration law states that a person being a "public charge" is cause for denial of entry or deportation, this administration is choosing to interpret that provision to provide heightened scrutiny to immigrants who use any form of public assistance for any period of time. In some cases, sponsors will receive bills for the cost of the assistance provided.
There are two common threads in each of these examples that I would like to point out. First of all, these measures are all directed against people living here legally. People following the legal process to seek asylum are separated from their children. Green card holders are being deported for petty crimes that wouldn't even earn a (white) teenager an overnight stay in jail. Talk from the administration about wanting to encourage legal immigration is entirely and purposefully misleading. Immigrants without documentation continue to live in constant fear that they or those they know will be targeted by increasing enforcement actions by ICE, and that they will as a result be ripped from their lives to be returned to a place that is no longer their home.
The second commonality I would like to point out is that all of these policy changes have the specific effect of stigmatizing and dehumanizing the individuals involved. The deportation of legal immigrants for petty or victimless crime has nothing to do with enforcing the law and everything to do with associating immigrants with criminality. The same holds for those on public assistance. No serious statistical study has concluded that immigration, legal or otherwise, is a net drain on national resources, but more severe enforcement action is meant to associate immigrants with negative stereotypes about public assistance.
This process is extremely important to understand, because it is how we become numb to moral catastrophes like systematically separating parents from their children, or the worse that I fear is yet to come. The administration protests repeatedly that they are simply enforcing the law, which may in some cases be technically correct, but the point is that they have chosen to enforce it more severely than is necessary on people they don't like. Associating people with criminality is meant to reduce sympathy for them. It is a process with which people of color in this country, particularly black Americans, are all too familiar. I remember watching several hours of media coverage of the discovery that Michael Brown had smoked cannabis, as though that had any relevance to the fact that he was shot half a dozen times while unarmed.
Systematic dehumanization as a policy is, unfortunately, extremely effective. Just today audio was released from one of the detention facilities where migrant children are being - again, there is no other word for it - imprisoned. Over the din of dozens of wailing children, crying for their parents, a guard comments drily "well, we have an orchestra here." This is what associating people with criminality and turning them into threats does. Cracking jokes about the anguish of children who don't know when or if they will see their parents again is revolting. It isn't something that a stable, healthy human being does.
The hostility of the administration toward all kinds of immigrants is open and gratuitous. The administration has and will continue to devise increasingly creative ways to establish a pretext to punish or deport them. It makes every single one of us ridiculous when we dare to utter the words "the land of the free and the home of the brave." The brave are, apparently, so frightened of immigrants seeking to build a life here that we are willing to treat them as unfree. The separation of parents from children is sadistic, and the glee with which it is being defended as legal, moral, even Biblical, is nauseating.
A friend of mine, as he reposted some of the stories of the frightening changes we've seen in the last few years, frequently asked "why aren't we in the streets?" I admit, that question haunts me when I think about terrified crying children by the hundreds supervised by impassive, unmoved guards. Why am I not in the streets? Why aren't all of us? While the roots of this administration's behavior lie in a past many of us still aren't comfortable criticizing, its increasing heavy-handedness and depravity demand action. It isn't enough to make our opinions known. We need to organize aggressively to make our power felt.
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