It’s been hard to watch and hard to turn away from. It shouldn’t have been so shocking. The crisis at the Texas border was in many ways predictable. The Trump administration’s new zero tolerance twist on an old immigration law and its hard-line implementation was meant to send a strong "keep out" message.
But desperation is a powerful motivator. And the desperate parents from Honduras, Mexico and El Salvador were willing to risk it all for a future free of gangs for their children and for a chance to plead for asylum. Apparently nobody considered the impact on the rest of us. Like millions of other Americans, I was horribly transfixed by the images of children wrenched from their mothers and fathers, and devastated by the recordings of frightened children begging their parents not to leave them. And I was chilled by the automaton efficiency with which Homeland Security Chief Kirsten Nielsen defended the administration’s hard line — no, there is no child separation policy, yes, we need to protect the US from potentially dangerous invaders, period. Denunciations and demonstrations, and even comments from the first lady and from first daughter Ivanka seemed only to solidify Trump's position.
I did not expect the president to change the policy he had claimed did not exist just hours earlier. And it’s clear he didn’t want to.
“Democrats put illegal immigrants before they put American citizens.” That’s what President Trump told the cheering crowd in Duluth, Minnesota hours after he had signed the executive order to stop the separations.
Going forward detained families — and they all will be detained — will be allowed to stay together. But that order does not mean the kids in cages and the babies and toddlers already assigned to the so-called “tender age” shelters will be reunited with their parents. They will not be, confirms Trump administration officials. Worse, because of bureaucratic snafus and confusion, many of the thousands being held may never see their parents again.
The president and the supporters of his zero tolerance policy believe that this unconscionable action is the best way to protect America’s borders. I am certainly not a security expert, but I am looking beyond this moment to a time when the kids made orphans by our government grow up. When they have had years to cope with the PTSD the experts anticipate they’ll suffer. Years to link their deep resentment not to a bad immigration policy, but to all the people for whom the policy was supposed to protect. Tell me this is not an incubator for terrorism.
