In response to the massive public outcry against his policy of the forcible separation of immigrant parents seeking asylum from their children, Trump issued an executive order July 20 that such separations should be stopped.
A victory? Not so fast.
In his executive order, Trump also re-affirmed his “zero tolerance” policy of dealing with asylum seekers who cross the border with Mexico to immediately turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents to begin the process of obtaining asylum.
These mothers and fathers, human beings, as well as their children, are fleeing situations of extreme danger in Central America. The dangers they are seeking to get away from are largely the result of U.S. policies and actions, but that is another whole topic.
These asylum seekers did not “sneak” across the border with their children. For example, coming across the Rio Grande (the border between Mexico and Texas) on rubber tires and other homemade rafts, in full view of the Border Patrol agents in order to turn themselves in to those agents is hardly a subterfuge.
It is “zero tolerance” that has resulted in tearing children from their parents. Under this policy, anyone who crosses the border without papers for any reason, is labeled a “criminal” and arrested and jailed with no possibility of posting bail. Those with children are immediately separated from them, since the children are not charged with a crime as their parents are.
But the children are sent to different jails, called “detention centers”, in sites all across the country, often far from where their parents are held. Some have been flown to New York City, others to Seattle, and God knows what other places in between.
The Trump administration says that these “lawbreakers” should have applied for asylum at sites inside the U.S. just over the border, but the Border Patrol doesn’t allow them to reach those sites since they don’t have the papers allowing them to enter. To obtain visas at U.S. Embassies in their home countries is almost impossible for working class and peasant families, and in these countries possibly dangerous to try to do so.
So there is a flat-out contradiction between “zero tolerance” and Trump’s statement that the children should be reunited with their parents. No wonder that officials charged with doing both are flailing around, saying contradictory things, while the situation on the ground has hardly changed since Trump’s executive order.
The few instances where children have been reunited have largely been the result of a growing group of lawyers who have begun to fight for these victims of U.S. “justice.”
In Trump’s executive order, he proposes a solution to the contradiction. As two of these lawyers, Bred Karp and Gary Wingens, explain in an op-ed in the June 26 New York Times, “President Trump’s recent executive order ending the unlawful and immoral policy of separating children from their parents advances another, equally lawless policy: prolonging the detention of families seeking asylum.”
To do this, Trump proposes scrapping a 1997 court ruling that children cannot be detained longer than 20 days. The only way to square this with stopping the separation of the children would be to keep the children with their parents in jail indefinitely.
On June 24, he proposed another solution: “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no judges or court cases, bring them back from where they came.”
Many have pointed out that both “solutions” are unconstitutional and violate due process. Trump, who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Constitution or due process, is pressing forward.
His position has in fact just been declared constitutional in a ruling by the Supreme Court, also on June 26. This was in a ruling in another aspect of Trump’s immigration policy, his Muslim ban. In a five to four decision, the Court upheld the Muslim ban.
It is the reason the Court gave for doing so that directly relates to this case. The Court said that the president has unbounded authority in deciding how to control the borders. That is now the law of the land. If Trump moves ahead with immediately sending asylum seekers and their children back to their home countries without any judicial review, that would now be constitutional.
The Supreme court ruling codifies a big step forward for Trump’s drive to consolidate an authoritarian government, with the trappings of bourgeois democracy, like the present Hungarian government under Victor Orban, also a racist hater of immigrants. No wonder he hails it as a great victory for himself.
If the first Trump solution is adopted, that has already been planned for, with Trump’s order to the armed forces to prepare to set up detention centers on military bases equipped to house 20,000. These could house immigrant families and their children. More ominously, Trump could just ignore his own ruling and be prepared to house children separated from their parents in the future in those facilities while deporting their parents
Whatever steps Trump takes moving forward, the children remain locked up and not reunited with their parents. Some parents have already been deported while their children remain in the U.S.
Despite White House claims that the authorities kept careful records of which child belonged to whom, this is widely disbelieved except among Trump’s white racist base. Given the opaqueness of the government on the issue, and its lies and contradictory statements, such disbelief is justified.
Moreover, it is highly unlikely that any such records were ever kept, since the administration has stated that its goal of separating the children in the first place was meant to discourage asylum seekers, and hoped to eventually to place the children in foster homes – in the U.S.
Since his July 20 order, Trump has intensified his anti-immigrant rhetoric, saying that immigrants are “invading” the U.S., are “infesting” the country, are killers, rapists and dope dealers. To drive home his point, he staged a media event with people he said were victims of crimes committed by immigrants.
Moreover, the wider attack on immigrants by the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency have accelerated, with raids on workplaces and other sites sweeping up immigrants without papers into the deportation pipeline.
Protests in the past two weeks have been held in many cities at ICE offices across the country. They are growing bigger and more militant. There have been ongoing “Occupy ICE” encampments blockading ICE facilities in New York, Los Angeles, Portland and Tacoma.
There was a demonstration at the tent city in Tornilla, Texas, housing migrant children. Thousands marched in San Diego, California near the Mexican border. In McAllen, Texas, protestors temporarily blocked a bus carrying migrant children off to no one knows where, chanting “set the children free!”.
A demand not widely heard before, for the elimination of ICE, is becoming more popular, even being embraced by some Democrats, to the consternation of the Democratic establishment, whose members in Congress have regularly voted to fund IEC.
Another manifestation of the growing anger has been spontaneous mass shaming of administration officials when they appear in public. A reporter in the June 26 New York Times wrote: “In recent days, as institutional Democrats wring their hands … [furious activists] and citizens have taken matters into their own hands beyond the corridors of power.
“Progressives have heckled the homeland security secretary, Kirsten Nielsen, and the White House aide Stephen Miller at Washington restaurants. They have ejected the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, from a Lexington, Va., eatery. And they have screamed at one of Mr. Trump’s leading cable news surrogates, Florida’s attorney general, at a movie theater.
“ ‘Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up’ Representative Maxine Walters, Democrat of California, said … at a rally in Los Angeles. “And if you see anybody from [Trump’s] cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Needless to say, these remarks by Waters, who is African American, did not sit well with the Democratic establishment. Nancy Pelosi, leading Democrat in the House, and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, were quick to denounce her remarks.
The road forward is not to look to the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties for a solution to this crisis, for they have none. The task now is to keep the protests going, and extend and enlarge them. Join the shouts leveled at the Trump surrogates of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” for what has been a cruel and evil attack on asylum seekers and their children.
Barry Sheppard