The Inhumanity and Inefficiency of Separating Families at the Border
One of the bigger stories that came about this week pertained to Roseanne Barr whose hit show Roseanne was cancelled by ABC on Tuesday following a racist tweet she made. Now I am not going to dive into the tweet itself and my opinion on Barr because it is not a unique opinion and everybody who is anybody has already made a statement about it. However, (like I always do) I am going to analyze the response. Some conservatives and Trump supporters cried foul when they heard the show was cancelled. �It�s the liberal media trying to silence conservative opinions!� they say.
I�ll leave it at that. There was no scheme among ABC to cancel Roseanne�s show. It was the network�s biggest and most profitable show this year and people loved it. Roseanne brought that success to an end and it will cost ABC a lot of money. They are not happy about this either.
This week�s main story is about a very polarizing and very disturbing policy being implemented by the Trump Administration and Border Patrol to deter migrants from crossing the border: family separation. To put it bluntly, this is an evil policy. President Trump does not even support the measure and somehow managed to blame Democrats for not helping him get rid of it in a Tweet on Sunday. He wants to get rid of the lottery system for migrants, chain migration and he wants to build the wall. He added a repeal to the �horrible law� as he called it of separating children from their parents in his proposal as an excuse to attack the Democrats because he knew they wouldn�t support everything else in the proposal. It�s like drafting a bill that would make littering punishable by death but adding a component that would protect animal rights and then screaming that the people against the bill are in favor of killing puppies. We can all agree that animal rights are important but realize that the death penalty might be a little too harsh a punishment for throwing a soda can out of a car window.
Anyways, this policy is currently being implemented and not only is it inhumane and traumatizing, it is not working. Let me first address how messed up this situation is. The new �zero tolerance� policy enacted by Attorney General Jeff Sessions imprisons and prosecutes anybody who comes to the border in order to enter the United States. This includes people asking for asylum. They are arrested and separated from their children who are then taken care of by the Office of Refugee Resettlement as they await trial.
The thing is, the Office of Refugee Resettlement has taken custody of children who cross the border illegally for years, those that have come unaccompanied. To be able to cross the Mexican-American border alone as a minor you probably are not younger than ten. Now that the Office is taking in children that have been separated from the parents that accompanied them as they crossed the border, very young children and infants are being put into their care. There is no protocol or precedence for the Office to adequately care for these children in their shelters. You cannot deny that a lot more attention is required to take care of an infant compared to a teenager.
The policy of family separation is also not working. The Trump administration has been testing family separation on a smaller scale for years, specifically in the El Paso area. They reported a 64% decrease in illegal immigrants apprehended at the border during the time that they implemented the policy. And while the number of illegal immigrants apprehended during that time period did decrease, the amount of family units apprehended actually increased by 64% (231 in July of 2017 to 379 in November of 2017). So, the law that was meant to deter families from illegally immigrating to the US caused a decrease in overall illegal immigration, it did not stop families from increasingly crossing the border. Not to mention, illegal alien apprehensions over the entire US-Mexico border decreased by 43% from October 2016 to October 2017, making the 64% decrease in the El Paso area pretty consistent with the average across the entire border.
Here�s a suggestion that I have to The Department of Homeland Security, The Justice Department, Congress, and the President: get rid of this horrendous, un-American policy that is creating unnecessary damage first and then let�s discuss everything else. I guarantee that a push to repeal this measure would get bipartisan support. What are we waiting for? That�s all for this week.
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