The Deliberation Over Family Separation

In Charleston, protesters gathered at the steps of the Customs House on Wednesday to rally against the separation of families at the border.

The majority of the news coverage and the focus of the media this week was on the family separation crisis that is currently happening at the US-Mexico border. As of Wednesday afternoon, President Trump signed an executive order that preserved his �zero tolerance policy� but ended family separation. This means that all migrants crossing the border illegally will be prosecuted, but parents will no longer be separated from their children.

            This order is only possible because of the amount of pressure and outrage that has been leveled against the Trump administration for enacting this new policy. I say that it is a new policy because this is a new policy. Attorney General Jeff Sessions unveiled this as a new �zero tolerance policy.� Yes, parents are separated from their children when they commit a crime. That is not new. But prosecuting everybody who crosses the border illegally, seeking asylum or not, is a new policy. Therefore, separating families at the border is a new policy enacted by the Trump administration.

            There are some things that this new order does not address. Will the children already separated from their parents be returned? Is there a timeline for how they will be returned? Considering that these children are being held in places as far away from the border as Pennsylvania and South Carolina, that will be a difficult and confusing process.

            Anyways, there is a lot of outrage and a lot of misinformation spreading as a result of this crisis. I witnessed that outrage when I attended a protest against family separation on Wednesday afternoon in Charleston. The people who were there were passionate and outspoken, and made emotional appeals to ending the separations. On the other hand, some conservatives and defenders of this policy state that they want immigrants to come here legally and seek asylum through a port of entry, not by crossing the border.

 

This photo taken by John Moore at the border last week has become a symbol of the immigration crisis.

  I don�t think anybody is in favor of family separation in general unless the child�s welfare is threatened. I also understand both sides to the issue. This is something that is extremely complex and where there is no perfect solution. Most liberals want immigrants to be able to safely move to the US to escape poverty or persecution. Most conservatives want those immigrants to legally migrate here. There are also reasonable critiques of those two stances because they are both too idealistic. In rebuttal to the common liberal argument, our country cannot accept everybody who comes here fleeing persecution and poverty. We do not have the resources to accept everybody when we already have a major problem with poverty. In rebuttal to the common conservative argument, it is not always easy or possible to legally immigrate here. There are quotas and it is a long process that people in desperate situations do not have time to wait on. There is no perfect solution to this problem.

            However, the optics of this entire situation and the extent to which some pundits and defenders of the Trump administration will go to justify family separation is beyond me. In response to a piece of audio from one of the detention centers of children crying and calling for their parents, Ann Coulter told a panel on Fox News that the kids in those audio clips were �child actors� and then turned to the camera and said, �Do not fall for it Mr. President.�

            On Wednesday morning, Corey Lewandowski, former Trump campaign manager, sarcastically replied, �Womp womp,� after hearing about the story of a ten-year-old girl with Down Syndrome being separated from her mother at the border.

The level at which these commentators stoop to mock, belittle, and downplay the serious implications of what is happening at the border is disgusting. These statements make a reasonable discussion of how to best to fix this problem less and less possible.

The rhetoric from the Trump administration itself is also not helpful to ending this crisis. While President Trump claims he wants to end family separation (which he has done) and is in support of legal immigration, his proposals do not embody that sentiment. His proposal includes cuts to legal immigration. By doing that, more people will cross the border illegally because they will have no other option but that to enter the US. Trump, whether he will admit it or not, does not want more immigrants in this country, illegal or not. There is a theme of blowback towards immigration throughout our history and the many cycles of immigration that we have gone through. It is a pendulum where the more we accept immigrants, the more people will resist it. At the moment, the pendulum is at the peak of its motion. That�s all for this week.