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<div class="header reader-header" style="display: block;"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/trump-immigration-child-family-separation-policy">https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/trump-immigration-child-family-separation-policy</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Roots of Trump’s Immigration
Barbarity</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Daniel Denvir - June 20,
2018<br>
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<p>The <a
href="https://www.azcentral.com/picture-gallery/news/politics/immigration/2014/06/18/first-glimpse-of-immigrant-children-at-holding-facility/10808687/">photos</a>
seemed to speak for themselves, perfectly capturing
the heartbreaking brutality of the Trump
administration’s immigration crackdown. In one, two
girls, likely Central American, detained at a US
Customs and Border Protection center in Nogales,
Arizona, sleep face down on the floor of a cage.</p>
<p>Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter and host of
the liberal “Pod Save America” podcast, <a
href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/may/29/donald-trump/trump-correctly-tweets-democrats-mistakenly-tweete/">tweeted</a>:
“Look at these pictures. This is happening right now,
and the only debate that matters is how we force our
government to get these kids back to their families as
fast as humanly possible.”</p>
<p>It turned out, however, that the photos were from
2014. Favreau’s boss, President Barack Obama, was
engaged in his own harsh crackdown on Central American
asylum seekers — an error Trump was unsurprisingly
quick to point out on Twitter: “Democrats mistakenly
tweet 2014 pictures from Obama’s term showing children
from the Border in steel cages. They thought it was
recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but
backfires. Dems must agree to Wall and new Border
Protection for good of country…Bipartisan Bill!”</p>
<p>What neither Favreau nor Trump likely grasped was how
perfectly the imbroglio encapsulated the confusion and
amnesia that pervade mainstream debate over Trump’s
immigration policies.</p>
<p>On the one hand, Favreau’s error is a hopeful one:
liberals, politicians and ordinary Americans alike,
are outraged at Trump’s unbridled racism and cruelty,
rallying to the cause of DREAMers threatened with
losing their legal authorization to remain in the
United States, <a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/airport-protests-trump-muslim-ban-jfk/">mobilizing
at airports</a> in defense of those targeted by the
Muslim ban, and pushing their elected officials to
resist deportations through state and local sanctuary
measures.</p>
<p>But most every horrific measure taken by Trump has a
policy precedent in similar, if less breathtakingly
inhumane, actions taken by his establishment
predecessors — predecessors who, alongside the
nativist right and their mouthpieces on Fox News and
talk radio, helped move the conservative <a
href="https://www.vox.com/2017/12/21/16806676/strikethrough-how-trump-overton-window-extreme-normal">Overton
Window</a> on immigration so far to the right that
by November 2016 it perfectly framed Donald Trump.</p>
<p>The images and stories that have captured headlines
in recent days depict a barbarically cruel
anti-immigrant agenda from Trump, rightfully moving
many to grief and anger and perhaps to action. But if
we want to stop Trump’s deportation machine, we have
to confront the key role Democrats played alongside
establishment Republicans in creating it. It’s the
only way to halt the spiral of anti-immigrant cruelty
that brought us to the horrific images of family
separation we see today.</p>
</section>
<aside></aside>
<section id="ch-1">
<p>Favreau did tweet an admission of his error. But in
doing so he made another, more substantial one. “These
awful pictures are from 2014, when the government’s
challenge was reconnecting unaccompanied minors who
showed up at the border with family or a safe
sponsor,” wrote Favreau. “Today, in 2018, the
government is CREATING unaccompanied minors by tearing
them away from family at the border.”</p>
<p>That’s a partial and highly misleading description of
Obama immigration policy circa 2014. The photo in
question <em>was</em> likely of unaccompanied minors
apprehended at the border who would later be released
to relatives. But as the<em> Arizona Republic</em> <a
href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/immigration/2014/06/18/arizona-immigrant-children-holding-area-tour/10780449/">noted</a>,
“they are still children in cages.”</p>
<p>Favreau’s biggest mistake, however, was obscuring the
bigger picture of what Obama was doing at the time: an
influx of Central American asylum-seekers fleeing
brutal gang violence (which is itself <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/07/20/deporting-people-made-central-americas-gangs-more-deportation-wont-help/?utm_term=.08dbacb3019d">rooted
firmly</a> in US government policy) sought asylum in
the United States, so he put these families <a
href="https://www.vox.com/2014/8/6/5971003/artesia-immigrants-detention-due-process-families-lawyers-asylum-court-border">into
detention</a> en masse to send a tough message to
would-be migrants down south <em>and</em>
anti-immigrant voters at home.</p>
<p>The Obama administration opened a facility to
incarcerate asylum-seekers fleeing for their lives in
southeastern New Mexico, far from where most lawyers
who could represent them in asylum proceedings live,
as Wil S. Hylton described in a February 2015 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/magazine/the-shame-of-americas-family-detention-camps.html"><em>New
York Times Magazine</em></a> story. And so
volunteer lawyers <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/magazine/the-shame-of-americas-family-detention-camps.html">rushed
to the small town of Artesia</a>. What they found
when they arrived were “young women and children
huddled together. Many were gaunt and malnourished,
with dark circles under their eyes.” “Kids vomiting
all over the place.” “A big outbreak of fevers.”
“Pneumonia, scabies, lice.” A school that often did
not seem to be open.</p>
<p>Such detentions would serve, the Obama administration
hoped, as a deterrent.</p>
<p>“It will now be more likely that you will be detained
and sent back,” Department of Homeland Security
secretary Jeh Johnson forebodingly <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/us/homeland-security-chief-opens-largest-immigration-detention-center-in-us.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer">warned</a>.
Johnson was “standing on a dirt road lined with cabins
in a barren compound enclosed by fencing,” celebrating
the opening of a massive detention facility for women
and their children in Dilley, Texas. It was run by the
for-profit Corrections Corporation of America. (The
company has since changed its name to the more
antiseptic CoreCivic, which pledges to “Better the
Public Good.”)</p>
<p>Johnson didn’t call Mexicans “rapists” or suggest
that what the United States really needed was more
Norwegians. But the message was clear: regardless of
your right to asylum under US and international law,
the US government will lock you up in degrading and
harmful conditions and then send you back home to your
possible death if you dare request their protection.</p>
<p>The same day Johnson visited the detention center in
Artesia, according to one of Hylton’s sources, ICE
deported seventy-nine people back to the US-tilled
killing fields of El Salvador. Ten youth were later
reported to have been killed.</p>
<p>Today, it was reported that Trump would soon sign an
executive order ending family separation. His method?
Resurrecting Obama’s policy of detaining families
together, which was ultimately blocked in federal
court.</p>
<p>Journalists still have trouble making sense of
Obama’s actions. On Saturday, the <em>New York Times</em>
<a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/politics/family-separation-trump.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news">took
pains</a> to explain that officials like Johnson and
domestic policy advisor Cecilia Muñoz had “struggles
with illegal immigration,” which is what led them to
incarcerate asylum-seeking families. “The steps led to
just the kind of brutal images that Mr. Obama’s
advisers feared: hundreds of young children, many
dirty and some in tears, who were being held with
their families in makeshift detention facilities.” The
images were bad, which made Obama look bad. But there
was lots of heart-wrenching, liberal soul-searching,
and so Obama wasn’t so bad.</p>
<p>It’s a strong contrast to the palpable sense of
liberal outrage at Trump’s policies. But that outrage
is a very good thing, even if it muddies the
historical record of Obama and others’ misdeeds. Trump
has hastened a welcome polarization over immigration
that has been <a
href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/15/americans-views-of-immigrants-marked-by-widening-partisan-generational-divides/">underway
since</a> the Bush administration: liberals who once
shared conservatives’ antipathy toward undocumented
immigrants have become increasingly sympathetic and
solidaristic as immigration becomes a partisan issue.
Polarization and partisanship around immigration is <em>good</em>
— the old consensus was horrific.</p>
<p>But liberal rhetoric too often elides the
uncomfortably mainstream roots of Trump’s crackdowns
and thus obscures the concrete solutions that we
should demand.</p>
</section>
<aside></aside>
<section id="ch-2">
<p>Many liberals appear to think that we had a
relatively humane immigration enforcement system
before Trump took office. In fact, Presidents Clinton,
Bush, and Obama thoroughly militarized the border
(including constructing hundreds of miles of a wall),
<a
href="https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2017-Dec/BP%20Staffing%20FY1992-FY2017.pdf">nearly
quintupled</a> the size of the Border Patrol, and
constructed a mercilessly smooth system linking the
mass incarceration to a terrifyingly gargantuan
deportation pipeline.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most bizarre thing about the debate over
Trump’s immigration policies, which has centered on
the Dreamers and the insistence on funding for his
“big, fat, beautiful wall,” is how it has
recapitulated the basic immigration policy framework
under his two most recent predecessors. Trump’s <a
href="https://ogletree.com/shared-content/content/blog/2018/february/president-trumps-four-pillars-for-immigration-reform">demand</a>
has been this: legal status for DREAMers must be
accompanied by the elimination of the diversity visa
lottery, sharp limitations on the priority given to
reunifying families in awarding visas for legal
immigration, and, of course, $25 billion for his wall,
since Mexico apparently doesn’t want to pay for it.</p>
<p>Many Democrats have rejected this, which is good. But
it all obscures an important historical irony:
combining legalization measures with deportation and
border enforcement crackdowns (along with a larger
supply of second-class guest workers for profiteering
businesses) is <em>precisely</em> the mainstream,
bipartisan establishment framework for immigration
“reform” that guided a) repeated and failed
legislation under Bush and Obama and b) executive
enforcement actions under Bush and Obama.</p>
<p>After Trump took office, apprehensions of
unauthorized border crossers sharply declined, leading
the president to eagerly take <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-trump-effect-has-slowed-illegal-us-border-crossings-but-for-how-long/2017/05/21/dfa12a0a-39be-11e7-a59b-26e0451a96fd_story.html?utm_term=.19c7a01e998e">credit</a>:
his tough talk had accomplished what his soft-spoken
predecessors could or would not. But the celebration
was premature. The number of crossings, as measured by
apprehensions, soon began to rise again, despite
Trump’s best efforts. It’s part of a longstanding
pattern: immigration crackdowns mollify nativists in
the short term but ultimately fail to accomplish their
stated objective, leading to further calls for even
harsher crackdowns.</p>
<p>And so Trump was confronted with the same reality
that met prior presidents since before President
Clinton <a
href="http://articles.latimes.com/1995-05-07/news/mn-63503_1_illegal-immigrants">asserted</a>,
in 1995, “We won’t tolerate immigration by people
whose first act is to break the law as they enter our
country.”</p>
<p>Border militarization and deportation crackdowns are
a performance aimed at satisfying anti-immigrant
voters and can have only a limited impact on changing
migration patterns on the ground. Many politicians
assume that tougher policies along the border deter
immigration, but they mostly don’t. And so new,
tougher scripts are written up and acted out, to the
same effect, again and again. This is what led Trump
to the family separation campaign.</p>
<p>Immigration continues, immigrants continue to suffer
expulsion and death in the Sonoran Desert, and a
hardcore nativist voting bloc is conditioned to expect
and demand even more draconian policies. One shudders
to think what kind of savagery Trump’s administration
will come up with next.</p>
</section>
<aside></aside>
<section id="ch-3">
<p>But this historical dynamic eludes most journalists,
and so much reporting on the family separation policy
has been confused.</p>
<p>In reality, what Trump is doing is directing federal
prosecutors to charge every possible migrant who
crosses between official ports of entry with illegally
entering the country. And people charged with illegal
entry or reentry would have always been separated from
their children, because they are transferred to
federal criminal custody.</p>
<p>The <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/us/politics/homeland-security-prosecute-undocumented-immigrants.html">plan
was family separation</a> by way of maximally <a
href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1049751/download">applying
existing tools</a>: <em>all</em> immigrants caught
crossing without authorization between ports of entry
— and not just some or many, as under past
administrations — would be prosecuted for the federal
misdemeanor of illegal entry.</p>
<p>In federal courts, prosecutions of immigrants charged
with illegally reentering the country rose steadily
under Presidents Clinton and Bush, then <a
href="http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/430/">skyrocketed</a> under
Obama. Prosecutions for illegally entering the country
rose as well. By 2016, people convicted of
immigration-related offenses <a
href="https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp">made
up</a> roughly 9 percent of the federal prison
population, or 15,702 inmates.<strong> </strong></p>
<p>Trump’s, then, is not the first crackdown. In 2005,
the Bush administration launched Operation Streamline
as part of its “enforcement with consequences”
approach to target a much broader swath of migrants.
Since then, federal law enforcement have used
magistrate judges to <a
href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-08-15/migrants-face-growing-cattle-call-american-criminal-courts">oversee
“cattle calls”</a>: mass guilty pleas from groups as
large as dozens of defendants at once, at times
prosecuted not by assistant US attorneys but by
immigration officials <a
href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1884354">who
may not</a> even be licensed to practice law.</p>
<p>Just as immigration law became increasingly
indistinguishable from criminal law, the former has
suffered from similarly weak due-process protections
as the latter, as harsh potential sentences were used
to coerce defendants into guilty pleas. The court
system was converted into a massive,
prosecutor-directed assembly line to prison and
deportation. As of 2016, <a
href="http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/446/">according
to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse</a>,
more than half of all federal prosecutions were for
these two migration crimes of entry and re-entry.</p>
<p>It’s still too early to measure the full scope of
Trump’s policies, because data for illegal entry and
reentry charges is not yet available for May or June.
But prosecutions have been on the rise over Trump’s
time in office, according to data from the
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In April,
the number of prosecutions for illegal entry stood at
4,521, up from 2,080 in January 2017.</p>
<p>Yet in December 2012, under Obama, the number
prosecuted reached a high of 6,701. Under Bush, they
reached an even higher point, of 7,137, in September
2008. The number of prosecutions frequently topped
5,000 during Bush’s final year of office, and
vacillated throughout Obama’s two terms.</p>
<p>Prosecutions for illegal reentry have been relatively
stable under Trump, reaching 2,916 in April of this
year, just somewhat higher than the 2,198 in January
2017. Those numbers were considerably below the
highpoint of 3,671 reached under Obama in April 2013,
and somewhat above the highpoint of 2,206 reached in
October 2008 during Bush’s final months in office.</p>
<p>How many children are being separated? 2,342 children
<a
href="https://www.vox.com/2018/6/19/17479138/how-many-families-separated-border-immigration">were
separated</a> from 2,206 parents or guardians at the
Mexican border between May 5 and June 9 — but CBP
claims that they could not provide me with data going
back to prior months and years. For now, precisely how
Trump’s cruel policy compares to his predecessors’ is
difficult to determine, though people working on the
ground <a
href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/anguish-southwest-border-more-immigrant-children-are-separated-parents-n874821">report</a>
a major increase in separations.</p>
<p>At least on a policy level, family separation is
incidental to the policy of prosecuting every
unauthorized crosser for committing a federal crime:
if you’re charged with a federal crime, you’re
remanded from the immigration officials to a federal
lockup. In part, as Roque Planas <a
href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trumps-family-separation-policy-is-meant-to-deter-immigration-that-could-make-it-illegal_us_5b194b89e4b0599bc6e17605">writes</a>
at <em>HuffPost</em>, that’s because a strategy that
was explicitly aimed at using detention as a means to
deter migration might not pass legal muster. This is
partly why Obama’s detention program was ultimately
shut down <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/us/detained-immigrant-children-judge-dolly-gee-ruling.html">by
federal judges</a>.</p>
<p>Trump’s solution is to launder their deterrence
policy through a criminal justice system that can
normalize most any horror.</p>
<p>Indeed, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions defends
family separation by <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2018/06/06/no-jeff-sessions-we-dont-treat-immigrant-families-the-way-we-treat-other-criminals/?utm_term=.13fec4ac8f21">saying</a>,
“every time somebody…gets prosecuted in America for a
crime, American citizens, and they go to jail, they’re
separated from their children,” he’s not wrong. Though
he’s right, of course, for the wrong reasons: Sessions
believes that the system of mass incarceration is
good.</p>
<p>A Bureau of Justice Statistics <a
href="https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/pptmc.pdf">study
estimated</a> that in 2004, 1,596,100 minor children
had a parent incarcerated in state prison at the time
that parent was admitted; 282,600 children had parents
locked up in federal prisons. Family separation,
including the widespread separation of poor mothers
(particularly poor mothers of color) by child
protection services, is a core feature of what the
American carceral system does. Indeed, incarcerated
women are often shackled while <a
href="https://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/women-and-criminal-justice/heres-how-prison-and-jail-systems-brutalize-women">giving
birth</a>, and then have their babies <a
href="https://nwhjournal.org/article/S1751-4851%2817%2930335-5/fulltext?code=nwh-site">taken
from</a> them by child protective services
twenty-four hours later.</p>
<p>The systems of mass incarceration and mass immigrant
enforcement have for decades become increasingly
intertwined and normalized — including, critically,
through Obama’s rollout of the Secure Communities
program, which made local police the front door to the
federal deportation pipeline. With Trump’s latest
policies, many are discovering that our norms are
reprehensible.</p>
</section>
<aside></aside>
<section id="ch-4">
<p>So what precisely has changed at the border?
According to Dara Lind, <em>Vox</em>‘s immigration
reporter, the most consequential change is the
widespread prosecution of asylum-seekers crossing
between ports of entry for illegal entry. That is
notably and newly cruel. Meanwhile, asylum-seekers who
present themselves at ports of entry are sometimes
being stopped from setting foot on US soil, and even,
in some cases, being separated from their children.</p>
<p>These are inhumane policies. But they are being
carried out by way of longstanding political and legal
norms of anti-immigrant cruelty.</p>
<p>The point here is not to wag a finger at liberal
hypocrisy or ignorance. Rather, we need to understand
this history to make concrete proposals that can help
solve the problem. We should repeal laws criminalizing
illegal entry and reentry. Short of that, we should
insist that Congress pass a law that bars the
prosecution of asylum-seekers for illegal entry. And
we can and should demand that the law recognize,
contrary to Attorney General Sessions’s recent
decision, that people can claim asylum when they are
running from violence perpetrated by non-state actors
like gangs or domestic partners.</p>
<p>Correctly analyzing Trump’s child separation campaign
is emblematic of a larger analytical and rhetorical
needle that the Left struggles to thread: emphasizing
that Trump’s awful policies are often <em>far too
normal</em> and rooted in longstanding bipartisan
establishment norms, while also recognizing and
condemning the fact that he is taking those norms to
dangerous, new extremes. Normal policies look worse
when a brazenly racist monster like Trump does them.</p>
<p>But Trump is also blazing new trails in cruelty, and
the spotlight on that cruelty offers a unique chance
to stop it. The Left and immigrant rights movement
should welcome the fact that border walls, deportation
raids, and jailed children that might have been
ignored or welcomed if put in place under Clinton,
Bush, or Obama are finally being exposed for the
monstrosities that they are. But we can’t let
establishment Democrats pretend like they’re leading
the resistance. They helped create the problem.</p>
</section>
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