ICE is full of sociopaths and should definitely be abolished, but it’s been hard this week to watch two separate scandals get conflated.
1. Lost children. Under the Obama administration, children who arrived at the border without a parent (UACs) were put into shelters while HHS looked for someone to place them with. No one was being ripped from their parents. This was a GOOD policy.
We WANT those kids to be placed with family or caregivers bc the alternative is them being sent back or kept in detention. Obviously the problem lies in lack of HHS screening/follow-up to make sure these kids were safe in their placements.
The “Lost Kids” could have fallen into the hands of traffickers (which would be awful) but it seems likely that many of them simply didn’t want the govt to know their whereabouts, understandably.
I fear that overcorrection here might mean they stay detained longer, or have to wear ankle bracelets or do regular ICE checkins or something. That would be bad!
2. Separating children from their parents at the border: this is a new Trump admin policy. It is objectively terrible and inhumane in every way. It is untrue to say, however, that the children separated from parents and detained in the last few weeks are among the “lost.”
The # of “Lost Kids” is from 2017, pre-separation policy. cnn.com/2018/05/26/pol…
In any case, ICE is an agency created (in 2003!) to terrorize immigrant families, and it should be the bare minimum we ask of Dem politicians to abolish it. #abolishICE
P.S. plz do not take from this thread that Obama was good for immigrants. He was mostly bad!
