Instead of some appeal to feels, I’m going to lay out the facts explaining WHY these family separations are occurring. The first point to understand is that an Administration can choose to treat illegal immigration as either a misdemeanor (crime) or a civil wrong.
If an Administration treats illegal immigration as a civil wrong, it works pretty much like a traffic ticket. The immigrant is given a deportation hearing date and is then released. But if it is treated as a crime, he can be detained along with his family (if with him).
The Trump Administration has chosen to treat illegal immigration as a crime rather than a civil wrong. I believe they started implementing the policy in April. The result has been a sharp uptick in detentions, including detention of children. I emphasize that this is a CHOICE.
Because of a court case called Flores — a case brought by immigration activists to discourage treating illegal immigration as a crime requiring detentions — children must be released after 20 days. These are the “separations” we are now seeing in the news.
A brief aside: it seems obvious to me that the immigration activists thought that forcing separations after only 20 days was so harsh and cruel that no Administration would dare try it. And no one did for almost 20 years. Okay, back to the main thread…
Now GOPers in Congress want to fix the problem — by eliminating the 20 day rule and allowing kids to be detained in facilities close to their parents. Dems, of course, oppose this. They basically want to decriminalize illegal immigration altogether and end all detentions.
Bottom line: as I said yesterday, neither side is being honest. I’ll start with Republicans. The GOP and the Trump Administration are not being honest in arguing that the law REQUIRES them to detain illegal immigrations (and separate families). It’s still a choice.
Democrats are not being honest about their real intentions: to decriminalize immigration altogether or at least the government’s ability to detain them. And we all know why: rightly or wrongly, Dems see illegal immigrants as future citizens and future Dem voters. So do GOPers.
The problem doesn’t get solved because Dems want to force GOPers to be harsh and even cruel to children of illegal immigrants so that they can score political points. They don’t want to let GOPers off the hook by eliminating the requirement that kids be separated after 20 days.
Last point: none of this is to say which policy should prevail on the merits. I have my opinions on that issue, but this isn’t the thread for them. But this kind of dishonesty and gamesmanship on both sides is one big reason why immigration never gets fixed in the first place.
