If they will do this to children, on the flimsiest excuse, they will do it to anyone.
Including, on the flimsiest excuse, you.
Including, on the flimsiest excuse, you.
A fellow in my TL asked why I didn’t speak up while child separations were happening for eight years in the Obama administration. Answer (as an immigration attorney of over fifteen years) - they weren’t.
The idea of zero tolerance for border crossers, etc. began in 2005 in the GW Bush administration with a policy called Operation Streamline. It included mass “trials” with little to no due process - but it DID have exceptions for adults crossing with children.
Operation Streamline continued to be policy well into the Obama administration along the Mexico-US border, although discontinued in all but a few places by 2014.
Around 2014, the Obama administration made a policy change, which indicated that immigrant families (that is, adults who crossed with children) could be detained prior to case processing. That absolutely happened - but CHILDREN WERE NOT SEPARATED FROM PARENTS.
To me, there’s no argument here. Putting a child in a holding cell alone is objectively worse than letting that same child be in that same cell with her parent.
The decision to separate children from their parents began with the Trump administration. It was considered in earlier admins and REJECTED - the quote I’ve seen from former domestic policy adviser Cecilia Muñoz was “that’s not who we are.”
As I said, I’ve worked in immigration for a long time, and there are many grey areas. People do game the system, sneak in, etc., and penalties, deportation, detention - all appropriate in many cases. But hurting kids? Essentially weaponizing them as policy instruments? Fuck that.
That is not who we are.
Some sourcing on this - The NY Times just ran a great article about the history of the policy: nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/…
A good write up on Operation Streamline (although against the policy as a whole - it has a slant): immigrationimpact.com/2015/12/15/ope…
The Wiki page on Operation Streamline - also interesting: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation…
A deep dive policy brief on Operation Streamline from 2010 by Joanna Lydgate, a then-student at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity & Diversity at UC Berkeley School of Law (looks at border issues/crime in depth): law.berkeley.edu/files/Operatio…
I’ll leave it there - plenty of information out there if you’re willing to look. I still believe the point in the first tweet, though. This time immigration’s being used as the excuse for inhumane policies. Next time... who knows?
