family separation – Sheila Kennedy

“The Black Guy Did It!”

Have you noticed that whenever there is a particularly sharp public outcry over something Donald Trump is doing–a level of pushback that exceeds the expressions of distaste, disagreement and/or horror that regularly greet his version of “policy”–he blames whatever it is on Obama?

The Washington Post gives four Pinocchios to the latest example of Trump’s “don’t blame me, it was the black guy who did it” evasion, his insistence that his inhumane and illegal family separation policy was really Obama’s. They quote him:

“President Obama had child separation. Take a look. The press knows it, you know it, we all know it. I didn’t have — I’m the one that stopped it. President Obama had child separation. … President Obama separated children. They had child separation. I was the one that changed it, okay?”

Trump keeps doubling down on that falsehood. Every time he is attacked about family separation, he repeats it. As the Post reports,

This is a Four Pinocchio claim, yet Trump keeps repeating it when he’s pressed on family separations.

Repetition can’t change reality. There is simply no comparison between Trump’s family separation policy and the border enforcement actions of the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.

In the article, the fact-checker reports that the Obama Administration had actually rejected such a proposal, and that neither the Obama Administration nor the Bush Administration had created or enforced a policy of family separation.

The zero-tolerance approach is worlds apart from the Obama- and Bush-era policy of separating children from adults at the border only in limited circumstances, such as when officials suspected human trafficking or another kind of danger to the child or when false claims of parentage were made.

The article concludes with quotes from Trump–responses to questions, tweets, etc.–documenting the number of times he repeated the lie that the policy was inherited from Obama, and the article links to the copious database of Trump lies that the newspaper maintains.

This particular falsehood illustrates the two utterly reliable aspects of the man who inexplicably occupies the Oval Office: his hatred of Barack Obama (how dare a black man be so obviously superior to him?) and people of color generally; and his inability to tell the truth. (I’m not sure he even recognizes the difference between objective facts and his preferred fantasies.)

The problem is, as Joseph Stiglitz has recently reminded us, America’s successes–both moral and economic–have rested on a process of experimentation, learning and adaptation that requires a commitment to ascertaining the truth.

Americans owe much of their economic success to a rich set of truth-telling, truth-discovering and truth-verifying institutions. Central among them are freedom of expression and media independence. Like all people, journalists are fallible; but, as part of a robust system of checks and balances on those in positions of power, they have traditionally provided an essential public good.

America’s “greatness” has depended upon–and varied with– the extent to which the nation has adhered to that truth-telling and has honored human rights and the rule of law. Greatness is not a product of bluster, or White Supremacy, or faux Christianity, or the worship of wealth and power and celebrity; it is a product of evidence-based allegiance to individual liberty and civic equality.

If we really want to make America great, we need to eject Trumpism, with its racism and “alternate facts,” not just from the White House, but from American culture.

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More Than Chutzpah

There are a number of translations of the yiddish term “chutzpah.” Among the best-known is some variation on the following: chutzpah describes the gall of a person who murders his mother and father and argues that he’s entitled to the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.

The Trump administration may actually have gone that orphan one better.

After reluctantly beginning to comply with a court order requiring them to reunite families–to return the children to the parents from whom they had forcibly taken them at the border– the administration was going to charge the parents for the expenses incurred.

You want this kid back? It’ll cost you….

The judge was not amused.

A U.S. judge in California on Friday ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to pay the costs of reuniting immigrant parents with children separated from them by officials at the U.S.-Mexican border, rather than forcing the parents to pay…

“It doesn’t make any sense for any of the parents who have been separated to pay for anything,” U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, who last month ordered that the children be reunited with their parents by July 26, said at a hearing in San Diego…

A lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued the administration over the family separations, said at the hearing that immigrant parents had been told by immigration officials they had to pay for their travel. One parent was initially asked to pay $1,900 to be reunited with a child, according to ACLU court papers. Trump administration lawyer Sarah Fabian called the judge’s order on paying for the reunifications “a huge ask on HHS,” referring to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Fabian said those decisions were handled at the field level, adding that HHS, which houses the detained children, had limited resources.

“The government will make it happen,” Sabraw responded.

So according to an administration lawyer, expecting the government to pay the costs of cleaning up an inhumane mess of its own making is “a huge ask.” As Ed Brayton commented, first they kidnapped these children, and now they want to charge a ransom for them.

Words fail…..

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The ACLU, Chuck E. Cheese and The Trump Administration

I cried reading the New York Times last Sunday.

It was an article titled “Can the ACLU become the NRA of the left?”

I spent six years as Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU affiliate, and took a great deal of pride in the organization’s nonpolitical bona fides. (As the only Republican Executive Director at the time, I was particularly supportive of that nonpartisanship.) The Times article focused upon the organization’s determined, effective–and very political– opposition to Trump.

If Trump didn’t pose an obvious and existential threat to civil liberties, democracy and the rule of law, I would be distressed.

It was the description of a family separation case that made me cry.

Nearly a year ago, fearing for their lives, Ms. L. and her daughter, S., who was 6 at the time, fled their small village in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A group of nuns gave them money and food and helped them flee the country. For the next several months, they slept outside most nights or sometimes on the floors of empty buildings they had been pointed to along their route north toward the United States. They cleaned themselves as much as possible in public restrooms. They scavenged for discarded food from restaurants. When they finally presented themselves at the crossing in San Diego, Ms. L. saw the American flag and told her daughter they were going to be O.K.: “We have arrived.”

This was on Nov. 1, 2017 — months before the government denied it was separating children from their families, then said it was only families who were caught crossing the border illegally, then announced it was all part of a zero-tolerance policy. Ms. L. entered legally at the port of entry at San Diego. In broken Spanish she had picked up along the way, she told the border agents she was seeking asylum in the United States. The Border Patrol referred her to ICE, and after four days in temporary housing, ICE agents met with her and S. and asked the girl to go with a guard into another room. Once she was gone, they handcuffed Ms. L., who hadn’t committed a crime. She listened to her daughter beyond the door, screaming and pleading with the guards not to take her away. S. was transported immediately to a facility for unaccompanied minors in Chicago. Ms. L. was detained in California with roughly 1,500 other detainees.

Two weeks later, on Nov. 17, an asylum officer conducted what ICE calls a “credible-fear screening” and determined that Ms. L.’s story met the “credibility threshold,” which would normally mean she could enter the country legally and live with her daughter in a shelter while she awaited a full asylum hearing. Instead, months went by, mother and daughter 2,000 miles apart, each in a place where no one else spoke their native Lingala. Ms. L. and S. spoke five or six times by phone, but the conversations were torturous for Ms. L., with S. sobbing on the phone and telling her mother how scared she was and her mother having no idea if she would ever see her again. “Chicago meant nothing to her,” Gelernt told me. “It might as well have been on the moon.”

In late January, Ms. L. appeared before an immigration judge without an attorney present. She hadn’t seen S. for nearly three months and was consumed with worry and despair. After questioning her, the judge ordered Ms. L. to be removed from the United States. Confused by what was being asked of her, she waived her right to contest her removal. When she returned to the detention center and recounted what happened, another detainee asked, “What have you done?” and explained that she was going to be sent to Congo. Ms. L. begged her fellow detainee to write a letter to the judge on her behalf. “Please don’t send me back,” she said. “I will be killed there.”

The Times article has much more detail–and I hope everyone will read all of it. The ACLU represented the mother.

Here’s the paragraph that made me cry:

The next night, after I left, they were reunited in the shelter. I’ve spoken with Gelernt several times about the moment of their reunion, what he called the most emotional thing he’d experienced in 25 years of doing immigration work. Ms. L. stood near him waiting for her daughter on a worn marble staircase just inside the shelter’s front door. When the door swung open, she crouched and stretched her arms wide. S. stepped through the doorway and saw her, and the most beautiful smile spread over the girl’s face, Gelernt said. She toppled forward, and Ms. L. gathered her in her arms and fell back onto the marble stairs. The look on her face as she held her daughter was almost too emotional to witness. For the next minute they lay there, clinging to each other and rocking from side to side. The only sound in the hall was a low, rhythmic moan, punctuated by S.’s higher-pitched cry.

A federal court gave the administration thirty days to reunite parents with the 2000+ children it holds. The administration wants more time–because they can’t figure out who belongs with whom.

Which brings me to Chuck E. Cheese.

Chuck E. Cheese was after my parenting time, but my son and daughter-in-law assure me that the chain–which evidently makes its money from children’s parties–has a simple security protocol (“Kid check“) that ensures parents will leave with the children they brought.

Chuck E. Cheese can do what the incompetent Trump administration can’t.

It’s a meme for our time.

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