Family Separations Continue

[Beringia]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/migrant-family-separations.html


LOS ANGELES — In the year since President Trump officially ended family separations at the southern border, immigration authorities have removed more than 900 migrant children from their families, sometimes for reasons as minor as a parent not changing a baby’s diaper or having a traffic citation for driving without a license, according to new documents filed Tuesday in federal court.

Family breakups have been imposed with even greater frequency in recent months under the Trump administration’s most widely debated immigration policy, ostensibly to protect the welfare of the children, but in many cases because of relatively minor criminal offenses in a parent’s past, such as shoplifting or public intoxication, according to tallies the Justice Department provided to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging the separations.

In most cases, government officials have said, border officers who make a decision to remove a child from an accompanying adult do so because there are questions about the child’s welfare, or doubts that the adult is genuinely the child’s parent. In some cases, they said, children are separated even though they are traveling with someone who clearly appears to be an aunt, uncle or sibling. Some children have appeared at the border accompanied by adults who later were determined to be using the child to try to gain entrance to the United States, officials have said.

The new numbers were filed with Judge Dana M. Sabraw of the Federal District Court in San Diego as part of the court’s continuing supervision of the family separation issue. In its motion on Tuesday, the A.C.L.U. asked the judge to clarify a set of standards for such separations that would ensure that children are taken from their parents only when there is evidence that the parent is a genuine danger to the child, or is unfit to provide care.

“The administration is still doing family separation under the guise that they are protecting children from their own parents, even though the criminal history they are citing is either wrong or shockingly minor,” said Lee Gelernt of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “This is just circumventing the court’s order.”

Children who were separated from their families over the last year spent an average of 68 days in shelters, according to the motion filed with the court, though four children have been away from their families for more than 300 days.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. Trump Nazis need to be held accountable

We need to purge OUR government of these Nazis.

We need to help these children!

[gratuitous]

2. Well, Judge Sabraw?

The administration has lied to you, continues to lie to you, and is continuing to perpetrate this kidnapping and torture regime despite your order. It's a simple question, but one that sadly needs to be asked: WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT THIS CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY?

[Ms. Toad]

3. We've seen this rationalization before

When Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, lawmakers from both parties were responding to more than two centuries of efforts by various governmental, religious and social welfare agencies to impose American values onto tribal communities. “There’s this continuity of this idea that Indian children don’t really belong with their families and they would be better off with white families,” says Margaret Jacobs, a historian at University of Nebraska-Lincoln who studies the treatment of Indian children in the U.S.

The most well-known of these policies started in the late 19th century, when the government took many Indian children from their parents and put them in boarding schools to “civilize” them. Children had their hair cut, were required to speak English and were taught Christianity. More than 75% of Indian children in school at the turn of the 20th century were brought up in these boarding schools, Jacobs says.

Federal policy changed in the 1930s when the government realized boarding schools were expensive and were not achieving the goal of assimilation. But they had to find a place for all these children, so they turned to the child welfare system. One infamous federal program called the Indian Adoption Project resulted in hundreds of Indian children in Western states being removed from their parents and given to white families, often several states away. This and other programs like it lasted for about 20 years starting the 1950s. Parents were often pressured to give up children, while others had children taken away because everything from poverty to single motherhood was called “abuse.”

https://time.com/longform/native-american-adoptions/

WASHINGTON - Conrad Eagle Feather, a Sicangu Lakota, was only three when he was taken from the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota and adopted by a non-Native farming family in the state of Nebraska. His three sisters were removed to separate families.

He recalls a childhood with little joy.

“They used us for farm labor,” he said, detailing a list of chores that began before dawn and continued until bedtime. He said he still bears the scars of physical abuse.

“For every sin I had committed according to the Bible, I got one strike with whatever they had in their hands at the time — a garden hose, a broom handle, a wire hanger,” he said. “And all the time, they used to tell me, ‘Who knows what would have happened to you if we hadn’t saved you?’”

https://www.voanews.com/usa/native-americans-confront-legacy-adoption

Three of my siblings are native. One should absolutely not have been taken from his family. The other two - perhaps would have been removed even if they were white - if the story I heard is accurate. At the time, my parents beleived they were helping take care of children who needed homes, and avoiding adding too much to the overpopulation problem (in the 50s, they were ahead of the times, as to the latter). Unfortunately, hiding the reasons for removal from natives homes was part of the overriding goal of assimilation.

[Beringia]

4. I think the aim here is to scare people so they won't try to cross border

Although I suppose there might be a component of trying to get adoptees. Sorry about your siblings being taken from their biological families. I understand your parents were doing what they thought was good.

[Ms. Toad]

6. The rationalization recited in the article for removing children from their parents is identical:

We have to do this to save them from their parents who are (drug dealers, unfit, etc.) - when the same crimes would not justify separating white children from their parents.

In both instances, the ulterior (real) motive was something else (assimilation for native children; to scare parents from entering the country today) - both are being rationalized as being done because the parents are bad parents and we need to protect the children from the parents (even though the crimes are not significant enough to justify removing white children from their parents).

[malaise]

5. This is kidnapping

plain and simple - these are crimes against humanity