The Nazis took my mother’s 5-year-old niece, Nurit, and my maternal grandmother, Sara, from the Krakow Ghetto. My mother spent her life in a futile search for her disappeared loved ones.
Today, the forced separation of Central American children at the United States border is a painful reminder of the suffering of families torn apart by the draconian policies of tyrannical governments.
On May 7, Attorney General Jeff Sessions instituted a zero-tolerance policy, declaring that parents entering the U.S. illegally will be jailed for trespassing, and their children will be taken by the U.S. government. Families have headed North to escape the deadly violence of Central America’s Northern Triangle. El Salvador and Honduras rank among the world’s top five most violent countries. Many of these families have undertaken a brutal journey, in order to legally file an application for asylum at a U.S. port of entry. Now, however, even asylum seekers are jailed for trespassing.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly once referred to families fleeing violence in Central America as parents that “are trying to save their children.” Today, he justifies this inhumane policy, stating, “It’s not ‘cruel’ to separate families at the border — children will be ‘put into foster care or whatever.’”
Federal law allowed those who could “establish … a fear of persecution in their homeland based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group” to qualify for asylum. The latter constituted a category for abused women and children. Last week, Sessions announced that those who have fled to escape domestic or gang violence, will no longer be granted asylum.
When parents are jailed, their children are labeled as “unaccompanied alien children,” and become the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. More than 10,000 children are in its custody. Some crossed the U.S. border on their own, but it’s unlikely that the increasing numbers of Office of Refugee Resettlement children as young as 18 months arrived solo. In a two-week period during May, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that 658 children were split from 638 adults!
What happens to these traumatized children, ripped from their parents in an alien country? The Office of Refugee Resettlement had attempted to place them with relatives or family friends in the U.S. A new federal policy, however, allows federal agents to check the immigration status of those who offer to host children. Undocumented family and friends, fearing deportation, are shying away from taking these children.
Children are being sent across the U.S., landing in temporary shelters, detention facilities, military bases, and foster care by a system that is stretched beyond capacity. U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, recently exposed the deplorable conditions of children being warehoused in Texas, forced to sleep in what Merkley describes as metal “cages,” without even a mattress. There have been reports of child trafficking, children being deported and children disappearing.
A recent American Civil Liberties Union report documents hundreds of claims of verbal, physical and sexual abuse of unaccompanied children by border patrol agents. Children have been denied necessary medical care, received inadequate food and water, and been subjected to misogynistic and xenophobic taunts and threats. Tasers have been used on young children. A girl in a holding cell was told by an agent, “You’re the garbage that contaminates this country.”
There is little effort to reunite parents and children, despite the fact that many parents plead guilty when brought to court, convinced by their lawyers that it’s the only chance they have to get their children back. Most who plead guilty are released, having been sentenced for time already served.
Imagine searching for your child in a country where you don’t speak the language, have no money, and don’t know how the system works. U.S. Rep. PramilaJayapal, D-Washington, visited a federal prison, where women reported that border patrol agents told them, “their families would not exist anymore,” and that they would “never see their children again.”
How many Central American children, wrenched from the arms of their mothers and fathers, will disappear, like my cousin Nurit? How many families will never recover from years of trauma, compounded by the anguish endured in the country they believed would save them?
How many end up like the distraught Honduran father, separated from his wife and 3-year-old son, who suicided in a Texas jail cell, or the parents deported back to their home countries without their children?
Our government uses children as a weapon in a relentless war against brown-skinned people. We must stop these crimes against humanity. Neta (netargv.com) is helping asylum seekers at points of entry in the Rio Grande Valley. The Texas Civil Rights Project (texascivilrightsproject.org/) and the ACLU have filed suit on behalf of parents separated from their children at the U.S. border. The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/bondfund) has a bond fund to enable Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees to be released to search for their children. All these organizations are in urgent need of donations.
This Wednesday, June 20, is World Refugee Day. Don’t just say this is terrible. Do something!
Sara Weinberger, of Easthampton, is a professor emerita of social work and writes a monthly column. She can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.