“The only thing worse than the nauseating cruelty of President Trump’s immigration policy — captured perfectly by the agonizing stories of young children forcefully being separated from their parents at the border — is the craven dishonesty with which he attempts to sell it to the American people.”
NY Daily News
The Smoke
According to most estimates almost 11,500 children are being held by the Department Of Homeland Security and are in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. They include children who came to the United States without their parents and those who have been separated from their parents at the border. So what law is in place that US authorities are using to separate the immigrant families? Well, its quite simple. During previous administrations most immigrants were brought before an immigration judge. The families were being kept together in detention facilities until they were brought before the court. What’s changed now is that our government is charging immigrants with a federal crime, because technically it is a federal crime to enter the US illegally. So immigrants now face potential prison time and must be seen in a federal court to learn what status they will receive, deportation or deportation and jail time. This is quite a departure from when immigrants just face our immigration laws. Of course you can’t hold children in federal custody because their parents broke the law. So you separate them. Back at the beginning of May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Justice Department will begin prosecuting every person who illegally crosses into the United States along the Southwest border. “Federal prosecutors will “take on as many of those cases as humanly possible until we get to 100 percent.”
The Mirrors
The President blames Democrats for the law which his administration is currently prosecuting immigrants under. In fact just recently the he said at event promoting his “Space Force,” in which he envisions a six branch of the military dealing with space, that, “I say this very strongly, its the Democrats’ fault. If the Democrats would sit down instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly. Good for the children, good for the country, good for the world. It could take place quickly. We could have an immigration bill, we could have child separation. We’re stuck with these horrible laws. They’re horrible laws. What’s happening is so sad. It’s so sad. And it can be taken care of quickly and beautifully and we’ll have safety.” But prosecuting immigrants under federal statue is the administrations choice. They could also use immigration laws, which don’t separate families and achieves the same thing, fair hearings to determine immigration status. Now to be fair, the President did cite the back log of cases being held by the immigration judges as one of the justifications for using federal judges. In fact he required immigration judges to meet a quota on the number of cases they had to do in a certain time. However, the quota’s were unrealistic and those same federal judges can hear cases and base their judgement’s on immigration law. With the midterms coming up in November, Republicans are concerned about the backlash his policy will have on the elections. A Quinnipiac poll found 66 percent of American voters oppose the practice, versus only 27 percent who support it.
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