Unprecedented Cruelty Against Immigrants and Their Children

http://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/20/unprecedented-cruelty-against-immigrants-and-their-children
Date Written:  2018-06-20
Publisher:  CounterPunch
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX22838

Recently White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly backed up the policy when he explained that, "the children will be put in foster care or whatever." This comes at the same time as a new report revealed that there are some 1,500 undocumented children, who have been placed by federal authorities in homes of "sponsors," and are now missing in the system.
No other country has a policy of separating families who intend to seek asylum.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Currently there are 140 detention centers in 14 states for the some 10,000 unacompanied immigrant children now held in the United States. These facilities are over flowing with many of the children being placed in jail holding pens or in tent complexes in the blistering heat of Texas and Arizona. A closed Walmart has been taken over to warehouse 1400 of them in Texas while the Department of Health and Human Services is considering shipping the children to military bases.

This is not the first time that the policy of the U.S. government has been to forcibly separate children from their families. Beginning in 1862 and lasting for over 100 years over 40,000 Native American children from 62 tribes were forced from their families into Christian missionary run "schools" separating them not just from their families but from their history and culture as well. The schools emphasis was not on education but on discipline and punishment. The trauma from this mass separation continues in Indian communities to this day.

The alarming horror of the inhumanity unfolding in front of our eyes is also reminiscent of another dark and racist chapter of U.S. history when 120,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and forcibly interned in isolated prison camps in the western interior of the country. Like Trump, President Roosevelt set these orders into motion through an order from the executive branch in 1942. Only 20% of the fathers ended up with their families in those camps.