Refer to the cover | the beginning and end of the "family separation" program in the United States

Reference News Network reported on September 2 that the September issue of the Us "Atlantic" monthly magazine published an article titled "The Secret History of the American Family Separation Program", written by Caitlin Dixon. The full text is excerpted below:

To understand how the U.S. government took children away from their parents without a plan for their return, we must go back to 9/11. After that deadly attack, the George W. Bush administration created a new federal department. The Department of Homeland Security, made up of 22 offices and agencies, became the nation's largest federal law enforcement agency.

Bikoku "Atlantic" Monthly September Issue Sealed

Originated from "Streamlined Action"

Among the agencies that make up the Department of Homeland Security is the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol was established in 1924 as a federal police force. For every single person the Border Patrol caught, another 100 people appeared to have slipped away from them. Even they know that their work is mostly in vain.

But after 9/11, the agency took on the mission of national security, and the way they looked at these border crossers changed. Border Patrol leaders suddenly began to portray these odd jobs as heinous criminals who posed a serious threat to the country.

The Border Patrol is no longer content to manage the country's borders by focusing on the highest priority crimes, but is trying to ensure 100 percent border security. Even an illegal crossing point would not be tolerated. Their new goal is zero tolerance.

In 2005, during George W. Bush's second term, Randy Hill, an enterprising Border Patrol captain in Del Rio, Texas, came up with a way to eliminate unauthorized crossings forever: to make the process so unpleasant that no one wanted to test it. He looked at a rarely enforced legal provision added to federal immigration law in the 1950s. The provisions of the article stipulate that any unauthorized transboundary act is a misdemeanor, but a repeat offence is a felony. Prior to 2005, both federal judges and prosecutors acquiesced in ignoring these immigrants, with the exception of high-profile cases.

But the del Rio patrol leader persuaded his counterparts in local law enforcement to participate in a trial in which they prosecuted every adult caught crossing the border illegally, leaving the migrants through formal deportation procedures and facing harsher penalties if they were found trying to re-enter the country in the future. This almost cuts off their path to citizenship.

This program, known as Operation Streamline, forms the basis of a school of thought that has made "deterrence prevention" a core tenet of U.S. immigration enforcement today. Parents traveling with children are generally not prosecuted under Operation Streamline, but this practice of securing the border will eventually lead to family separation.

Target immigrant families

By the mid-2010s, poverty in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador had increased, with gang and domestic violence surging and large numbers of children and families coming to the U.S. border.

Jonathan White, a longtime social worker at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was sent to assess the situation. He saw children huddled in the Border Patrol's cramped concrete cells or sleeping under the bridge, waiting to be dealt with. At a prison, White said, signs read "up to 35 people," and as a result, more than 80 teenage boys were passing water in paper cups and you scrambled to go to the bathroom. He saw a baby lying alone in a cardboard box. "We are shocked from a public health and child health perspective."

In 2014, Barack Oba President Ma Homeland Security Secretary Jay Johnson called Admiral John Kelly of the Marine Corps and asked for advice. Kelly said the large number of children and families who migrate to the United States to seek asylum poses no threat to national security, but the shock on the border will continue to intensify unless employment becomes more abundant across Central America and violence decreases. Kelly told Johnson that no amount of "deterrence" could overwhelm the reasons that prompted Central Americans to go to the United States.

So Johnson met in Washington with his top border enforcement officials to brainstorm ideas. Tom Homan, executive deputy director of the Enforcement and Migration Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is the toughest. He worked for decades in immigration enforcement, working as a Border Patrol member in his early 20s. Hohman said he hopes to apply the so-called experience of Operation Streamline to migrant families, prosecuting parents who have crossed the border illegally with their children. Although many of these families are seeking refuge, they will be considered criminals under this new model. Hohman explained that the parents would be criminally detained by the federal government, much like Operation Streamline, but this time, the process would automatically trigger family separation.

Forcing flesh and bones to separate

This is one of the first examples of proposing a way to discourage immigration to the United States by means of family separation. That makes Tom Homan the initiator of the Trump administration's most controversial policies. But Horman said it was done to help families, not to hurt them. He said his experience still haunts him to this day. One day in the spring of 2003, he received a call from Customs and Border Protection headquarters asking him to rush to a crime scene near the southeastern Texas city of Victoria. He flew to the border, where he found more than 70 migrants loaded behind overheated semi-trailer trucks. When authorities found them, 17 passengers were dead; Soon after, 2 more people died.

During an investigation into the semi-trailer truck, he noticed a boy lying on his father's lap, only 5 years old, the same age as Hohmann's youngest son, both of whom had died. I knelt down, put my hand on the child's head, and said a word of prayer. This example made me who I am today, because this kind of thing is preventable. We can stop that. ”

Hohman said that when he presented Johnson with the idea of suing parents and taking the children away, he had such a family in mind. He admits that, indeed, separated families can be miserable, but at least "they're not dead yet."

In the spring of 2018, when the official zero-tolerance policy went into effect, the Trump administration frequently used this reason from Homan. Time and time again, people hear the saying that separating families is not about hurting them, but about making people like them safe. But no one acknowledges that tougher enforcement would tempt children and families to try more dangerous ways to cross the border, such as hiding in the back of a tractor-trailer.

Source: Reference News Network