Four months ago, a mother and her seven-year-old daughter crossed the U.S.-Mexico border at San Ysidro, just south of San Diego. They had come from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they had taken refuge in a Catholic church in response to threats to their safety. Somehow, they made it all the way to San Ysidro, where they immediately went to immigration authorities and asked for asylum.
Four days later, the mother was interred in a Southern California detention center, while her seven-year-old girl was sent, without explanation, to a children's center in Chicago, where she knows nobody and repeatedly asks for her mother. The government has filed no charges against them, nor alleged that they pose any kind of danger to anyone, nor contended that the mother was in any way unfit to take care of her little girl. They have been permitted to talk on the phone several times since, though the girl is reported to have sobbed throughout each of the calls.
Our tax dollars at work.
According to the Department of Homeland Savagery—that is, Security—it is the government's policy to discourage people who arrive unannounced at the border and ask for asylum, and one way it are endeavoring to discourage them is to separate children from their parents. There have been reports, which the government has declined either to confirm or deny, that the separation of children from their parents is now a common practice. The ACLU has filed suit to reunite the mother and daughter, to compel the government to reunite all such separated parents and children, and to enjoin it from continuing the practice.
Elsewhere on our website today, we've run one of my columns, in which I note the disquieting parallels between today’s ICE raids and the kidnapping journeys that slaveholders made to the Northern states between 1850 and 1861 to re-enslave African Americans who’d freed themselves by escaping. Such re-enslavements were not only legal, but under the terms of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Northern states and cities—and even Northern citizen-bystanders—were legally obligated to help the kidnappers re-enslave the escapees. In essence, the hatreds of the white South were imposed on the North, and many Northern states and cities—prefiguring today’s sanctuary city and state laws—reacted by passing statutes forbidding their officials from cooperating in these kidnappings, while demonstrators and activists sought to hide the freed men and women and thwart the slavers.
Now, in forcibly separating children from the parents, federal officials have dusted off yet another slavers' practice and put it back into use.
Why ICE offices aren't surrounded by obstructive vigils of Americans who don't want their tax dollars to work this way is a mystery to me.
