Errol Morris and Jacob Soboroff discuss their new film, “Separated,” which chronicles the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” immigration policy, which separated more than 4,500 children from their parents between 2017 and 2019. 1,300 children are yet to be reunited due to incomplete information...
Its a bit more nuanced than that. That's like saying "people who wear seat belts still die". Well yes, that's a fact, but intentionally or not, you're making a claim without context and painting a picture in the mind of others that doesn't reflect reality.
Under the Trump administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy, separations were calculated and deliberate.
The goal of zero tolerance was to criminally prosecute all adult migrants who entered the country illegally. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would detain parents and transfer their children into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“Cruelty was the point of that policy,” Langarica said.
Biden rescinded the policy in January 2021. Yet, three years later, more than 1,400 families remain separated, according to the latest update from the Family Reunification Task Force.
The report argues that separations have happened for decades, but under the Biden administration they are a result of bureaucratic processes, lack of transparency and accountability — not purposeful cruelty.
A) You didn't read the article, and thusly come in with your usual "democrats bad" without realizing that most of the reason these people haven't been reunited is nobody knows (because there are no records or incorrect records) with whom they should be re-united
B) We have elections in this country and "dems being in power" doesn't mean that they'll stay there...because they'll leave after having lost an election.
The Dems don't have control of every branch of government, so there's nothing they can do. They're powerless. Fortunately, they're working hard to cultivate a bipartisan coalition of influential figures, such as Jeff Flake, John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, and Dick Cheney. Together, we're confident that they can retake the White House and govern from the political center, rather than deviating to the extremes like during the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations.
By bringing neoconservative Republicans into the big Democrat tent, we can achieve a homogeneous and irrefutable understanding of how to govern. This is the only way to reunite those 1,300 children with their families. And if you suggest to the contrary, you're hurting Kamala Harris in her campaign to protect American democracy from a tyrant who might take power by cheating his way to victory.
So go out there and vote. And yell at anyone who doesn't vote or votes for the wrong candidate. Anyone who doesn't vote for Harris is responsible for those orphaned children. It's their fault. Don't forget it.
If something happened to my kid, and I was never reunited with them? Never given contact with them, never provided communication with their care takers?
You can bet violence would be the inevitable outcome.
1300 children havent been reunited because of incomplete documentation - that was by design - and now the government has the responsibility to protect the children from nefarious parties and verify identities of non-us citizens and their parents?
That's the parents of 1300 children who are slowly losing their wits because they sought safe refuge from a country where if they didn't escape, death was already inevitable.
Now, what do we all know about Facists? They need and enemy. Their entire existence is based around having an enemy. It's easy to point to powerless minority groups and stoke nationalism through that, but invasions don't occur to save lives or conquer land. They occur to give purpose to iron fist policies.
Especially useful is when the Enemies attack you. Unfortunately for the Facists the iron fisted policies enacted after 9/11 had the consequence of restricting the effectiveness of already radicalized groups, reducing their numbers and the usefulness of the Enemy. So what did Trump do? Instead of working on producing false flag attacks which is a hard sell to even his most devoted followers, why not create home grown enemies!
The absolute sick fucks they are. The people I see with a Trump sign on their lawn show me how many of these people there are. The way they dehuminize others really starts to make me think that there is an actual physiological difference between them and the rest of humanity.
They are fine with physical and psychological torture of humans. I wouldnt be surprised if it turns out they have reduced, damaged, or lack entirely the part of their brains that should house empathy.
It all works without it being a specific conspiracy to create terrorists so I don't know why you added that part. Maybe he's just a piece of shit who does bad stuff that creates cohorts of people who hate him and America because he doesn't know about, think about, or care about them.
Every single sign I see, I mentally note them as a monster. Nothing will change my mind on this. I have brought up these kids and the despicable camps they made even recently to my peers and just get a shrug. This whole thing is nuts and I will never forgive our current government for not making this right, as inconsequential of a detail this is for most people. This shit happened on our own damn soil, concentration/internment camp style. That fucking monster did it, but what about the last 4 years? Did anyone even try to help the people we tortured? Did anyone even care?
The worst part? A lot of these kids will not even be able to remember or identify their parents at this point. Hell, their parents might not recognize them. You basically need DNA tests at this point, and if you are not their biological parent, you are probably screwed.
1300 kids have parents trying to claim them. There is no way they couldn't have significantly reduced those numbers through maternity/paternity testing. Which doesn't take that long to do anymore.
The ones you'd be left with are the guardians , probably aunts/uncles or older cousins and siblings. Siblings you could probably test for.
At that point, what can you do? Even if we put everyone involved in separating the children in jail for the rest of their lives all the way up, it will never reunite the families they separated.
The saddest part to me is that it often makes me think that people somehow forget what it's like being a child. Like they just purposefully forgot their childhood, not because of trauma, but because they deemed it a hindrance to hold on to.
Elián González is now an anti-USA politian in Cuba. And quite frankly, I don't blame him. It's pretty easy to see what will happen when you force a child to go through tramatic events resulting in the loss of family.
And the trump administration is 16-20 years after the Elián González situation happened. They could already see the results happen in real time by that point.
Long after this post is forgotten about by everybody, including me, we're going to see some of these 1300 children today become anti-usa voices when they become adults.
And they'll have fully justified reasons for thinking that way.
Elian lost his mother coming here and was living with relatives in Miami. His Cuban father (rightfully, in my opinion) wanted him back. His family here reasonably argued that his mother's last act was to bring him to the US and hence he should remain.
The legal battle and ultimate decision he was to be sent back traumatized an innocent kid, but it's not the same. The US was in the middle of a family fight where both sides were asserting viable arguments and the kid was a pawn. I don't see that being a US policy mistake.
I was refering more to the part where federal agents breached his miami home, with him being about 6 years old, and having an assault riffle pointed at him as agents screamed orders and made his crying face one of the top news stories of the year.
That's the part I was referring to. Not a legal court battle.
Why would any Cuban politician be pro USA when said country is blocking every possibility of trade with other countries which results in food scarcity because Cuba is too small to do all production domestically and is therefore lacking in large scale farming equipment and fuel?
It’s also paywalled, but once archive.org comes back online you can find it there. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
The main takeaway is that the family separation policy was pushed by Trump and his administration incessantly. It took a while to really start because various government officials were reluctant to do it, and kept trying to placate the White House by slow walking the whole thing.
At one point, government lawyers who process asylum claims realized that the separated children were being shipped away from the local holding facility without any documentation, effectively “losing” them in the system. The lawyers figured this was just a terrible error and began processing asylum claims by the parents faster. If they could get it done within a week or so, the children would still be held in the nearby facility and could be reunited with their parents.
The white house was furious and directed the holding facility to start “relocating” the children faster, so that they’d be lost in the system before the parents could be processed.
This is not the same thing at all. Trump instituted a zero tolerance policy, separating any family caught crossing illegally with the stated intent to dissuade families from making the trip.
Normally (including under Biden) the government separates children from suspected human traffickers or members of gangs that engage in trafficking. This is not to deter families. It's to protect children - sending a child back to Mexico with a human trafficker is an abhorrent thing to do.
Standard Democrat fare - they'll perpetuate the worst of the GOP nonsense, fix some of it, and generally be less terrible. Also see: Gitmo.
...but as long as the alternative is the GOP, who will make everything far worse far faster (to the point that they're likely to end the moribund US democracy next term), you need to get out and vote for them up and down the ballot.
It's a standard good cop, bad cop routine. They're playing off each other to keep the people perpetually in conflict, and scared. Both sides are convinced that every election means the end of democracy if they lose, and neither side is in a position to demand change, instead desperately trying to cling to the remnants of their former liberties.
When the alternative is having those loved ones denied medical care, locked up, or shuffled off to the camps, yes.
You don't have to be happy about it, but you do have to keep the unabashed fascists out of power. There's 1,458 other days in the election cycle to convince, cajole and bully the Democrats into being less bad.
They will never find them again barring getting lucky with both the parents and the kids picking the right DNA testing company. At which point that company will sell its data to the U.S. government.