REMINDER: The Kids Are Still in Cages
America's abuse of migrants is a crime against humanity. Will anyone face justice?
When Donald Trump and Stephen Miller were torturing asylum-seeking families at the southern border, Democrats vowed to stop the abuses. Joe Biden called Trump’s immigration policies a “stain on our nation” and promised to “ensure our laws reflect our values as a nation of immigrants.”
The Trump policy of ripping children away from their parents was indeed abhorrent. In 2018, the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor said Trump and his thugs had committed crimes against humanity: “We list crimes against humanity in the Statute of the International Criminal Court. We have ‘other inhumane acts designed to cause great suffering’. What could cause more great suffering than what they did in the name of immigration law?”
Trump, Pence, Miller, Sessions, and other Republican officials belong in The Hague for their abuse of migrants. Instead, they’re signing book deals, playing pundit on Fox News, and contemplating presidential runs.
Have Democrats done better? Hardly. To begin with, the cages Trump used were built by Obama and Biden.
In August 2015, the ACLU excoriated the Obama administration for its cruel immigration policy:
The Obama administration doubled down on one of its worst immigration legacies: the return and expansion of family detention. Responding to a court order holding that its family detention camps violated the 1997 Flores settlement agreement, the Obama administration again defended family detention as necessary to send a message to Central American families that they are not welcome here—even though it concedes that most of them are fleeing persecution. [Emphasis added]
Obama was dubbed the “deporter in chief” for the surge in deportations during his presidency. And contrary to Democratic Party spin, Obama-Biden policies included family separation.
Fast forward to the Biden presidency, and the same brutal practices have continued.
In June 2021, Kamala Harris echoed Trump’s police state language, warning migrants: "Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border."
The Texas Tribune reports that immigration attorneys consider Biden’s policies no better than Trump’s:
“On issues like [immigrant detainees], we're not seeing a whole ton of change,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an immigration attorney and law professor at Ohio State University. “We did have hope for the Biden administration that they would at least very significantly limit or lessen the use of immigration detention,” said [Juan] Reyna’s lawyer, Kathrine Russell. “Unfortunately, that does not seem to have happened whatsoever.”
Democrats have funded ICE, an abusive and authoritarian agency, at Trump-era levels. They have reinstated Trump’s atrocious “Remain in Mexico” policy, at a judge’s orders, and chosen to expand it. And they have continued to use Title 42 to expel asylum-seekers.
Over 1 million people have been expelled without processing due to Title 42 this year alone, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. After being expelled, migrants are subject to frequent attacks in Mexico, including kidnappings and rape at gunpoint, according to a report from the group Human Rights First. A woman from southern Mexico fleeing cartel violence died by suicide in October after learning at the border that Title 42 would block her from claiming asylum, the group reported.
The Biden administration is being sued by Haitian migrants for the inhumane treatment they’ve endured at the border:
"After Mirard stepped out of the river, holding two bags of food for Madeleine and his daughter, he encountered a mounted officer. As other officers looked on—some on foot, others on horseback or in official vehicles—the mounted officer shouted at Mirard, lashed at him with split reins, grabbed his neck, and held his collar," the lawsuit states.
In January 2022, the administration argued before the Supreme Court in favor of indefinite detention for immigrants:
The administration also backed out of a plan to compensate victims of Trump’s family separation (i.e. torture) policy: “Lawyers for the plaintiffs said the Justice Department did not give a clear reason for walking away from the negotiations and did not make an offer to the plaintiffs before doing so.”
And how have migrant kids been treated under Biden and Dems? Horrifically.
From CNN:
Officials also cited a rush to release minors, potentially putting them at risk, pressure to put up temporary facilities that lacked basic services, saying those facilities were "run like disaster camps" and said staff became "first-hand witnesses of the deterioration of the mental and behavioral health" of children who stayed at the emergency sites.
Oh, and remember Trump’s wall? Democrats are still building it.
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