I find it hard to understand why the election campaigns are not talking at all about Trump’s separating children from their parents at the border during his presidency. This was in my opinion the darkest, most egregious policy former president Trump enacted during his time in office, on a level with the attack on the Capitol. Why has it gone off our radar screen?
On June 22, 2018, The Times Record published an article I wrote about the psychological damage Trump caused to young immigrant children — over 5,000 of them — in separating them from their parents at the border. Since that time, I have read more about that policy because much has been written about it. The policy was meant to deter immigrant families from seeking asylum in the United States. It did not. I should note that it is the law that a person whose life is in danger in their home country has a legal right to seek asylum in the United States.
Driven by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, children as young as 10 months were literally torn from their mother’s arms, some even from nursing mothers. The children were shown on television, housed in cage-like detention centers, sleeping on concrete floors with only a foil sheet for a blanket. Seven-year-olds were changing the diapers of infants. Because the Department of Homeland Security, which passed the children on to the Department of Health and Human Services, had been given so little notice of this zero-tolerance policy of the Trump administration, they had no time to secure staff for these children. The food provided was inadequate. Children told lawyers who came to investigate that they had instant oatmeal, a cookie and a sweetened drink for breakfast; instant noodles for lunch; and a frozen burrito and a cookie for dinner. The children said they went for weeks without baths or clean clothes.
Conditions were appalling, but the conditions were not the worst assault these children suffered. The worst was being torn away from their mother or their father while screaming and clinging to that parent, then separated from that parent for months or years, some perhaps forever. The numbers vary but some estimate that as many as 2,000 children have still not been reunited with their family. This type of trauma produces severe damage to development. I’ve read that those who have been reunited still suffer from bedwetting, immaturity and nightmares. They are easily frightened and memories of their separation are easily triggered.
We were told that Trump’s zero-tolerance policy took place between May and June of 2018. Records now show that these separations took place throughout 2017, beginning soon after Trump took office, but were not made known. A 40-page article in the August 2022 issue of The Atlantic by Caitlin Dickerson gives a detailed account of what went on behind the scenes in the development of this program, which officials promoted it and which opposed it.
Before the Trump administration, border crossings at points that are not legal ports of entry was considered a misdemeanor and were largely overlooked by the Border Patrol. Those seeking asylum used illegal crossings because legal ports were metered, allowing only so many a day. Now any illegal entry was deemed a crime to be prosecuted. The rationale given for separating families was that to prosecute the parents you needed to take away the children, but even families crossing at legal entries had children taken. The real reason was deterrence.
There was such a backlash to this policy, even Ivanka and Melania Trump protested it, that then President Trump was forced to write an executive order reversing the policy. Officials in the Trump administration allege that Trump continued to press this policy long after he wrote his executive order to discontinue it and that separations still took place. Kirsten Nielson, head of the DHS, says Trump asked her repeatedly to resume and extend family separations regardless of legality. She refused. Eventually, Trump fired her.
When you read 5,000 children, that is just numbers. It is the stories that are now circulating about these children that touch your heart. One I read of a father and his 5-year-old daughter, Filomena, stays with me. They fled Guatemala because they faced hunger and danger there. They were apprehended at the border and Filomena, holding onto her father’s leg, was pulled away screaming and sent to a detention center. The distraught father agreed to being deported back to Guatemala after being promised his daughter would be returned to him in two weeks. He waited and when she was not returned he began calling. “What does the American government want with these children?” he asked. “They’re just children.” Eventually, after almost three months, Filomena was returned to him. They still had little food and feared the violence, but they were together. She had turned 6 in custody. After three years, when Filomena was 9, the father received a call from a therapist asking how Filomena was doing. The father passed the phone to her. She eked out a few words then gave the phone back to her father. “I’m sorry,” he said, “she’s crying.”
Filomena is fortunate compared to the many children the government has not been able to reunite with their parents. As cruel as the separations were, even more cruel, I find, was the deliberate not keeping records because the Trump administration felt that reuniting the children undermined the purpose of deterrence. Some in the administration even interfered with attempts to reunite these children. How hard-hearted can one become? Biden is trying to reunite them.
If reelected, would Trump do this again? By all accounts, he would. The ACLU recently won a class action suit in which one provision was that this policy cannot be reinstated for eight years. However, with the immunity the Supreme Court has given Trump, perhaps that would not hold. But it should never be reinstated. This is not the America we know. President Biden has just apologized for the cruel separation of Native American children from their families. Hopefully, there may be an apology for this unthinkable deed. But apologies do not erase the harm that is done.
Sarah Slagle-Arnold, Ph.D., is a psychologist in Topsham.