Outside of the initial and possibly lifetime lasting emotional damages to children, one of the issue of family separation is the children are literally lost in the bureaucracy. The result is parent have bern deported without their children. Parent have been released, waiting for their asylum hearing, but they can't locate their children. This actually happen - sorry, we have no idea where they are. Here is an 800 #. It was an incorrect number, a number to ice. Why Is This Happening? Fighting a dehumanizing U.S. immigration system, with Lee Gelernt: podcast & transcript LEE GELERNT: Exactly. And so, what happened was, is what's now happening with what's called the Zero Tolerance policy of the Attorney General. Rather than saying, "Okay, let's see about your asylum claim, let's see if it's legitimate." The attorney general has said, and this happened even before the Attorney General said it's going to be zero tolerance, "We're going to prosecute you for the misdemeanor of illegal entry." And so, she goes to jail, and she goes only for a few days because it's a misdemeanor, she gets time serve. She sees the federal judge, she pleads guilty, because she thinks she's going to be able her son again, she's released from jail. LEE GELERNT: In the meantime, the son has been sent all the way off to Chicago. He also went to Chicago, a different facility. She gets out of jail, and what Secretary Nielsen and the Attorney General have said is they give you half the story. They say, "well, we're prosecuting them. And when any parent goes to jail, they necessarily lose their kid." Okay, let's say they really should have a zero-tolerance policy of prosecuting asylum seekers. The question no one ever asks the secretary Attorney General on follow up is, well, when they get out of jail after those few days for the misdemeanor and they go back to immigration custody or pursue their asylum claims, do they then get their kid back? They don't. LEE GELERNT: This Brazilian mom has been waiting now for more than eight months to get our kid back. She went to immigration for six months in a detention center, passed her initial asylum screening, so she's a bonafide asylum seeker. LEE GELERNT: Exactly. What the studies show is there's a million ways to ensure appearance at the asylum hearing. But it's an easy thing to demagogue. They're flooding our countries, we have no way to control them. And so, now what the Trump administration wants to have happen is the word gets out around the world, if you come here to seek asylum, not only will you be detained, but you will lose your child. The truth is, they're not even going to deter the asylum seekers because like this Brazilian mom has said, "I'm stuck because I can't stay risk my life for my son's life. So, I'm going to have to come anyway as bad as it is. So, we're just going to have to put up with losing our children." So, it's not going to deter any way. LEE GELERNT: Yeah. You would ask me rightly, "What was it like at the border?" There's this whole image of just there's these hordes of people coming to hurt us and invade us. And it's just people should come down and see these moms, and they're doing what any mom would do. They're just trying to protect themselves and their kid. It's interesting because now I can't really remember a time when I'm in a federal court and federal judges are really getting emotional. One judge in Boston in a case where they're trying to remove all these people who are seeking asylum and the Trump administration is not giving them hearings and due process. She said, "But didn't we learn our lesson after World War II? She's saying this an open court and you rarely hear federal judges says, "Didn't we learn our lesson when we turn back to St. Louis, back to Germany? Isn't this why we enacted all these refugee laws and asylum laws? Do we really want to have that on our hands?"
People don’t like to know how the hot dog is made. Seems like Most Americans including the ones that voted for Trump can’t stomach separating children from their parents. Funny line that seems to be.
the smile on sessions as he quoted 1/4 of Romans but not the part about love made you want to go Joker on his face. Met James Martin when he spoke on a liberation theology seminar at St. Mary's San Antonio in 2003. I remember that day because it was full of emotion and david carr almost won it against the Jets. ALMOST.
5,000 in six months? The US receives tens of thousands in six months. Before Trump, this meant that mexico had received roughly 2,000 applications the previous year during the same months. Many. So, the question remains: can these people not apply for asylum in mexico?
Not sure I get you. How many of us live near our cousins and siblings? Anyway, the child-taking policy is disgusting and unworthy of the USA.
Taking advantage of a generous host is not awesome. Taking advantage of your neighboring country is not awesome.
Tell that to Reagan's tomb and Bush. They destabilized many of the countries that are now pits of violence causing people to flee. Look at Compton. Their secret war led to the ruin of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Mexico is not relevant. If your neighbor is "not awesome" to you, you kidnap her children. Psycho? y/n
Don't understand your point from this chart, but here are numbers and the trends is that the number of applications from Mexico and other countries have grown dramatically from 2011...over 400% from Mexico alone. 106% from Honduras, 46% from San Salvador... http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/448/
Love how Sessions references Romans 13, one of the most-loved passages of Scripture of antebellum slavers justifying the Fugitive Slave Act, which required escaped slaves be returned to their masters. There are a lot of haunting parallels between the tumult over slavery and the situation with illegal immigration today. I'm not even Christian, but I am highly offended that Sessions would say the Bible justifies what he's doing. He's emphatically wrong. First, Romans 13 is the "obey the authorities" passage not the "enforce unjust policies" passage. Nothing in Romans 13 says that rulers and authorities are authorized to brutalize people or otherwise deviate from God's law. And of course there is God's Law which says stuff like "The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God" (Lev 19:34). And a famous passage from Isaiah 10 about official injustice: "Woe to those who enact evil statutes and to those who constantly record unjust decisions, so as to deprive the needy of justice and rob the poor of My people of their rights, so that widows may be their spoil and that they may plunder the orphans. Now what will you do in the day of punishment, and in the devastation which will come from afar?" Beyond those, while there are some passages that lament lawlessness or hold up lawfulness, it is mostly rife with stories of mercy. And, perhaps most poignantly in the case of separating children from their parents, the admonition to care for the widow, the stranger, and the orphan. If we want to look at this whole thing in Biblical terms, we shouldn't be feeling justified, we should be looking over our shoulder to see if the Assyrians are coming. OMG, why is that graph a line graph! Were columns too expensive? That's a effin' atrocity!
