Children in aviaries: How and why in the United States are separated migrant families
Dmitry Kurkin
About two thousand children of immigrantsexpelled from the United States were separated from their parents in just six weeks. These children are now kept in shelters, most often resembling not so much a children's home as an open-air cage. Many of these children are not even five years old, the youngest are not more than eight months old. They clearly do not understand what is happening to them, and cannot ask questions, because they do not know how to speak. All this is the result of the tightening of immigration policy by the administration of Donald Trump, who declared "zero tolerance" towards those who are illegally in the United States (mainly, migrants from Mexico). What is happening has already been called a large-scale humanitarian crisis: commentators are horrified by the very fact of the separation of parents from children, and the inhuman conditions of children in shelters.
Trump promised to deal with illegal immigration even during his presidential campaign: speaking in New Hampshire in February 2016, he said that the United States would "build a wall" on the border with Mexico. He still upholds the idea of the wall, along with other measures to toughen immigration laws.
Current US laws distinguish between illegal entry into the country’s territory (it is punishable by a fine and / or imprisonment for up to six months) and an undocumented stay, which is considered not a criminal, but an administrative violation. This difference is often used by migrants from poor countries: the authors of a study in 2006 claim that almost half of undocumented foreigners are those who initially entered the United States legally and remained in the country with an expired visa. It is this hole that the Trump administration intends to close, insisting that illegal stay in the United States should be reclassified from an administrative offense into a criminal one.
The flow of deported illegal immigrants grew so much that the conditions in the shelters quickly turned into prison
American laws do not allow keeping young children in federal prisons along with their parents. Therefore, at the time of the deportation, families are divided, and children are equated to “foreign children not accompanied by adults” (the wording used to be used more often in relation to small children who try to cross the US border on their own) and sent to shelters for reasons of humanity. However, under pressure from the Tramp administration, from mid-April, the flow of deported illegal immigrants grew so much (from April 19 to May 31, 1995 immigration services were required to be resettled), so that conditions in shelters quickly turned into prison ones.
The southern states, on which the main burden of shelter arrangement has been laid, clearly do not cope with the task. Many of the centers are either simply unsuitable as orphanages (one of them appeared on the territory of the former Walmart supermarket), or are already crowded (Texas Observer reports that at least fifteen shelters in the state of Texas have more children than the license allows).
Similar problems have already arisen with the administration of Barack Obama in 2014, when there was an influx of refugees: they were detained at the US border with Mexico, after which they could spend many months in immigration camps, where sometimes there were no basic necessities. In 2015, under pressure from critics, a federal court limited the time spent by refugees in camps, allowing them to expect their cases to be heard in the country. This more humane measure worked only partly, since not all of the refugees who came to the country were on the agenda of the immigration courts. To which, of course, the first were the Republicans, including Trump, who criticized the practice, which he has since called "catch and release" ("release first, then catch"). He, however, did not find an adequate replacement for her, which provoked the current crisis.
Photos taken in hastily equipped shelters show children sitting in cells with concrete floors, on which mattresses and blankets are scattered from pieces of foil. The children separated from their parents are left to themselves and in many cases are deprived of even minimal assistance: a representative of a humanitarian organization said that during a visit to the orphanage she had to explain to the little prisoners how to change the diaper to the girl - none of the center's employees were concerned about this. Finally, there is still no established procedure for family reunification: parents are asked to find out the fate of children on their own, but more often they have no clues other than the immigration hotline number.
Separated children are left to their own devices and in many cases are deprived of even minimal assistance.
Testimonies of reporters and human rights defenders who were still admitted to the shelters turned out to be enough for the entire American establishment (from politicians to Hollywood celebrities and heads of Google, Facebook and Apple) to be outraged by the “children's concentration camps” (and up to Pope Francis, who cautioned the US government against populism). The administration of Trump did not blink his eye on political opponents: according to the Republicans, they are only guided by the laws that they inherited from the Democrats and which, ultimately, led to the horrors of deportation today.
Trump and his Republican supporters blame Democrats for allegedly blocking overdue immigration amendments for years. Nevertheless, the majority of Americans regard the presidential administration as the culprits: according to a CNN survey, two-thirds of US citizens do not support the fight against illegal immigrants in its current form.
Under public pressure, Trump signed an executive decree that would end the separation of families. However, critics point out that this measure will hardly make life easier for children who are expected to be deported. If the reform is supported by the congress, as required by the presidential administration, in the long term this will lead to a similar result - only for a much larger number of illegal families: the United States was not ready to solve the problem by force.
Cover: Getty images