SECRET BABY JAILS IN TEXAS!

[The Truth about Separating Kids

By RICH LOWRY
May 28, 2018 10:37 PM

Some economic migrants are using children as chits, but the problem is fixable — if Congress acts.

The latest furor over Trump immigration policy involves the separation of children from parents at the border.

As usual, the outrage obscures more than it illuminates, so it’s worth walking through what’s happening here.

For the longest time, illegal immigration was driven by single males from Mexico. Over the last decade, the flow has shifted to women, children, and family units from Central America. This poses challenges we haven’t confronted before and has made what once were relatively minor wrinkles in the law loom very large.

The Trump administration isn’t changing the rules that pertain to separating an adult from the child. Those remain the same. Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings.

It’s the last that is operative here. The past practice had been to give a free pass to an adult who is part of a family unit. The new Trump policy is to prosecute all adults. The idea is to send a signal that we are serious about our laws and to create a deterrent against re-entry. (Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, illegal re-entry a felony.)

When a migrant is prosecuted for illegal entry, he or she is taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. In no circumstance anywhere in the U.S. do the marshals care for the children of people they take into custody. The child is taken into the custody of HHS, who cares for them at temporary shelters.

The criminal proceedings are exceptionally short, assuming there is no aggravating factor such as a prior illegal entity or another crime. The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE.

If the adult then wants to go home, in keeping with the expedited order of removal that is issued as a matter of course, it’s relatively simple. The adult should be reunited quickly with his or her child, and the family returned home as a unit. In this scenario, there’s only a very brief separation.

Where it becomes much more of an issue is if the adult files an asylum claim. In that scenario, the adults are almost certainly going to be detained longer than the government is allowed to hold their children.

That’s because of something called the Flores Consent Decree from 1997. It says that unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so.

The clock ticking on the time the government can hold a child will almost always run out before an asylum claim is settled. The migrant is allowed ten days to seek an attorney, and there may be continuances or other complications.

This creates the choice of either releasing the adults and children together into the country pending the ajudication of the asylum claim, or holding the adults and releasing the children. If the adult is held, HHS places the child with a responsible party in the U.S., ideally a relative (migrants are likely to have family and friends here).

Even if Flores didn’t exist, the government would be very constrained in how many family units it can accommodate. ICE has only about 3,000 family spaces in shelters. It is also limited in its overall space at the border, which is overwhelmed by the ongoing influx. This means that — whatever the Trump administration would prefer to do — many adults are still swiftly released.

Why try to hold adults at all? First of all, if an asylum-seeker is detained, it means that the claim goes through the process much more quickly, a couple of months or less rather than years. Second, if an adult is released while the claim is pending, the chances of ever finding that person again once he or she is in the country are dicey, to say the least. It is tantamount to allowing the migrant to live here, no matter what the merits of the case.

A few points about all this:

1) Family units can go home quickly. The option that both honors our laws and keeps family units together is a swift return home after prosecution. But immigrant advocates hate it because they want the migrants to stay in the United States. How you view this question will depend a lot on how you view the motivation of the migrants (and how seriously you take our laws and our border).

2) There’s a better way to claim asylum. Every indication is that the migrant flow to the United States is discretionary. It nearly dried up at the beginning of the Trump administration when migrants believed that they had no chance of getting into the United States. Now, it is going in earnest again because the message got out that, despite the rhetoric, the policy at the border hasn’t changed. This strongly suggests that the flow overwhelmingly consists of economic migrants who would prefer to live in the United States, rather than victims of persecution in their home country who have no option but to get out.

Even if a migrant does have a credible fear of persecution, there is a legitimate way to pursue that claim, and it does not involve entering the United States illegally. First, such people should make their asylum claim in the first country where they feel safe, i.e., Mexico or some other country they are traversing to get here. Second, if for some reason they are threatened everywhere but the United States, they should show up at a port of entry and make their claim there rather than crossing the border illegally.

3) There is a significant moral cost to not enforcing the border. There is obviously a moral cost to separating a parent from a child and almost everyone would prefer not to do it. But, under current policy and with the current resources, the only practical alternative is letting family units who show up at the border live in the country for the duration. Not only does this make a mockery of our laws, it creates an incentive for people to keep bringing children with them.

Needless to say, children should not be making this journey that is fraught with peril. But there is now a premium on bringing children because of how we have handled these cases. They are considered chits.

In April, the New York Times reported:

Some migrants have admitted they brought their children not only to remove them from danger in such places as Central America and Africa, but because they believed it would cause the authorities to release them from custody sooner.

Others have admitted to posing falsely with children who are not their own, and Border Patrol officials say that such instances of fraud are increasing.

According to azcentral.com, it is “common to have parents entrust their children to a smuggler as a favor or for profit.”

If someone is determined to come here illegally, the decent and safest thing would be to leave the child at home with a relative and send money back home. Because we favor family units over single adults, we are creating an incentive to do the opposite and use children to cut deals with smugglers.

4) Congress can fix this. Congress can change the rules so the Flores consent decree will no longer apply, and it can appropriate more money for family shelters at the border. This is an obvious thing to do that would eliminate the tension between enforcing our laws and keeping family units together. The Trump administration is throwing as many resources as it can at the border to expedite the process, and it desperately wants the Flores consent decree reversed. Despite some mixed messages, if the administration had its druthers, family units would be kept together and their cases settled quickly.

The missing piece here is Congress, but little outrage will be directed at it, and probably nothing will be done. And so our perverse system will remain in place and the crisis at the border will rumble on.

There's nothing new about tearing kids away from their parents. We do it all the time in our prison system

The scenes of parents being separated from their children at the border are shocking and shameful. But taking children from their mothers is not a new practice nor is it inflicted only on border-crossers. It is the way the American penal system regularly treats women in the criminal justice system, whose children often suffer lives of deprivation, stigma, loneliness and trauma as a result.

There are currently about 219,000 women behind bars in the United States, according to a study by the American Civil Liberties Union last year, about eight times as many as were incarcerated in 1970.

Of those, 80% are mothers, and most are the primary caretakers of their children — or were, before they were separated.

What’s more, it is estimated that 1 in 25 female inmates is pregnant when sent to prison. In many states, inmates who give birth while incarcerated are shackled during labor and delivery. When a child is born in prison, it is almost immediately handed over to a social worker to be sent out to a family member or to foster parents. Often those separations turn out to be permanent. In many cases, there is no father present or available to take custody of the child.

You can say, as some people do, that this problem does not merit our concern. All these women committed crimes and are suffering the punishment. Perhaps they should have thought about the consequences of their actions before they misbehaved.

But of course there are several problems with that glib response.

For one thing, the people who suffer most from this situation are not the incarcerated mothers but the children, who are not just sad on a day-to-day level at being separated from their mothers, but often are damaged psychologically by the combination of trauma, pain and stigma. (Parental incarceration is now acknowledged as an “adverse childhood experience” by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.) Unsurprisingly, these children, who have not themselves committed crimes or offended society, are disproportionately non-white — because it is their parents who get locked up at higher rates and their parents who are less likely to make bail. The imprisonment rate for African American women (96 per 100,000) is twice the rate of imprisonment for white women (49 per 100,000).

Furthermore, it is important to remember that of the thousands of women being held in county jails, 60% have not been convicted of crimes and are merely awaiting trial. In many cases, they are behind bars, separated from their children, facing charges for which they are subsequently found not guilty.

Even among those who ultimately are found guilty, 25% are convicted of nonviolent drug offenses.

If for some reason you find it difficult to imagine the pain suffered by these mothers and children, try watching this seven-minute documentary about children being taken by bus to visit their mothers in remote prisons in rural California on Mother’s Day.

Or read Rachel Kushner’s excellent new novel, “The Mars Room,” about a young inmate in a California women’s prison. Among other things, she is trying desperately to find out what happened to her child when she was locked up and to get back to him. Some 850,000 children in California have a parent currently involved in some way in the criminal justice system, according to the makers of the Mother’s Day documentary.

In recent years, there has been more attention paid to this issue. There are an increasing number of programs around the country that allow children to spend more time with their incarcerated parents, including prison nurseries in some states that allow women to keep their newborns with them behind bars. It makes intuitive sense that spending more time with a parent is good for a child, but there is also research suggesting that it leads to less recidivism when the mother gets out. These programs deserve more study, more resources and more of our attention.

EmeraldGhost wrote:   (Poor choice of thread title, though ...  just a bit hysterical, doncha' think, 'Deucie'?)

Trump says he'll sign order stopping his policy of separating families at border

Government officials familiar with early drafts say the executive order would allow families to be held in immigration detention together.

....

(and but of course he'll claim that he "won"   )