Children in cages

In Nazi Germany, the state concocted the policy of Lebensborn as a way of ensuring the ‘racial’ purity of Germany and any lands it conquered. Millions of children were snatched away from their parents and then judged for being racially ‘worthy’. In dictatorships around the world, the state often threatens dissidents by kidnapping their children. The current American policy of separately detaining undocumented adult immigrants and their minor children contains elements of both. In April, the Trump administration announced a new policy of criminally prosecuting everyone who crossed its border with Mexico without the proper documentation. It departed from past practise by not exempting those who came with children, with Attorney General Jeff Sessions heartlessly boasting this would deter future immigration. Essentially, the US is breaking up families to stop brown people from coming to the country. The children are snatched away from their parents by border security officials, sometimes through deceit. In one instance, a parent was told that the immigration agent was taking her daughter to wash her hair, only to later realise that they had been forcibly separated. The children are then kept away from their parents in what are essentially large internment camps.

The Trump administration has never disguised its bigotry. President Trump launched his presidential campaign by essentially categorising all immigrants from Mexico as rapists and drug dealers. He has praised Nazi marchers, tried to ban all Muslims from entering the US and has a strange fixation on African-American crime. Now his administration is literally tearing apart the families of those who do not have the privilege of being white. US actions against undocumented immigrants have always been harsh. Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama was responsible for more deportations than any other American president in history. American history is littered with examples of breaking up the families of minority citizens, from the internment of Japanese citizens during the Second World War to forced separation of the black population when slavery was still legal. What is more disturbing is that polls in the US show that a majority of Republicans support the current policy. There has been a lot of talk about how the economic anxiety of white America was behind Trump’s election. But racism was never lurking too far beneath the surface. Trump brought that racism out in the open and now we are seeing how it is treating brown bodies as expendable. It is putting brown lives in danger – especially after the government announced that it would no longer give asylum to those who suffer domestic abuse or threats from criminal gangs – and it is showing the world that it is willing to use children as a weapon in the war against immigrants.