tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/separating-families-55445/articlesSeparating families – The Conversation2018-07-25T10:44:43Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/999902018-07-25T10:44:43Z2018-07-25T10:44:43ZWhat exactly is the point of the border?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228592/original/file-20180720-142417-bpwbdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A 'no border wall' sign is held during a rally to oppose the wall the US government wants to build.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Eric Gay</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/para-que-sirven-las-fronteras-100566">Leer en español</a></em>.</p>
<p>The past few weeks have seen widespread outrage over the Trump administration’s now-defunct policy of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/migrant-children-chaos-family-separation.html">separating migrant families at the border</a>. Four members of the president’s Homeland Security advisory council have resigned in protest, citing the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2018/07/17/morally-repugnant-homeland-security-advisory-council-members-resign-over-immigration-policies/?utm_term=.39480c5e44d2">“morally repugnant” practice</a>.</p>
<p>Similar conflicts about policing the borders have erupted throughout much of the world. In Europe, the coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/02/europe/merkel-seehofer-government-intl/index.html">barely survived</a> a controversy over how to deal with the continued stream of refugees seeking asylum in Germany. </p>
<p>How people respond to these controversies depends upon what it is that they think the border is set up to protect. </p>
<h2>Borders protect from ‘outsiders’</h2>
<p>In recent years, philosophers have provided several distinct visions on what the borders are protecting. </p>
<p>One prominent justification for securing the border begins with the thought that each state has its own distinctive <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674088900">national character</a>, and that the state’s borders protect it from being overwhelmed by outsiders. The country is not just a state, then, but a cultural or ethnic nation - and, some people might believe, it ought to ensure that migration does not disturb that composition.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228596/original/file-20180720-142432-1035s13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228596/original/file-20180720-142432-1035s13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228596/original/file-20180720-142432-1035s13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228596/original/file-20180720-142432-1035s13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228596/original/file-20180720-142432-1035s13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228596/original/file-20180720-142432-1035s13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228596/original/file-20180720-142432-1035s13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable on immigration policy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Evan Vucci</span></span>
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<p>President Trump’s criticism of European immigration begins with this idea. He has stated quite categorically that the wave of immigration to Europe would permanently change its culture and <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6766947/donald-trump-britain-losing-culture-immigration/">that was a “shame</a>.”</p>
<p>From my perspective as a <a href="https://phil.washington.edu/people/michael-blake">political philosopher</a>, whose work focuses on the political morality of migration, this view assumes that the “real” community in a country can be identified with one particular culture or ethnicity. In doing so, it implicitly announces that all those who are not members of that majority are less important to the state.</p>
<p>This view echoes the ideas of <a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-claim-that-europe-is-losing-its-culture-is-racism-and-it-must-be-challenged-99962">racial and religious superiority</a> that have caused immense harm throughout history. Fascism as an ideology began with the thought that only certain European residents were the true inheritors of Europe’s history. The rest were considered interlopers, who were <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/">reducing the grandeur of European civilization</a>. </p>
<h2>The ownership of the state</h2>
<p>Another justification for the border begins with a notion of property rights. Scholar <a href="https://wagner.nyu.edu/community/faculty/ryan-pevnick">Ryan Pevnick</a> has argued that the state and its institutions are rightly owned by those who have worked to <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/philosophy/political-philosophy/immigration-and-constraints-justice-between-open-borders-and-absolute-sovereignty?format=HB&isbn=9780521768986">build and sustain those institutions</a>. They can thus refuse to share their institutions with outsiders – in the same way that I can refuse to share my house with those who have no property rights to enter that house.</p>
<p>There are difficulties here, too. Many people present within a given country may have done very little to actually build that society and its institutions. This does not, however, imply that they are not entitled to the rights associated with citizenship. </p>
<p>But, as importantly, there are many people outside the country who have done a great deal to protect and to preserve that country. During the Iraq War, for example, some Iraqis became translators for the United States Army, at <a href="https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2018/4/12/the-iraqi-translators-betrayed-by-the-united-states">enormous personal risk</a>. </p>
<p>If this view is to be coherent, then these individuals would have a right to cross that border. Indeed, this fact was belatedly recognized by the Trump administration. In February 2017, an exception was made to the travel ban for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/world/middleeast/trump-visa-ban-iraq-interpreters.html">Iraqi translators</a> who had worked on behalf of the United States. </p>
<h2>Preserving democracy</h2>
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<span class="caption">Border between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico.</span>
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<p>A final justification for the border reflects the <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/immigration-and-democracy-9780190909222?cc=us&lang=en&">importance of democracy</a>. Widespread migration, it is believed, could <a href="https://www.idea.int/our-work/what-we-do/migration-democracy">undermine social trust and solidarity</a> – both of which are preconditions for democratic self-government. </p>
<p>Migrants from countries without a tradition of democracy, based on this argument, might have neither knowledge of democratic norms nor a moral commitment to the preservation of democracy. Concerns such as these led Belgium to recently introduce a requirement that all potential immigrants coming from outside Europe must sign a <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/belgium-to-force-non-eu-migrants-to-sign-pledge-to-uphold-european-values-as-integration-concerns-a6965271.html">“newcomer’s statement” </a> indicating adherence to “European values” – including <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/04/belgium-contemplates-newcomers-statement-for-immigrants.php">gender equality and gay rights</a>. </p>
<p>The thought that some outsiders are unlikely to be good democratic citizens, though, has a long and unpleasant history. The United States once barred Chinese nationals from citizenship on similar grounds. American politicians argued that the Chinese civilization was incompatible with any form of government other than <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/01/14/fearmongering-around-muslim-immigrants-echoes-anti-asian-hysteria-of-past/">“an imperial despotism</a>.” </p>
<p>If democracy is this important, those who value it may have some obligation to use migration policy to help people live under democratic rules. President Ronald Reagan, for example, argued that the borders of the United States should be <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=44128">open to those fleeing Soviet oppression</a>. The freedom of United States, he stated in his farewell address, did not belong to the country alone. </p>
<p>Rather, as Reagan said, the U.S. ought to see herself as the custodian of <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=35402">the freedom of outsiders as well</a> – a suggestion that is increasingly important, as the American debate about borders continues.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99990/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Blake receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. </span></em></p>Conflicts about policing the border have erupted in much of the world. How people respond depends on the many distinct visions of what borders are meant to be protecting.Michael Blake, Professor of Philosophy, Public Policy, and Governance, University of WashingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/988072018-06-26T21:58:25Z2018-06-26T21:58:25ZI’ve seen the lasting emotional damage to detained children<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225020/original/file-20180626-112598-1etu4cq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Children protest in Los Angeles outside a court hearing where immigrant-rights advocates asked a judge to order the release of parents separated from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Richard Vogel)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2016, I landed the most challenging job of my life: Teaching at a juvenile detention facility. </p>
<p>Now it’s not what you might immediately think — I wasn’t unqualified. </p>
<p>In both the city I was born, Long Beach, Calif., and in San Diego where I went to graduate school at San Diego State University, I’d taught and studied under-served and marginalized populations.</p>
<p>Yet inside a newly created trauma-reduction unit, I was tasked with providing a general humanities curriculum to psychologically distressed, incarcerated youth — a population, and setting, you can’t simply “prepare” for. </p>
<p>It was this experience that forced me to realize the importance of safety and security — both physical and emotional — on children’s mental health. </p>
<p>My research is on the social determinants of mental health, and I study the correlation between intergenerational trauma, mental health and incarceration.</p>
<p>I’ve learned that nurturing parents, and a safe, stress-free environment are both crucial for healthy development and indicative of a lower probability of committing crime.</p>
<p>Social class and environment also contribute substantially to mental health: Families of low socio-economic status are both more likely to experience adversity and stress, and have less resources for coping. </p>
<h2>We don’t choose the lives we’re born into</h2>
<p>As a sociologist, I don’t believe in the ideology of “meritocracy.”</p>
<p>We do not get to choose the neighbourhood we grow up in. Racism and poverty have an impact on our opportunities. </p>
<p>We do not get to choose the psychological makeup of our family (such as past abuse or addiction issues), nor their educational background or socio-economic status. </p>
<p>We don’t get to decide the amount of love and affection — or hatred and violence — we’re exposed to. We don’t get to choose the opportunities — or misfortunes — that are afforded to us.</p>
<p>So inside that detention facility, my question was never: “What did this <em>individual</em> do?” It was, rather: “What has this <em>population</em> been exposed to?”</p>
<p>The answer shouldn’t shock you. What I realized at the end of my teaching term was, sadly, pretty straightforward: Not a single student I encountered was given the opportunity to live a healthy, stable, peaceful life. </p>
<p>Instead, there was one commonality, one characteristic thread sewn into each of their lives: Trauma.</p>
<h2>PTSD takes a toll</h2>
<p>Recent social science literature on the social determinants of mental health suggests detrimental childhood experiences — such as <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3115616/">parent-child separation</a>, for example — predict increased levels of developmental/learning disabilities, anxiety, depression and drug addiction. </p>
<p>Post-traumatic stress disorder — a likely outcome of <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2016-37283-001">such experiences</a> — can severely threaten psychological and physical health for a lifetime, and both the victim and those closest to them are at risk. </p>
<p>When parents are absent from a child’s most important developmental stage, children regularly confront difficulties cultivating the necessary emotional skills needed to form lasting, intimate bonds. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-sudden-and-lasting-separation-from-a-parent-can-permanently-alter-brain-development-98542">A sudden and lasting separation from a parent can permanently alter brain development</a>
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<p>And when those problems aren’t resolved in adulthood, patterns of inter-generational trauma can be established.</p>
<p>You’ve seen the photos, heard the cries, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/us/children-immigration-borders-family-separation.html">and read the heartbreaking stories</a> — more than 2,300 children and counting have been taken from their parents. </p>
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<p>In <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/us/family-separations-migrants-court.html">some cases</a>, families have been separated for up to eight months, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/nyregion/children-separated-border-new-york.html">in others</a>, more than 300 youth may have become “lost” in the bureaucratic labyrinth of federal agencies — all of this in addition to the terrible conditions that forced them to leave their home countries in the first place.</p>
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<p>Allegations of abuse, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/21/us/undocumented-migrant-children-detention-facilities-abuse-invs/index.html">including being forcibly drugged and assaulted</a>, have also begun to emerge.</p>
<p>One 15-year-old Honduran boy <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/06/25/a-15-year-old-fled-a-texas-shelter-for-migrant-children-as-officials-say-they-cant-detain-people-involuntarily/?utm_term=.ce08192042c7">fled one facility,</a> and is reportedly undertaking a dangerous attempt to make his way back to his country on his own.</p>
<p>How any person, parent or political administration could have initiated, supported and justified this policy, without the attendant horror and rage that fills most of us, is beyond comprehension.</p>
<p>Though U.S. President Donald Trump has now done a supposed about-face on his policy of using traumatized children as bargaining chips in his political games, large numbers of children may never find their parents. <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-immigration-order-confusion-concern-1.4715566">The administration has so far not committed to reuniting these children with their parents</a>.</p>
<p>Trump may believe he has contained the uproar following the widespread public and media backlash, but I assure you, the damage has already been done — and an entire generation, in the U.S., Central America and abroad, will absorb the consequences.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98807/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jarrett Robert Rose does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>U.S. President Donald Trump may believe he’s contained the political damage of his policy to separate migrant children from their parents. But the psychological damage to children has only just begun.Jarrett Robert Rose, Teaching Associate and Ph.D. Student, York University, CanadaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/986122018-06-19T21:49:44Z2018-06-19T21:49:44ZTrump’s act of state terrorism against children<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223924/original/file-20180619-126559-eg7t33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Children listen to speakers during an immigration family separation protest in Phoenix, Arizona.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>State terrorism comes in many forms, but one of its most cruel and revolting expressions is when it is aimed at children. </p>
<p>Even though U.S. President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/trump-immigration-children-executive-order.html">backed down in the face of a scathing political and public outcry</a> and ended his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents, make no mistake: His actions were and remain a form of terrorism. </p>
<p>That he was defiant until his back was against the wall points not only to a society that has lost its moral compass, but has also descended into such darkness that it demands both the loudest forms of moral outrage and a collective resistance aimed at eliminating the narratives, power relations and values that support it.</p>
<p>State violence against children has a <a href="https://www.juancole.com/2018/06/dictators-children-sessions.html">long, dark history among authoritarian regimes.</a> </p>
<p>Josef Stalin’s police took children from the parents he labelled as “enemies of the people.” Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet all separated children from their families on a large scale as a way to punish political dissidents and those parents considered disposable. </p>
<p>Now we can add Trump to the list of the depraved.</p>
<p>Amnesty International called Trump’s decision to separate children from their parents and warehouse them in cages and tents for months as a cruel policy that amounts to <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/06/usa-family-separation-torture">“nothing short of torture.”</a> </p>
<p>Many of the parents whose children were taken away from them entered the country legally, unwittingly exposing what resembles a state-sanctioned policy of racial cleansing. <a href="https://apnews.com/afc80e51b562462c89907b49ae624e79">Allegations of abuse</a> against the children while detained are emerging. And federal U.S. officials have said despite Trump’s about-face, children who have already been separated from their parents — more than 2,000 of them — will not be reunited with them.</p>
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<span class="caption">Immigrant children are shown outside a former Job Corps site that now houses them on June 18, 2018, in Homestead, Fla.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)</span></span>
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<p>In any democratic society, the primary index through which a society registers its own meaning, vision and politics is measured by how it treats its children, and its commitment to the ideal that a civilized society is one that does everything it can to make the future and the world a better place for youth.</p>
<h2>Abuse and terror</h2>
<p>By this measure, the Trump administration has done more than fail in its commitment to children. It has abused, terrorized and scarred them. What’s more, this policy was ludicrously initiated and legitimized by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a notorious anti-immigrant advocate, with <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/06/14/jeff-sessions-points-to-the-bible-in-defense-of-separating-immigrant-families/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.13fc93211747">a Bible verse that was used historically by racists to justify slavery.</a></p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-bibles-message-on-separating-immigrant-children-from-parents-is-a-lot-different-from-what-jeff-sessions-thinks-98419">The Bible's message on separating immigrant children from parents is a lot different from what Jeff Sessions thinks</a>
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<p>In the name of religion and without irony, Sessions put into play a policy that has been a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.</p>
<p>At the same time, Trump justified the policy <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/15/politics/family-separation-democrats-trump/index.html">with the notorious lie that the Democrats have to change the law</a> for the separations to stop, when in actuality the separations are the result of a policy inaugurated by Sessions under Trump’s direction. </p>
<p>Trump wrote on Twitter that the Democrats are breaking up families.</p>
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<p>Yet according to the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/politics/trump-immigration-separation-border.html">New York Times</a>:</p>
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<p>Mr. Trump was misrepresenting his own policy. There is no law that says children must be taken from their parents if they cross the border unlawfully, and previous administrations have made exceptions for those travelling with minor children when prosecuting immigrants for illegal entry. A “zero tolerance” policy created by the president in April and put into effect last month by the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, allows no such exceptions, Mr. Trump’s advisers say.</p>
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<p>Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen actually elevated Trump’s lie to a horrendous act of wilful ignorance and complicity.</p>
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<p>This is an extension of the carceral state to the most vulnerable groups, putting into play a punitive policy that signals a descent into fascism, American-style.</p>
<p>The New Yorker’s Marsha Gessen got it right in comparing Trump’s policies towards children to those used by Vladimir Putin in Russia, both of which amounts to what she calls <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/taking-children-from-their-parents-is-a-form-of-state-terror">“an instrument of totalitarian terror.”</a> </p>
<p>Both countries arrest children in order to send a powerful message to their enemies. In this case, Trump’s message was designed to terrorize immigrants while shoring up his base, while Putin’s message is to squelch dissent in general among the larger populace. Referring to Putin’s reign of terror, she writes:</p>
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<p>The spectacle of children being arrested sends a stronger message than any amount of police violence against adults could do. The threat that children might be removed from their families is likely to compel parents to keep their kids at home next time — and to stay home themselves.</p>
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<h2>Children screaming for their parents</h2>
<p>Within the last few weeks, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/us-immigration-children-audio-trump-border-patrol-separate-families-parents-detention-center-a8405501.html">heart-wrenching reports, images and audio</a> have emerged in which children, including infants, were forcibly separated from their parents, relocated to detention centres under-staffed by professional caretakers and housed in what some reporters have described as cages. </p>
<p>The consequences of Trump’s xenophobia are agonizingly clear in reports of migrant children screaming out for their parents, babies crying incessantly, infants housed with teenagers who don’t know how to change diapers and shattered and traumatized families.</p>
<p>The Trump administration <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/06/16/dhs-family-separation-mexico-border-lavandera-dnt-ac.cnn">has detained more than 2,000 children</a>. What’s more, the Trump administration <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/05/heres-how-the-government-managed-to-lose-track-of-1500-migrant-children/">has lost track of more than 1,500 children it first detained</a>.</p>
<p>In some cases, it deported parents without first uniting them with their detained children. What is equally horrifying and morally reprehensible is that previous studies, such as those <a href="https://www.amazon.com/War-Children-Anna-Freud/dp/1258161877/ref=as_at?creativeASIN=1258161877&linkCode=w50&tag=thedailybeast-autotag-20&imprToken=HKxJiMCzt0SDWl7bH6SvfA&slotNum=0&s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528998860&sr=1-1&keywords=war+and+children+anna+freud">done by Anna Freud</a> and Dorothy Burlingham in the midst of the Second World War, indicated that children separated from their parents suffered both emotionally in the short run and were plagued by long-term separation anxieties.</p>
<p>It’s no wonder the American Academy of Pediatrics referred to the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their families as one of <a href="http://www.aappublications.org/news/2018/05/08/immigration050818">“sweeping cruelty.”</a></p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223926/original/file-20180619-126540-14sf4xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223926/original/file-20180619-126540-14sf4xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223926/original/file-20180619-126540-14sf4xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223926/original/file-20180619-126540-14sf4xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223926/original/file-20180619-126540-14sf4xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223926/original/file-20180619-126540-14sf4xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223926/original/file-20180619-126540-14sf4xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Christopher Baker, 3, holds a sign that reads ‘Which baby deserves to sleep in a cage?’ as he attends a Poor People’s Campaign rally with his mother in Olympia, Wash., on June 18.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Trump has mobilized the fascist fervour that inevitably leads to prisons, detention centres and acts of domestic terrorism and state violence. Echoes of Nazi camps, Japanese internment prisons and the mass incarceration of Black and brown people, along with the destruction of their families, are now part of Trump’s legacy. </p>
<p>Shameless cruelty now marks the neoliberal fascism currently shaping American society. Trump <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/392886-dem-lawmaker-to-trump-stop-holding-kids-hostage-to-build-your">used children as hostages</a> in his attempt to implement his racist policy of building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and to please his white supremacist base. </p>
<p>Trump’s racism was on full display as he dug in to defend this white supremacist policy. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1009071403918864385"}"></div></p>
<p>He likened migrants to insects or disease-carrying rodents. In the past, he has also called undocumented <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-44148697/trump-immigrant-gangs-animals-not-people">immigrants “animals.”</a> This is a rhetoric with a dark past. The Nazis used similar analogies to describe Jews. This is the language of white supremacy and neo-fascism.</p>
<h2>Long history in the U.S.</h2>
<p>But let’s be clear. While the caging of children provoked a great deal of moral outrage across the ideological spectrum, the underlying logic has been largely ignored. </p>
<p>These tactics have a long history in the United States, and in recent years have been intensified with the collapse of the social contract, expanding inequality and the increasing criminalization of a range of behaviours associated with immigrants, young people and those populations considered most vulnerable.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/fascisms-return-and-trumps-war-on-youth-88867">Fascism’s return and Trump’s war on youth</a>
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<p>The horrible treatment of immigrant parents and children by the Trump regime signals not only a hatred of human rights, justice and democracy, it lays bare a growing fascism in the United States in which politics and power are now being used to foster disposability. White supremacists, religious fundamentalists and political extremists are now in charge. </p>
<p>It’s all a logical extension of his plans <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-embassy-cables-warned-against-expelling-300000-immigrants-trump-officials-did-it-anyway/2018/05/08/065e5702-4fe5-11e8-b966-bfb0da2dad62_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b8fd2325dc34">to deport 300,000 immigrants and refugees,</a> including 200,000 Salvadorans and 86,000 Hondurans, by revoking their temporary protected status.</p>
<p>His cruelty is also evident in his <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/daca-trump-ends-news-latest-dreamers-act-immigration-renewal-immigrants-jeff-sessions-a7930926.html">rescinding of DACA for 800,000 so-called dreamers</a> and the <a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/immigrants-arent-bludgeons-far-right-use-against-democrats">removal of temporary protected status for 248,000 refugees</a>. </p>
<p>“Making America Great Again” and “America First” morphed into an unprecedented and unapologetic act of terrorism against immigrants. While the Obama administration also locked up the families of immigrants, it eventually scaled back the practice. </p>
<p>Under Trump, the savage practice <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/the-false-choice-between-jailing-children-and-separating-families/">accelerated and intensified</a>. His administration refused to consider more humane practices, such as community management of asylum-seekers. </p>
<p>It all functions as short hand for making America white again, and signals the unwillingness of the United States to break from its past and the ghosts of a lethal authoritarianism.</p>
<h2>Trump’s admiration of dictators</h2>
<p>It’s also more evidence of Trump’s <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-dreams-of-dictators-kim-jong-un-vladimir-putin/">love affair with the practices of other dictators</a> like Putin and now Kim Jong Un. And it signals a growing consolidation of power that is matched by the use of the repressive powers of the state to brutalize and threaten those who don’t fit into Trump’s white nationalist vision of the United States. </p>
<p>There is more at work here than the collapse of humanity and ethics under the Trump regime, there is also a process of dehumanization, racial cleansing and a convulsion of hatred toward those marked as disposable that echoes the darkest elements of fascism’s tenets.</p>
<p>The U.S. has now entered into a new era of racial hatred.</p>
<p>What has happened to the children and parents of immigrants does more than reek of cruelty, it points to a country in which matters of life and death have become unmoored from the principles of justice, compassion and democracy itself. </p>
<p>The horrors of fascism’s past have now travelled from the history books to modern times. The steep path to violence and cruelty can no longer be ignored. The time has come for the American public, politicians, educators, social movements and others to make clear that resistance to the emerging fascism in the United States is not an option —but a dire and urgent necessity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98612/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Henry Giroux does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Donald Trump’s policy to separate children from their migrant parents lays bare his fascism. The time has come for Americans to resist this act of domestic terrorism.Henry Giroux, Chaired professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.