America’s border with Tijuana in Mexico will hopefully become a more humane junction. In belated acknowledgment of familial tragedies, Donald Trump has eventually been sensitive to public condemnation. Children will not be separated from their parents, after all when families try to cross the border to enter the US illegally and get caught.
A more heartless case-study of reckless border management will be difficult to imagine. Sure, it is a “very important executive order” as President Trump described it; but the chief regret must be that it has come a little too late in the midst of the heart-rending wail of the separated ~ even caged ~ child.
In the net, both the parents and the children were detained on either side of the fence. For all the grandstanding at the Oval Office last Wednesday, the US President and his cabal have taken a little too long to realise that “It’s about keeping families together while at the same time being sure that we have a very powerful, very strong border, and border security will be equal if not greater than previously.”
More accurately, Mr Trump’s America had very nearly sacrificed family bonding at the altar of border security. Even three days after the executive order was signed, there is considerable confusion on both sides of the divide over the fate of no fewer than 2,300 children who are already separated from their parents. There is no procedure in place to reunite these children with their parents.
So heartrending a humanitarian tragedy is perhaps uniquely American ~ a testament to a remarkably insensitive President who eventually has been suitably compassionate to admit that “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.” Even if the reversal came after storms of protest ~ worldwide and within the United States.
For all the belated effusion of sympathy, the fineprint of the executive order makes it pretty obvious that a hardline approach to immigration will continue, specifically what the administration calls “zero tolerance” enforcement policy of criminal prosecution for every immigrant who crosses the border illegally.
The imprimatur has been clothed with the imperative to “maintain family unity” by detaining parents and children together instead of separating them while their legal cases keep pending amidst a severely backlogged immigration court system. The crackdown, therefore, will be matched with a human touch. In the net, the zero tolerance policy remains and this is at the root of the family separation crisis created by the Trump administration.
In terms of immigration policy, the order marks a sudden reversal for President Trump, who only hours earlier had insisted that the law demanded children be separated from their parents. He claimed that only Congress could resolve that. It is after all a question “of human bondage” to summon the title of Somerset Maugham’s novel.