Have you noticed that in the last few days the issue of children separated from parents arrested while illegally crossing the Mexican border has become the latest anti-Trump fury and obsession. This is not a new issue, but is now dominating the media and social media landscape as so many other issues have filled a slow news cycle void.
The problem of separating children is a problem caused entirely by people crossing the border illegally with their children, which puts U.S. border enforcement in a terrible dilemma of either not enforcing immigration laws or separating families.
Rich Lowry has an excellent explanation of the problem, The Truth about Separating Kids. Read the whole thing, of course, but here’s my short paraphrase:
Under the Obama administration mostly central American families were encourage to illegally cross the border as a family unit and to claim asylum, because that increased the chances they would be released into the U.S. pending an asylum hearing. Many if not most of them never would be heard from again and would remain in the U.S. illegally. The reason this tactic was effective was that the government is barred by law from incarcerating children with arrested parents (makes sense), so to arrest the parent for the misdemeanor of illegally crossing the border (the first time, the second time is a felony) meant the child would be separated from the parent. The Obama answer was to not enforce the immigration laws and to not arrest the parent in most cases.
But it didn’t need to be this way. The parents could have applied for asylum in the first nation (usually Mexico) where it was safe for them to do so, and not risked arrest or separation from children. Crossing the border illegally with your children is a voluntary act which not only puts the children in physical danger, but risks parental arrest and separation.
The Trump administration a couple of months ago changed the practice of not arresting illegally crossing parents. This amounts to a strict enforcement of existing immigration laws. But that has the result of increasing the number of children separated from their arrested parents. Those separations usually are very short term, a few days up to a couple of weeks.
No one should doubt that any separation of a child from a parent, even for a short time, can be traumatic particularly for the child. But the parents and open borders advocates have used the children cynically in an attempt to effectively eliminate border enforcement.
The separated children, along with a vastly larger number of children who were sent across the border illegally by their parents unaccompanied by an adult, are cared for in facilities many of which are run by private humanitarian groups.
Any hope of finding a solution to this problem is lost because the rhetoric has been so infused with anti-Trump derangement that it is inviting Nazi comparisons.
Joe Scarborough went there two days ago, in what coincided with the launch of the anti-Trump campaign on the issue:
The White House is pushing back after MSNBC host Joe Scarborough compared the Trump administration’s border policies to Nazi tactics.“It is appalling that Joe Scarborough would compare sworn federal law enforcement officers — who put their lives on the line every day to keep American people safe — to Nazis,” read a statement from White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley.On Thursday, Morning Joe host Scarborough repeated a claim that illegal-immigrant parents are being told their children will be taken to go bathe, only for the government to separate their families indefinitely.“Public defenders, in the federal courts down there in McAllen, Texas reporting that children are being told and their parents are being told that they’re being taken off to the showers. And that they’ll return. And they never return,” Scarborough said. “I know children are being marched away to showers, marched away to showers. Being told they are — just like the Nazis said that they were taking people to the showers and then they never came back.”“This is Donald Trump’s America. And yes, it sounds like something we would be condemning, coming out of North Korea,” Scarborough said to co-host Mika Brzezinski.The White House’s statement said Scarborough’s “facts are categorically false.”
In a tweet yesterday that is getting enormous attention and push back, former NSA and CIA Director General Michael Hayden tweeted an image of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi extermination camp with the text: “Other governments have separated mothers and children.”
This is a hideous and false comparison, yet Hayden is standing by it and laughing off complaints that he has both defamed U.S. border agents and desecrated the memory of the millions of children and adults exterminated by the Nazis at places like Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The other day I asked If you are active on social media, are you happier now than before social media?
It is a rare experience on Twitter that leaves me feeling better about anything – the world, myself, or others. I’ve described Twitter as a pus pocket. I think I was too charitable. It’s easy to turn disagreement into hatred into fury — just witness how many celebrities and others have gotten themselves into trouble by Twitter outbursts.
I used to respect Michael Hayden, though admittedly I only knew him from TV interviews where he seemed like a reasonable person. But like so many of the anti-Trump deep state and establishment, he has lost his senses if he thinks the situation on the U.S. border warrants a comparison to Nazi death camps.
Of course, Hayden is far from alone in losing his mind.
The thrill of Twitter RT’s and the demands for ever-more-outrageous anti-Trump rhetoric are the fuel that feeds The Resistance fire.
(Some of the tweets below via Twitchy)
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY
