Immigrant Children

About this Episode

Show Notes and Links

We recorded the day Trump signed an executive order against breaking up families, so we really didn't have time to process the ramifications. Let me make it clear, we are 100% against the punitive separation of children from their families. We are also 100% for the comprehensive immigration reform and greater work visas for immigrant labor. (Gomer is for the legalization of literally all drugs, so that will strip the cartels of most of their power, but we don't talk about that!)

What we are not for is the hype wagon of the left wing media and anti-Trumpkins out there. Nor are we interested in the Sessions-style biblical apologetics of the Trumpkin defenders. We are pro-life, pro-family, and pro-child. Some of these parents are sketchy. Some of these kids are being trafficked (a lot more than you think) and need to be saved. Some are criminals, some are forced into criminal behavior.

GOMER'S IGNORANCE
Gomer here: "I will claim more ignorance of the elevation of abuse under Trump's administration, really especially since the month of March. I do think it's due to the increase in illegal border crossings that usually drops off the closer we get to summer. I've spent all day today reading Vox and some others about the background to the anti-Trump recent outrage and have learned a lot. I also think the Colberts of the world are just so blind with Trump hatred (again, personally, I did not vote for him and never will) they will blame everything on him and not on a lack of space, of funds, or of personnel to help these kids.

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Episode Links

• The Catholic vision of just immigration reform — “You drew me forth from the womb,” the Psalmist wrote to the Lord, “made me safe at my mother’s breasts.” We don’t know what happened after that Honduran girl was taken from her mother’s arms. We don’t know if she was taken to a warehouse, to be housed with hundreds of other children who had been separated from their immigrant parents. We don’t know if she sat strapped in a car seat, squalling for her mother, near the big kids who let themselves cry only as they fall asleep on gym mats spread across the floor, behind a chain link fence. We do know that policies that indiscriminately separate children from their migrant parents at our national border violate the sacred sovereignty of families. They need to be stopped. But it’s not enough to condemn the treatment of a mother separated from her child without asking what should happen instead. There have been, unfortunately, too few solutions proposed to address a real problem: how should the identity of family members be verified at the border, to ensure that children are not being trafficked? That issue needs more than moralizing or grandstanding. It needs a real solution.
• Zero-tolerance immigration policy leads to surge in family separations, lawyer says - CNN — Children generally are separated from parents who are awaiting prosecution for crossing illegally, so prosecuting more parents will result in the separation of far more children from their parents at the border than before the policy took effect. Those children become the charges of the Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families (specifically, the Office of Refugee Resettlement).
• Family separation at the border: the past 72 hours in outrage, explained - Vox — The past 72 hours in outrage over Trump’s immigrant family separation policy, explained Children are being kept in cages. Parents are being deported without their kids. Trump is wrongly blaming Democrats.
• Hundreds of children wait in Border Patrol facility in Texas — McALLEN, Texas (AP) — Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets.
• UN Human Rights Office condemns US border separation of families — Washington D.C., Jun 7, 2018 / 03:42 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Maria had been a victim of sex trafficking and abuse by a local gang when she fled Guatemala. Taking her 3-year-old son, Jose, she made the trek to the U.S. border, seeking asylum in the United States. But when she arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in December 2017, she was apprehended by Customs and Border Protection. Agents separated her from her son, who was grouped together with “unaccompanied minors” by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, while Maria was transferred to adult detention.
• US bishops ask that immigration reform protect families, Dreamers — US bishops ask that immigration reform protect families, Dreamers
• Family separation and detention: Obama’s border policy vs. Trump’s - Vox — What Obama did with migrant families vs. what Trump is doing Trump hopes the courts will let him detain families like Obama did.
• Pope Francis criticizes Trump's 'zero-tolerance' migrant policy — Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the U.S. bishops conference, issued a statement during the bishops' biannual meeting in Fort Lauderdale last week. He criticized the policy, saying “separating babies from their mothers is not the answer and is immoral.” He said later the bishops would consider the possibility of sending a delegation to the U.S.-Mexico border to see the detention centers for themselves and offer solidarity for incoming migrants and refugees. “Let it be clear that in these things, I respect [the position of] the bishops conference,” Pope Francis said in the interview with Reuters. When migrants arrive to a country, “you have to receive them, help them, look after them, accompany them and then see where to put them, but throughout all of Europe,” he said, noting that “some governments are working on it, and people have to be settled in the best possible way, but creating psychosis is not the cure.”
• Tucson bishop elaborates on ‘canonical penalties’ for immigrant family separation — Tucson, Ariz., Jun 20, 2018 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- A bishop who suggested last week that the Church consider canonical penalties for Catholics involved in the separation of families at the United States’ southern border said Wednesday that penalties are not central to a discussion of immigration reform. On immigration reform,  “the critical issue at hand isn’t canonical penalties, even if the concept has intrigued many. The real issue is children being used as pawns in a contorted effort at punishing their parents or deterring future asylum seekers,” Bishop Edward Weisenburger of Tucson wrote in a June 20 op-ed for the Arizona Daily Star.
• Trump on GOP “compromise” immigration bill: “What is the purpose”? - Vox — Trump undermined House Republicans’ entire immigration debate in one tweet