Daily Bread for 6.17.18

Good morning.

Father’s Day in Whitewater will be a sunny day with a high of ninety-two.  Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 07s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1885,  the Statue of Liberty arrives in New York harbor “aboard the French frigate Isère — in 214 crates that held the disassembled gift from the people of France. Nearly a quarter-of-a-million onlookers lined Battery Park, while hundreds of boats pulled into the harbor to welcome the Isère.”

Recommended for reading in full — articles on immigration policy — 

Julie Hirschfeld Davis reports Trump Again Falsely Blames Democrats for His Separation Tactic:

President Trump on Saturday repeated his false assertion that Democrats were responsible for his administration’s policy of separating migrant families apprehended at the border, sticking to a weeks long refusal to publicly accept responsibility for a widely condemned practice that has become a symbol of his crackdown on illegal immigration.

“Democrats can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change!” Mr. Trump said in a morning post on Twitter.

It came the day after his administration said that it had taken nearly 2,000 children away from their parents in a six-week period ending last month, as part of a new “zero tolerance” policy that refers for criminal prosecution all immigrants apprehended crossing the border without authorization.

The White House defended the practice this week, saying the president was merely enforcing the law. And in recent speeches around the country, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, has made a spirited case for it, arguing that a strict approach is a vital tool for deterrence.

Katy Vine recounts What’s Really Happening When Asylum-Seeking Families Are Separated (“An expert [Anne Chandler] on helping parents navigate the asylum process describes what she’s seeing on the ground”):

There is no one process. Judging from the mothers and fathers I’ve spoken to and those my staff has spoken to, there are several different processes. Sometimes they will tell the parent, “We’re taking your child away.” And when the parent asks, “When will we get them back?” they say, “We can’t tell you that.” Sometimes the officers will say, “because you’re going to be prosecuted” or “because you’re not welcome in this country,” or “because we’re separating them,” without giving them a clear justification.

In other cases, we see no communication that the parent knows that their child is to be taken away. Instead, the officers say, “I’m going to take your child to get bathed.” That’s one we see again and again. “Your child needs to come with me for a bath.” The child goes off, and in a half an hour, twenty minutes, the parent inquires, “Where is my five-year-old?” “Where’s my seven-year-old?” “This is a long bath.” And they say, “You won’t be seeing your child again.” Sometimes mothers—I was talking to one mother, and she said, “Don’t take my child away,” and the child started screaming and vomiting and crying hysterically, and she asked the officers, “Can I at least have five minutes to console her?” They said no.

In another case, the father said, “Can I comfort my child? Can I hold him for a few minutes?” The officer said, “You must let them go, and if you don’t let them go, I will write you up for an altercation, which will mean that you are the one that had the additional charges charged against you.” So, threats. So the father just let the child go. So it’s a lot of variations. But sometimes deceit and sometimes direct, just “I’m taking your child away.”

Parents are not getting any information on what their rights are to communicate to get their child before they are deported, what reunification may look like. We spoke to nine parents on this Monday, which was the 11th, and these were adults in detention centers outside of Houston. They had been separated from their child between May 23 and May 25, and as of June 11, not one of them had been able to talk to their child or knew a phone number that functioned from the detention center director. None of them had direct information from immigration on where their child was located. The one number they were given by some government official from the Department of Homeland Security was a 1-800 number. But from the phones inside the detention center, they can’t make those calls.

Kristine Phillips reports ‘America is better than this’: What a doctor saw in a Texas shelter for migrant children:

Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said colleagues who were alarmed by what was going on at the border invited her to see for herself, so she visited a shelter run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

“We needed to see what was happening and tell the country and the world about it,” she said.

One thing immediately became clear to Kraft: Those who work at this shelter, whom she declined to name for privacy reasons, were doing what they could to make sure the children’s needs are met. The children were fed; they had beds, toys, a playground and people who change their diapers. But there are limits to what workers could do. Not only could they not pick up or touch the children; they could not get their parents for them.

“The really basic, foundational needs of having trust in adults as a young child was not being met. That contradicts everything we know that the kids need to build their health,” Kraft said.

[‘Where’s Mommy?’: A family fled death threats, only to face separation at the border.]

Such a situation could have long-term, devastating effects on young children, who are likely to develop what is called toxic stress in their brain once separated from caregivers or parents they trusted. It disrupts a child’s brain development and increases the levels of fight-or-flight hormones in their bodies, Kraft said. This kind of emotional trauma could eventually lead to health problems, such as heart disease and substance abuse disorders.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issused a Statement from Daniel Cardinal DiNardo:

Fort Lauderdale, FL—”At its core, asylum is an instrument to preserve the right to life. The Attorney General’s recent decision elicits deep concern because it potentially strips asylum from many women who lack adequate protection. These vulnerable women will now face return to the extreme dangers of domestic violence in their home country. This decision negates decades of precedents that have provided protection to women fleeing domestic violence. Unless overturned, the decision will erode the capacity of asylum to save lives, particularly in cases that involve asylum seekers who are persecuted by private actors. We urge courts and policy makers to respect and enhance, not erode, the potential of our asylum system to preserve and protect the right to life.

Additionally, I join Bishop Joe Vásquez, Chairman of USCCB’s Committee on Migration, in condemning the continued use of family separation at the U.S./Mexico border as an implementation of the Administration’s zero tolerance policy. Our government has the discretion in our laws to ensure that young children are not separated from their parents and exposed to irreparable harm and trauma. Families are the foundational element of our society and they must be able to stay together. While protecting our borders is important, we can and must do better as a government, and as a society, to find other ways to ensure that safety. Separating babies from their mothers is not the answer and is immoral.”

The United Church of Christ issues U.S. interfaith leaders urge government to #KeepFamiliesTogether:

Recently, the Administration announced that it will begin separating families and criminally prosecuting all people who enter the U.S. without previous authorization. As religious leaders representing diverse faith perspectives, united in our concern for the wellbeing of vulnerable migrants who cross our borders fleeing from danger and threats to their lives, we are deeply disappointed and pained to hear this news.

We affirm the family as a foundational societal structure to support human community and understand the household as an estate blessed by God. The security of the family provides critical mental, physical and emotional support to the development and wellbeing of children. Our congregations and agencies serve many migrant families that have recently arrived in the United States. Leaving their communities is often the only option they have to provide safety for their children and protect them from harm. Tearing children away from parents who have made a dangerous journey to provide a safe and sufficient life for them is unnecessarily cruel and detrimental to the well-being of parents and children.

As we continue to serve and love our neighbor, we pray for the children and families that will suffer due to this policy and urge the Administration to stop their policy of separating families.

Charles C. Camosy, of Democrats for Life, writes that You Can’t Be Pro-Life and Against Immigrant Children:

We are in the midst of a serious crisis for vulnerable children and families, though, and these “pro-life, pro-family” organizations have been largely silent.

The crisis is the Trump administration’s practice of separating children from undocumented parents, even when the families are asking for asylum. In one particularly horrific case, a mother said that her baby was taken from her while she was breast-feeding.

The number of children being taken is so large that the administration, using the fear these children must feel as a means of deterring undocumented immigration, is apparently building “tent cities” around military bases to house them.

Given their support of the administration, and an unwillingness to speak critically about immigration policy, “pro-life, pro-family” organizations now risk being tied to these and other horrific practices.

Psychologist J. A. Coan writes The Trump administration is committing violence against children:

As a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, I study how the brain transforms social connection into better mental and physical health. My research suggests that maintaining close ties to trusted loved ones is a vital buffer against the external stressors we all face. But not being an expert on how this affects children, I recently invited five internationally recognized developmental scientists to chat with me about the matter on a science podcast I host. As we discussed the border policy’s effect on the children ensnared by it, even I was surprised to learn just how damaging it is likely to be.

At minimum, forced separation will cause these children extreme emotional distress. Most of us know this intuitively. Less intuitive, as Nim Tottenham of Columbia University told me, is that “the sadness is not the thing that really matters here. What matters is this is a trauma to the developing nervous system.” Extreme emotional responses to separation from parents is part of evolution’s plan to keep those parents close — to “break any parent’s heart,” as Megan Gunnar of the University of Minnesota said. That’s because throughout human evolution, an absent caregiver has meant almost certain death. Jude Cassidy of the University of Maryland put it best: When faced with separation from loved ones, “we fight as if it’s a matter of life and death, because it is.”

But little minds and hearts can maintain that level of distress only for so long before the children face a horrifying decision: Continue, through severe emotional pain, to call out for their parents, or proceed on the assumption that their parents are gone. As Dylan Gee of Yale University explained, for those who choose the latter path, their brains will start down a course of “accelerated development” — they’ll mature more quickly. The problem is that rapid maturation often comes at the cost of cognitive and emotional inflexibility later on, as well as the assumption that the world is extremely dangerous and threats must be avoided automatically, without thinking. According to Gunnar, this assumption of perpetual danger will cause some to suffer from chronic, low-level inflammation, as if they are constantly battling a mild infection. Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School, provided the comprehensive long-term view: As those children grow and develop into adults, the combination of chronic inflammation and behavioral inflexibility will impair their health in at least two ways — through direct weathering of their bodies and less effective problem-solving, impulse control and decision-making.

The Migrants and Refugees Section at the Vatican recently tweeted a verse of Deuteronomy:

 

“The Bible teaches that God ‘loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt’ (Deuteronomy 10:18-19).” Pope Francis pic.twitter.com/Yt8i7b39VN

— Migrants & Refugees (@M_RSection) June 14, 2018

Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey report Trump cites as a negotiating tool his policy of separating immigrant children from their parents:

President Trump has calculated that he will gain political leverage in congressional negotiations by continuing to enforce a policy he claims to hate — separating immigrant parents from their young children at the southern border, according to White House officials.

On Friday, Trump suggested he would not change the policy unless Democrats agreed to his other immigration demands, which include funding a border wall, tightening the rules for border enforcement and curbing legal entry. He also is intent on pushing members of his party to vote for a compromise measure that would achieve those long-standing priorities.

Trump’s public acknowledgment that he was willing to let the policy continue as he pursued his political goals came as the president once again blamed Democrats for a policy enacted and touted by his own administration.

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images:

MCALLEN, TX – JUNE 12: A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is executing the Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards undocumented immigrants. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also said that domestic and gang violence in immigrants’ country of origin would no longer qualify them for political asylum status.

Embed from Getty Images