Today in our ongoing series ICE is Full of Sadistic Racists, the agency is planning to start arresting the parents and adults who are currently responsible for caring for children brought who've been brought into the country.
This is not only cruel, I don't think you could overstate how dumb and self-defeating it is.
From the Associated Press:
A new "surge initiative" aims to dismantle human smuggling operations, including identifying and arresting the adult sponsors of unaccompanied minors who paid coyotes or other smugglers to bring the children across the U.S. border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials confirmed Thursday. [...]
"Arresting those who come forward to sponsor unaccompanied children during their immigration proceedings, often parents, is unimaginably cruel," said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, a nonprofit that has matched thousands of unaccompanied minors with pro bono attorneys in the last eight years. "Without caregivers to come forward, many of these children will languish in costly detention centers or be placed in foster care at great expense to states."
Trump isn't just creating more orphans, he's going to greatly increase the cost of caring for them.
ICE may claim it's going to "dismantle human smuggling operations," but I think we all know that's bullshit. They're going to arrest people even if they have no proof of anything.
What makes this especially sadistic is arresting adults who voluntarily and willingly came forward on the record to care for children under the Obama administration. People who came forward, who are already registered in the system, will be among the first targeted for action.
This will have long term consequences even after Trump is gone because registering under a friendly administration is clearly no protection from the next time racist white Americans elect a racist president. These are the consequences of immigration being under the exclusive purview of the executive branch.
Congress could resolve all of these conflicts by passing comprehensive immigration reform, but that will never happen (and probably shouldn't, because it would be terrible) under a Republican-controlled congress.
"Family values" goes right out the window when the kids aren't white.