Taking Children by Laura Briggs

Author:Laura Briggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520343672
Publisher: University of California Press

5

Taking the Children of Refugees

In July 2019, there was a dustup on Twitter between the House Oversight Committee and President Trump over the question of how exceptional the Trump administration’s policy of taking the children of asylum seekers was. The House committee sought to publicize hearings about conditions faced by children in Border Patrol facilities in 2019. These detention camps, designed for the short-term processing of adults, were turned into long-term facilities for children, in apparent violation of the law. The Democratic leadership of the committee tweeted out a photo of children with silver emergency blankets at the McAllen Detention Center in Texas—from 2014. Republican members of the House as well as the president himself were quick to point out that these were minors detained by the Obama administration.1 This, in turn, led to renewed efforts to sow confusion about what the Obama administration policies had been. Although the 2014 photos were of children who arrived unaccompanied, rather than of children who were made unaccompanied, critics had a point. The Obama administration—like the Clinton, Reagan, and both Bush administrations—had put children in detention camps. Those who found the Trump administration’s sometimes quite explicit anti-immigrant racism and efforts to subvert the international asylum system utterly objectionable found themselves casting around: what, exactly, made Trump’s policy different? To find the answer, it helps to look back over the century and a half that Texas and the rest of the Southwest have been part of the United States.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.