Trump's Inhumane Border Policy Is Not Over Yet

(Cartoon image is by Matt Wuerker at Politico.com.)

Is the inhumane tearing of children (even infants and toddlers) away from their parents at the border over now? Not by a long shot. His rather suspect executive order just put a temporary hold on the situation, and provides an out for Trump to resume the policy (by saying their would be no separation as long as space was available). He is now going to federal court to ask that children be allowed to be detained indefinitely and be detained in facilities that cannot meet the minimum state and federal standards for youth facilities. In other words, the abuse continues.

Here is part of an excellent article in Time Magazine by Molly Ball:

It is a crisis Donald Trump created and always had the power to solve. At detention facilities across the country, children are penned in cages, crying out piteously for the parents from whom they have been torn by border agents on orders from Washington. Some children may never see their mother or father again.

In a presidency marked by serial outrages, the scandal over family separations at the southern border has been unlike any other. The President didn’t just say something offensive, he intentionally turned the machinery of the state on some of the world’s most vulnerable humans. He applied his signature approach–brutal toughness–to his trademark issue, immigration. He greeted criticism of his policy with mockery, falsehoods and blame-casting. He handcuffed the Republican Party and hamstrung understaffed federal agencies. All the themes of Trump’s character and Administration were embodied in this wrenching calamity.

At first, Trump embraced the outrage, as he so often does. Even as the pictures, video and audio began to trickle out of the detention facilities, and awful stories spread–a woman deported without her son; older children changing younger ones’ diapers–supporters predicted that Trump would stand his ground. . . .

But the images of young children sobbing for their parents created an outcry that neither Trump nor his opponents anticipated. Recriminations poured in, some of them from unexpected quarters. Evangelical leader Franklin Graham called it “disgraceful.” Former First Lady Laura Bush wrote a scathing op-ed. Even Melania Trump issued an unusual statement deploring the situation and worked her husband behind the scenes, according to a White House official. The President and his party faced a toxic scenario in an election year that was already looking grim. “It’s political insanity,” a top Senate Republican aide told TIME. “It will kill us.”

And so Trump did something he has rarely done as President: he backed down from the fight. At the urging of advisers, he signed an Executive Order on June 20 in an attempt to end family separations and instead detain children and parents together. . . .

The inhumanity unfolding at the border has not just been a test for Trump. It has been, and will continue to be, a moment of reckoning for America. Trump has often bet that if he just rides out the current frenzy, the anger will fade and some new controversy will erupt. He thinks shock is a temporary condition, moral outrage is phony posturing and that the American people can be numbed to just about anything. If there is a Trump creed, it’s that there’s no such thing as going too far. That may have found its limit with putting children in cages. But as his “zero tolerance” policy heads toward a seemingly inevitable court battle, the jailing of kids may become the jailing of families–and we will see how much American hearts can withstand. . . .

What happens next for the parents and children detained at the border is just as murky. The President’s Executive Order calls for families to be detained together, ending the separation issue but creating new complications. It is likely to be challenged in court. Immigrants’ advocates fear that his move could defuse the public pressure as family separations give way to family internment camps. And there is still no system in place to reunite the thousands of children and parents already separated from one another.

Whatever misery this mess brings will lay squarely at the feet of the President. But what price he will pay remains unclear. Trump was elected on the strength of some searing truths about the American political system–that Washington was broken and politicians of both parties were hopeless lightweights–and also some searing falsehoods, including that a frightening, inhuman foreign threat was to blame for the nation’s problems. He placed a cynical bet on the American character, that our capacity for empathy only went so far. The outcome of the humanitarian crisis at the border will be a test of whether that wager was right.