Kansas and Missouri Republicans stand up to Trump: Stop separating migrant families
Eventually, President Donald Trump may get his “big, beautiful wall” on the Mexican border. But the wall of Republican silence on the president’s own odious policy of separating migrant children from their parents is collapsing so fast that even some of our terrified-of-Trump Missouri and Kansas lawmakers have mustered the will to raise objections.
OK, you don’t have to be so very bold to agree with the president’s own wife, and that’s how Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt positioned himself: “I agree with Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Trump that separating families does not meet the standard of who we are as a country,” he said on Monday, referring to former first lady Laura Bush’s “heartbroken” response to toddler traumatization in an op-ed in The Washington Post. She called the situation “eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.’’ In 2015, Trump said he might have supported those infamous camps, too.
The president’s strategically harsh new “zero tolerance” policy has separated families guilty of the misdemeanor infraction of entering the country without papers. And in complete violation of our treaty obligations, even some legal asylum seekers have had their kids torn away.
Kansas Sens. Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran were also among those who balked on Monday. “I am against using parental separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration,” Roberts said.
He’s right to use that word “deterrent,” because that’s exactly what the new policy is supposed to be. Or at least, that’s what White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told NPR last month, before his boss started pretending that the policy predated him. It was only implemented in April, and since then, has separated more than 2,000 children from their parents. On Monday, ProPublica released an audiotape of some migrant children in detention screaming, “Mami!” and “Papa!” as a border agent jokes, “We have an orchestra here; all we need is a conductor.”
Hilarious. As is the president’s insistence that this treachery has been forced on him by law — there is no such law — and by Democrats.
That’s only true according to the Trumpian logic that unless his political adversaries give him everything he wants on immigration, he’ll keep right on separating families, which would thus be the fault of the Democrats who didn’t stop him.
Kansas Rep. Kevin Yoder, who has a seat in a suburban swing district to defend, doesn’t seem to see it that way: “As the son of a social worker, I know the human trauma that comes with children being separated from their parents,” he tweeted. “It takes a lasting, and sometimes even irreversible toll on the child’s well being.That’s why I’m demanding that Attorney General Sessions halt the practice of family separation at the border immediately as Congress works toward legislative solutions.”
That’s exactly what must happen because the damage being done to these kids can never be undone. And as for legislative solutions, immigrant advocates say that even the Senate bill that California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein has proposed wouldn’t necessarily prevent the separation of children from parents seeking asylum.
“The Trump administration will not win on this one,” Trump ally Bill O’Reilly tweeted. And if we don’t put kids before politics on this issue, when will we?
This story was originally published June 18, 2018 at 8:20 PM with the headline "Kansas and Missouri Republicans stand up to Trump: Stop separating migrant families."