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Trump administration's child separations a "moral stain" — and a voter issue
The Trump administration's policy of child separations is back in the news weeks before the presidential election. Latino advocates, elected officials and religious leaders say it is a voter issue.
Local
After taking a back seat to the coronavirus pandemic, the reminder that the Trump administration intentionally separated babies and children from their parents to deter Central American migration is back in the news, two weeks before the presidential election.
This week, American Civil Liberties Union lawyers told a federal judge they have yet to locate the parents of 545 children and that the overwhelming majority of the children’s parents were deported.
The revelation — while many people are voting early — inserts an issue into the election cycle that was such a lightning rod in the 2018 midterms, Republicans tried distancing themselves from the administration’s separation strategy.
“This exemplifies a policy that reflects an incredible disregard for certain values, certain rights," said Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House in El Paso, Texas, a Catholic nonprofit shelter that assisted families who had been separated. "It is asking the United States to become something, someone we should not become and it needs to be something that we somehow resoundingly reject."
As the administration’s systemic separating of families returns to the forefront of the American consciousness, Trump will have to contend with the re-emergence of images of horrified parents pleading to know the whereabouts of their children, the sounds of crying children as they are mocked by an agent, children caged in pens of chain-link fencing and stories of young children who died while in custody.
"I would hope people would consider when they make their decisions on who to vote for,” Garcia said.
A group of artists has made child separations and other immigration detention measures part of an anti-Trump campaign targeting Latino, Black and young voters. The campaign, Remember What They Did, which includes artists like Shepard Fairey, is posting more than 200 billboards and thousands of street art posters in North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona and Pennsylvania, while the group urges people to vote. The same group posted anti-Trump billboards in Cleveland before the first presidential debate.