Tag: immigrant children
#EndorseThis: Trump's Cruelty To Children Must Never Happen Again

#EndorseThis: Trump's Cruelty To Children Must Never Happen Again

Next to the massive negligent homicide caused by Trump's response to coronavirus, the criminal mistreatment of immigrant children is his administration's worst offense. Caged, terrorized, deprived of medical treatment and adequate sanitation, even food, the innocents who crossed the border fell into a nightmare created by the White House. Some will never awake from that nightmare because they died, but others – at least 545 at last count – have been left effectively orphaned because their parents cannot be found.

That is what the "family separation" perpetrated by Trump and his law enforcement apparatus has meant. It is a gross offense to human rights, American traditions, and the reputation of the United States among the world's nations.

Watch "Cruel" for one minute as People for the American Way and the Lincoln Project remind us why we are all so angry at this government for tormenting children and shaming our country. Then go out and do something about it.


immigrant children

By Demonizing Immigrants And Refugees, Trump Only Harms The Innocent

A fanatic has been defined as someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. It's a good description of Donald Trump, who began his quest for the presidency stoking fear of foreigners and used this year's final debate to keep doing it, as he has throughout his presidency.

Foreigners who come to America — with or without authorization — are viewed with hostility by this administration. It has diverted military funding to build Trump's border wall. It has separated thousands of foreign children from parents who came without permission — and then failed to reunite hundreds of these families. It has cut refugee admissions by some 90% and legal immigration by half. It has declared war on "sanctuary cities."

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immigrant kids , ICE

Trump Says Immigrant Children He Orphaned Are ’So Well Taken Care Of’

Donald Trump on Thursday night defended his administration's policy of separating immigrant children from their families with no way of reuniting them, claiming they are "so well taken care of."

Asked at the final presidential debate about the 545 detained immigrant kids taken forcibly from their parents at the southern U.S. border under his administration's zero-tolerance policy, whose families the Trump administration has been unable to locate, Trump first suggested without proof that some had been brought into the country by "coyotes."

Former Vice President Joe Biden quickly refuted that argument, noting that the kids in question had come over with their families before being separated by border officials.

"Let's talk about what we're talking about, what happened. Parents, their kids were ripped from their arms and separated. And now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone, nowhere to go," Biden noted. "It's criminal."

Trump then falsely claimed that the children were being kept in great facilities.

"I will say this. They went down. We brought reporters, everything. They are so well taken care of. They're in facilities were so clean and have gotten such good..." he bragged.


In reality, the Department Health and Human Services' own inspector general has documented widespread trauma among those children, many of whom have been held in facilities with histories of abuse and misconduct. A September 2019 investigation found "some separated children expressed acute grief that caused them to cry inconsolably."

A separate 2018 report by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general found that hundreds of children were also unlawfully detained for more than three days — often in cages, without beds or showers — and that the Border Patrol failed to even keep track of which of the nonverbal young kids were which.

Thursday night's question about the 545 separated children stemmed from a New York Times report published on Wednesday, which revealed that the Trump administration's poor record keeping had made it difficult to impossible to decipher the parents' whereabouts. And though in some cases, parents said they had left their children with friends after being deported, they only did so because they felt forced or were concerned for their children's safety if they came with them.

"The Trump administration had no plans to keep track of the families or ever reunite them and so that's why we're in the situation we're in now, to try to account for each family," Justice in Motion's Nan Schivone, who is working with other advocates to help find the parents, told the Times.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

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Danziger Draws

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.