Obama and the child kidnapping policy of the Trump Administration

It's nothing new for Trump and his minions to blame Obama for whatever Trump himself is doing. So they first claimed that Obama passed a law requiring them to kidnap the children of asylum-seekers (not true) and that the Obama Administration also practiced family separate (unfortunately true).

On Michael Brooks Show for 06/19/2018, Michael has a discussion about how Democrats and the left should approach discussing the conservative immigration politics that Obama practiced in connection with Trump's. Michael stressed the viewpoint that, yes, Obama's policy involved detention of minors, too, but his purpose was to practice a restrictive and punitive immigration policy as part of a strategy to get the Republicans to agree to comprehensive immigration reform. He argued that our legitimate criticism of Obama's policies detract the qualitatively worse and more cruel than Obama's. His concern is that a purist left harping on Obama's policies can function as a kind of concern trolling, validating Trump's claims that his child kidnapping policy is a continuation of Obama's approach.

Jimmy Dore and Abby Martin make the case that Michael Brooks probably considers more in the purist lane, Hillary: Undocumented Children "Should Be SENT BACK!" Jimmy Dore Show 06/21/2018. The Hillary anti-immigrant clips they feature are important to keep in mind. Hillary was set to play the same game on immigration that Obama did, despite the failure of the fundamental premise that harsh anti-immigrant policies by Democrats would persuade the Republicans to agree to something better.

Sam Stein in this clip calls the Obama Administration's family detention policy and its very explicit purpose to act as a deterrent to asylum-seekers "abhorent," while also characterizes the Trump kidnapping policy as "another level of disgustingness." Does Sam Want Completely Open Borders? Majority Report 06/22/2018. Michael Brooks is also part of that discussion on that clip, noting that the Trump policy has a "fundamental[ly] different premise behind" it.

Digby also joined Sam Stein on Friday to talk about the Trump Administration's child kidnapping, Casual Friday w/ Digby and Film Guy Matthew 06/22/18. Diby appears about 15 minutes into the show.

They also discussed the conservative political calculation behind Obama's related policies. What Digby emphasizes is the progressive critics were criticizing Obama's immigration and detention policies in real time. And also pointing out that the ConseraDem political strategy would not work. The critics were right.

Franco Ordoñez and Anita Kumar, Yes, Obama separated families at the border, too McClatchy Nenwspapers 06/21/2018:

No numbers on children separated from their parents under Obama is available because the Obama administration didn’t keep them, according to Trump DHS officials.

Leon Fresco, a deputy assistant attorney general under Obama, who defended that administration's use of family detention in court, acknowledged that some fathers were separated from children.

Most fathers and children were released together, often times with an ankle bracelet. Fresco said there were cases where the administration held fathers who were carrying drugs or caught with other contraband who had to be separated from their children.

“ICE could not devise a safe way where men and children could be in detention together in one facility,” Fresco said. “It was deemed too much of a security risk.”

One of the most controversial measures that Obama took was to resurrect the almost-abandoned practice of detaining mothers and children to deter future illegal immigration. [my emphasis]

Those of us who criticized Obama's immigration policies in real time obviously want to reject the attempts by Trump and Sessions to use Obama's bad policies to justify or excuse their own qualitatively worse child-kidnapping program.

But I said when Obama took office, his most important Constitutional responsibility was to make sure that the torture crimes of the Cheney-Bush Administration was properly investigated and prosecuted. The torture policy had been approved and implemented by very senior Administration officials. Not only under American law but under the obligations of the Torture Convention signed by St. Reagan when he was President, the US Government was obligated to pursue those crimes. Here again, whatever failings of the Obama Administration in this regard, it's not a serious as the original crimes themselves. And it doesn't change the fact that the Justice Department was obligated to pursue those prosecutions, too. And didn't.

But Obama and Eric Holder did give Dick Cheney the one thing that his own Administration couldn't give itself: a subsequent Administration of the other party that granted the torture criminals de facto immunity. And now the mobsters and grifters of the Trump Administration are driving a fleet of trucks through that de facto immunity.

And, as despicable as the Trump-Sessions child kidnapping policy is, the Democrats should remember and reject the Bad things that Obama did on immigration. And if his motivation really was to get a good comprehensive immigration reform bill with Republican cooperation, it failed. And Hillary Clinton was wrong in her support of the same harsh policies. After the Clinton and Obama Administration, I don't see any excuse for Democrats to pretend that such an approach by future Democratic Administration is anything but bad.

Will Bunch in this column reminds not to be sentimental about Obama's immigration policy, because some of it really was bad. Some of the pictures of border kids that haunt me most are from 2014. Here's why Attytood 06/24/2018:

The immigration lawyer [R. Anderew Free] had been to two large detention centers in Texas where U.S. officials were holding hundreds of migrant families from Central America, often for months at a time. Free said some of the conditions at these makeshift detention camps were appalling.

“I remember hearing the constant, violent coughing and sickness of small children, and the worry of their mothers who stood in the sun outside the clinic all day only to be told their kids should ‘drink water,'” Free tweeted. “I remember nearly doubling over when I saw the line of strollers.”

When Free had a chance encounter with the president at a political event, he warned him that the detention centers would be “a stain on his legacy.” He said the president wanted to know if Free was an immigration lawyer — implying that everyday citizens weren’t worried about what goes on at the border — and then said, according to Free: “I’ll tell you what we can’t have, it’s these parents sending their kids here on a dangerous journey and putting their lives at risk.” The message that Free took away was that the president saw family detention as a deterrent to keep more refugees from coming.

This happened in 2015. The president with the looming stain on his legacy was Barack Obama.

Bunch also makes the important observation that he and Democratic critics generally concentrated at the time on the nasty rightwingers agitating the immigration issue.

US foreign policy in Latin America, including under Obama when it was pretty straightforwardly conservative (and that' not mean to be a compliment), has had and still has a major role in generating refugees and other immigrants to come to the US. This is something we need to keep in mind always on this issue. Because, as Bunch also notes:

But Obama also amped up deportations to record levels — which, in some cases, separated families here in the United States — and he did little to radically alter the sick culture of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that would be “unshackled” the moment that tinhorn despots like Trump and AG Jeff Sessions arrived on the scene. And, probably fearful of midterm election politics, Obama didn’t treat the 2014 event as what it really was: a humanitarian refugee crisis. [my emphasis]

Obama was also moving to phase out the use of privately-for-profit detention centers in immigration, which Trump and Sessions have dramatically reversed. This is a central problem in the child-kidnapping issue. We have private prisons companies with lobbyists who make money off excessive detention and child kidnapping. Private Prisons Cashing In On Migrant Crisis - But Who’s Paying? | Velshi & Ruhle | MSNBC 06/22/2018:

Stephanie Ruhle reports that three of the biggest private prison contractors for the federal government are The Geo Group Inc., CoreCivic, and MTC/Management & Training Corp.

Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton carried on much of the Obama the last several years.

Clinton: Send some immigrant kids home CNN 06/18/2014:

Clinton on unaccompanied children arriving in the US PBS Newshour 02/11/2016:

See also:

Immigration is still really dead this time PBS Newshour 07/01/2014

New surge of familes from Central America prompted immigration raids PBS Newshour 01/12/2016

Such concerns helped prompt the Department of Homeland Security, with the close involvement of the White House, to initiate crack-downs on migrants in several states over the holidays, picking up 121 people for deportation. In some instances people were detained during surprise early-morning home raids that have spread fear across immigrant communities and infuriated the president’s Democratic allies.

“Having people afraid to open their doors to strangers, not going to work, etc., is not a healthy development,” said Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who is attending a news conference Tuesday where House Democrats will release a letter signed by around 90 lawmakers demanding an end to the raids.

Lofgren said she shares concerns about a renewed Central American border crisis, but like other Democrats argued that the migrants should be treated as refugees. Many are fleeing brutal gang warfare in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the same countries whose violence and instability forced women and kids to make the dangerous trip north two years ago, overwhelming U.S. facilities and producing disturbing images of frightened children huddling in Border Patrol facilities.

Obama was wrong on this issue in important ways. And progressives, including some Democrats in Congress like Zoe Lofgren, were criticizing him for that in real time.

Stephanie Canizales, How unaccompanied youth become exploited workers in the US The Conversation 03/13/2017


Reunification process for immigrant children uncertain as court cases continue Corpus Christi Caller Times/WZZM13 06/21/2018

Family separation is something that happens constantly, said Diana Abrego, who works at Clinica De Immigracion De San Jose, an organization in Del Rio — about halfway between Brownsville and El Paso — which offers help with legal services such as applying for citizenship and completing legal forms.

“You’ll see those situations happening off and on. (Separation of families) has always been a continuous thing, but it’s just got a little more intense,” she said. “There’s a lot of people that get deported and one half stays here and the other in Mexico. You see that a lot in the border towns.”

And the Washington Post has a new report (Maria Sacchetti et al, Separated immigrant children are all over the U.S. now, far from parents who don’t know where they are 06/24/2018) describing:

...a converted Walmart where each morning they are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, in English, to the country that holds them apart from their parents.

Why must they say those words, some of the children ask at the shelter in Brownsville, on the Mexican border in Texas?

“We tell them, ‘It’s out of respect,’ ” said one employee of the facility, known as Casa Padre, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job.