Last year during April, President Trump requested the enforcement of the “Zero Tolerance” Immigration Policy, and within a few weeks, his request was approved. This policy is a “punishment” for those who held criminal records or entered the united states illegally (or both), the punishments are: either they are sent to their homeland or they go to jail inside the country, which means that if they had children, all of them were going to be separated from their parents, and be held in custody of the United States Child Protective Services until a decision is made of the parent's case.
The policy purpose was to decrease undocumented people entering the country, in other words, letting them know that if they cross the border illegally, there was a chance that their families were going to be divided. This policy also existed during the Obama Administration but the separation only occurred in extreme cases, for example, where the adult was really putting at risk their own child. Now, there have been cases that the violations committed by the defendant weren’t necessarily criminals violations, but still, they were prosecuted by the court and were found “guilty” therefore, since the United States by law can’t let children live with their parents when the parents are being deported to their homeland, or while they're in criminal jail, all of the children end up in the shelters of the Department of Health and Human Services or the Office of Refugees Resettlement, both working together.
My response to it is that there are more criminals that should be prosecuted just as fast as the government is doing it with undocumented people and also they should reinforce the laws within the policy because the more children are being admitted the less control the DHHS will have. There are child abusers, that rape kids, abuse them physically, verbally, and emotionally, not only these children are in desperate need of help, but in need of justice, and they aren’t necessary undocumented people, they are “normal” people that walk around or beside us every day.
The government has facilitated the process of this policy early this year and according to Miriam Jordan, a former journalist of The New York Times, writer of U.S. Continues to Separate Migrant Families Despite Rollback of Policy, 245 children were separated from their families on last spring’s Zero Tolerance border enforcement policy. She also argued that the separation can have a negative psychological long term effect on children. Later in the article, she stated that even though, 2,700 children were reunited on June 20 of 2019, thousands of other children, before the enforcement of the policy happened, are still living in the shelters or in temporary foster homes, she stated that the Department of Health and Human Services “ lack of an efficient tracking system”(Jordan) of the children being accepted in the Department. Jordan added to her article that a member of the Department of Homeland Security said that there were some cases in which family separations were not being reported formally to the Refugee Resettlement Office, and such lack of formal or official reports meant that the recorded 245 children that were separated and placed in shelters or fosters homes this year up to march, could be more.
The trauma that these kids are going through isn't easy, primarily because most of the undocumented children held by CPS, only have their parents present in the United States, not other family member is able to take care f him/her, or he/she just doesn't have anyone else. The International Association of Chiefs of Police Website presented a pdf document that is called Safeguarding Children of Arrested Parents, in which in the section of "Scope of the Problem: How Many Children are Affected?", the organization wrote " Incarceration of a mother can have the most severe and long-lasting consequences for her child, as she is most often the primary, if not the only, caregiver. Separation from a primary caregiver represents a crisis for children and should be given special consideration."(IACP) on page 4 of the aforementioned document.
