What Trump’s Immigrant Detention Policy Is – And What It Is Not

Amid the nice weather and world cup, it seems to be the case that multiple different political and social issues have slipped through the cracks over the last couple of weeks or so. People are more likely to be aware of what the scores were for the games eight days ago but not know that 81 people have been murdered this year alone in London by knife. Whilst the media buzz around the weather and football is a nice break from the news; we can’t sit around and just ignore what is going on in the UK, and further still in the rest of the world.
The first, and only thing really, thing that came to my mind when I was planning what to write about was this whole business with Trump and splitting families up. I felt like even though I feel up to date with the world, I had little to no idea about what the situation was there; primarily because no one is actually talking about it. Sifting through all the fake news was honestly unbearable, I could see why people ignore these kinds of things. Here is the crux of what I found:
At the actual heart of the executive order- the things Trump can just make up on the spot like the now infamous Muslim ban- it seemed for a better word; ridiculous. The president set out to prosecute all adults who try to cross the Mexican border illegally; whether they want to work there or seek asylum was irrelevant. Since children can’t be jailed with their parents, they were separated. The BBC reported the figure at 2,300 children being removed between 5th of May to the 9th of June- averaging at 65 a day. The main opposition to all of this is doctors, with the head of the American Academy of Paediatrics going so far as to call the policy “child abuse” and against “everything we stand for as paediatricians”; which I get.

Thing is, the opposition has one valid point; child safety.

Advocates of this fiasco are saying that the children could be taken away from potential dangerous and criminal parents and put into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. I think the main question is however- what about the kids of normal people just trying to make a life for themselves? Isn’t this too severe? And are the cages necessary?
I had to try and find out why this was going on, and basically, it’s a mess. Trump actually blamed the Democrats (the opposition) for the whole thing and said, “we have to break up the families” because of a law that “Democrats gave us”. I looked around and tied to see if this was true, and it will be no surprise to many that there is no law that US Congress made that demands that migrant families be separated. As irony would have it, these measures may not actually stop the ‘migrant problem’. Most of the families involved are fleeing violence and poverty, meaning that staying is a death sentence.

Its hard to find an event like this- take Australia. From what I know they have some of the strictest policies when it comes to immigration, but even they don’t have a policy that splits parents from their children. Like Michael Flynn, the executive director of the Geneva-based Global Detention Project said, ‘What the US is doing now, there is no equivalent, there’s nothing like this anywhere’- so if you don’t listen to me, listen to him.

To sum up this morbid update, this issue is simply bigger than we realise. Social media has been ablaze about this topic for days now, and understandably so. Its one of those issues that the next generation of history books will mention as a complete failure of legislation and a humanitarian crisis. Sounds cliché but its just time that will either make or break the situation; hopefully the former.