The numbers are staggering and beyond shameful. The American Immigration Council reports that during Donald Trump’s first term in office more than 4,600 children were separated from their immigrant families, turning them into what’s been called “state-created orphans.” Human Rights Watch estimates that by as late as 2024, some 1,360 of those children still had not been reunited with their parents.
The full extent of childhood trauma inflicted by the U.S. government, however, can only be guessed at. The powers that be do not want us to know the depth of their callousness and brutality, which has been described by The Hill as a “silent tragedy” unfolding “every day” in our country. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids homes, workplaces and even community spaces, leaving children in the wake of their parents’ abrupt and often unexplained detention. These are not isolated stories — they represent a national crisis, where the very fabric of family life is being unraveled.”
This utter horror is being inflicted on children and their families for merely political reasons. It has turned the executive branch of government into a bureaucratic torturer of innocent kids. The sanctity of childhood is a core value in our country, one that most of us idealize and try to honorably practice. It’s terrible enough to be abused as a child by members of your family or other domestic and economic circumstances. But when government traumatizes children, orphans them, even incarcerates them, there just isn’t language strong enough to condemn it.
Destroying families and brutalizing children goes against everything we say we believe in. As even Ronald Reagan recognized, “It is the power of the family that holds the nation together … that serves as the cradle of our country’s soul.”
Governmental child abuse is not exclusively a Trumpian issue. Both the Obama and Biden administrations pursued aggressive deportation policies but tended to focus on undocumented immigrants they deemed to be threats to national security or public safety, according to the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force. Children in such cases, of course, would still have suffered from the traumatizing uncertainty of their parents being accused and labeled as dangerous. And to make matters worse, such accusations probably came about arbitrarily without the formal protections of due process, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
Trump has now broadened the scope of deportations drastically, making all 11 million or so undocumented immigrants priority targets for removal. What happens to their children, American born or not?
Most of us, I’m sure, have had experiences in our childhoods that hurt our feelings or burdened us in some way. Most of us survived intact enough to overcome those early difficulties. Imagine, though, being a kid who’s been orphaned or traumatized because her family has been victimized by malicious supposition and prejudice leveled at them by the government of the United States! Chances are they could suffer from a psychological category of troubles that fall under the heading of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) which might lead to some form of post-traumatic stress.
ACEs are events that batter children, such as being a victim of violence, abuse or neglect, or witnessing violence at home or in your community, or other unsettling “aspects of the child’s environment that can undermine their sense of safety, stability, and bonding,” says the CDC. Being swept up in warrantless raids and separated from your family by hostile, heavily-armed mobs of masked ICE agents is as traumatizing as it gets, short of rape and murder. It all plays into a child’s worst fears of being abandoned. If you want to dream up a hell for kids, separate them from their families. It’s demonic and unconscionable. I can’t imagine how I’d have handled something like that when I was a in my early teens, much less as a helpless six-year-old.
Trumpism is creating a future in which large numbers of immigrant children are being set up to suffer mental and emotional ills as adults because they’ve been battered by a child-abusing government that should have protected them from unjust harm by virtue of their humanity alone. The tragedy for all of us is that our “system” and its values have become perverted and turned into instruments of bigotry that routinely inflict monstrous hardships on the vulnerability of youth. I can think of few things worse.
This is how our country loses its soul.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Photo by Nicolas Alejandro)
Comparisons are never completely realistic but it’s interesting to note that today, as our government permanently traumatizes these innocent immigrant children, it simultaneously prepares to once and for all destroy the Cuban process whose motto, from its inception, has been “children are the privileged of the revolution.” The Cuban system has never lacked problems–internal as well as external–but prioritizing its children has always been more than just a motto. Raising my four children there, I witnessed the many ways in which sacrifices were made to assure the health and happiness of children: from universal health care and special diets to daycare, summer camp and art. And we mustn’t forget the 20,000 Palestinian children murdered by Israel with the ongoing economic and military support of the United States. Trumpism not only separates families and kills children here at home but around the world.