U.S. Holds Even More Children Hostage

Jan 21, 2019

The number of children separated from their parents at the Southern Border is much higher than the official count of 2,737, according to a report by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

It’s because that count goes back only to April 2018, when the federal government announced a “zero tolerance policy,” meaning it would arrest every adult entering the U.S. without authorization, and separate their children from them. But the DHHS report says that this policy must have been in place already in the summer of 2017, when the rate of separations jumped up more than ten-fold, from 0.3 percent to 3.8 percent.

The authorities sent the children to detention facilities, sometimes hundreds of miles away from their parents. Many parents were deported before they even knew where their children were; but even those parents who were not deported were not able to find their children–because the authorities did not even bother to set up a process to track the children they were detaining!

So no one knows how long, if ever, it will take for each child to be reunited with his or her family–in fact, no one even knows how many children have been, and are still, separated from their parents!

Everybody understands that putting young children through such trauma opens wounds in them that they will carry for many years, and some perhaps all their lives. The Trump Administration may have taken this cruelty to new heights, but in the end what’s cruel is the policy of criminalizing workers for looking for work across the border.

And that is the policy of U.S. capital, which has always used the borders as an excuse to divide the U.S. working class and lower wages.