Trump admin to end separation policy

[Dill]

(06-21-2018, 10:49 AM)bfine32 Wrote: This sound almost like you are suggesting the illegal immigrant deserves preferential treatment over a US citizen. They children are treated the exact same in either situation and the person that committed a crime is responsible for the situation the child is in.

I just cannot wrap my head around the mentality of we must blame someone other than the law breaker for this situation.

Speaking of accountability . . .

In the modern international system, all human beings have human rights, called "universal human rights," regardless of citizenship.  Under current national and international law, not to mention the supposed values of the dominant religion in the US, we cannot deflect responsibility for unnecessarily separating children from parents by framing the issue as one of "preferential treatment" to rationalize cruel handling of the undocumented children we are abusing. And people who  commit misdemeanors in the US are NOT separated from their children, and when parents must go to jail, their children do not "disappear," distributed in some hidden system of child incarceration and held incommunicado from the parents. And where caretakers are forbidden to physically hug or otherwise comfort crying children. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/facing-outcry-over-family-separations-dhs-chief-says-we-will-not-apologize/2018/06/18/d1e85466-7305-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html?utm_term=.306ee953e40a.  How is this being "humane as possible" when two months ago we were not doing this at all?

Nor can we simply cast the parents as "law breakers" to exonerate the US from responsibility for inhumane treatment. In non-democratic, illiberal societies, where people have no say in determining what is law, only law breakers are ever to blame--never law makers.  In contrast, in democracies, where the people ultimately decide what laws are just and how they are to be applied, the question of whether someone other that "the law breaker" is to blame for a crime is a social and legal constant. E.g., that is how the Civil Rights movement rolled back segregation--by determining that LAW MAKERS, NOT THE LAWBREAKERS, were in the wrong.

Your argument also reminds me of the logic of zero tolerance, an illiberal experiment adopted by US schools in the '90s when they switched from the standard of making student punishment fit the level of offense to using the most extreme punishment--expulsion--for minor offenses, like a student bringing Tylenol to school.  When people pointed out how this went against traditional conceptions of school responsibility for the well being and education of children, school boards defended the practice by "blaming the lawbreaker" (the student) rather than the extreme and unnecessary law.

I also note that the black and white, authoritarian clarity attributed to immigration law and law breakers becomes considerably fuzzy when Trump defenders turn from the border to their leader, whose scofflaw behavior is daily applauded, as he blames Democrats for the effects of a policy he put into place in April.