Trump Takes “Great Credit” for Addressing His Own Immigration Nightmare

When Donald Trump signed an order ending his disastrous family-separation policy, one of the first to publicly congratulate him was his daughter. “Thank you @POTUS,” Ivanka Trump tweeted, “for taking critical action”—never mind that he was responsible for enacting the policy in the first place. On Monday, the president betrayed the same penchant for selective acknowledgement when he thanked a federal judge who praised his administration for its hard work in reuniting some of the roughly 2,000 immigrant children displaced by the policy. Cleaved from their parents, some of the children were held in inhumane conditions; others were returned in acute states of psychological distress. (The Trump administration was similarly inconvenienced when a federal judge ordered that parents and children must be reunited, forcing officials to work overtime to track down the family members they had separated without any planning or oversight.)

For Trump, whose policy has been met with international outrage (outrage that should, he insisted, have been aimed at Democrats), the praise was well timed and deeply deserved. Naturally, he tweeted his appreciation for the congrats. “A highly respected Federal judge today stated that the ‘Trump Administration gets great credit’ for reuniting illegal families. Thank you, and please look at the previous administrations record - not good!” he wrote.

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s tweet told only half the story. In June, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw gave the government 14 days to reunite children under the age of five with their families, and 30 days for those older than five. On Friday, he did indeed award the Trump administration “great credit” for reunifying more than 1,800 children, age five and older, with parents or elected sponsors by Thursday’s deadline. But, if the White House deserves credit for partially solving a problem of its own creation, Sabraw was careful to note it should also be blamed for stories of confusion, distress, and abuse that continue to emerge from the border. “The government is at fault for losing several hundred parents in the process and that’s where we go next,” he said, stressing the haphazard system underpinning the “zero-tolerance” policy. “Each [department] was like its own stovepipe, each had its own boss, and they did not communicate,” he said. “What was lost in the process was the family.”

Earlier that week, officials announced they had reunited all children with their parents, barring those with parents who were “either not eligible, or not yet known to be eligible, for reunification.” The criteria for ineligibility spans the hazy “further evaluation” category, to include parents who disappeared after being deported without their children (despite officially falling under the remit of Sabraw’s court order, the government says it’s unclear where they are, or how long it would take to locate them), and parents waiving their rights to be reunited with their children. But in the latter case, that waiver may not have been intentional—multiple reports have emerged of parents pressured into signing documents giving up their children, without understanding their implications. Meanwhile, stories of abuse and neglect of children at the border continue to multiply. As Sabraw delivered his verdict on Friday, Judge Dolly M. Gee administered another related ruling announcing she will appoint an autonomous monitor to assess the conditions for immigrant children held in facilities across Texas following what she deemed a “disconnect” between official appraisals, and complaints from more than 200 children and their parents. Her decision taps into mounting concerns as to the vulnerability—and voicelessness—of many detained children. The Nation recently reported on a six-year-old girl who was sexually abused at least twice in a detention facility in Arizona, and was then forced to sign a form declaring she would steer clear of her alleged abuser. (Neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the detention facility responded to The Nation’s request for comment.) The story chimed with an investigation published by ProPublica that found that, over the past five years, police have received at least 125 calls reporting sex-related offenses at shelters housing immigrant children. (The Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica in a statement that it has a “zero-tolerance policy for all forms of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior” at shelters.)

On Monday, Gee issued yet another decision stating that government officials have been violating state child-welfare laws by administering psychotropic medication to migrant children at Texas’s Shiloh Treatment Center without securing the consent of their parents or guardians. According to court filings, some children were forcibly injected, and others recalled being told they would be detained for longer if they refused medication. Despite officials claiming they only used drugs when a child’s “extreme psychiatric symptoms” were perilous, children were reportedly sometimes given pills twice a day.

Reports of troubling treatment in migrant detainment facilities are not new, nor are they limited to the Trump administration. Four years ago, the Houston Chronicle uncovered systemic patterns of abuse, and some cases of death, at the Shiloh facility. But during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, officials suggested that the Trump White House was uniquely positioned to predict the nightmarish fallout of its policy. When Senator Richard Blumenthal asked Office of Refugee Resettlement official Jonathan White whether he’d attempted to warn the White House that “hey, maybe this isn’t a good idea,” White responded that yes, he had: “During the deliberative process over the previous year, we raised a number of concerns about any policy that would result in family separation due to concerns we had about the best interest of the child.”

“You told the administration that kids would suffer as a result, that pain would be inflicted?” Blumenthal asked.

“Separation of children from their parents entails significant risk of harm to children,” White replied. “There’s no question that there is potential for psychological traumatic injury.”

“Great credit,” indeed.

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