The Trump Administration's Cruel Use of Children for Leverage

By Editorial Board, The Washington Post

30 December 19

eeping children in detention has the effect of traumatizing them — a form of abuse that interferes with brain development and leaves lasting mental and emotional scars. That scientific consensus is irrelevant to the Trump administration, which, characteristically contemptuous of science and determined to deter illegal immigration at any cost, has formulated a plan to use detained migrant children as bait to entrap, surveil and deport their parents and relatives.

Among the plan’s likely and predictable effects is that it will dissuade potential sponsors — those parents and relatives — from coming forward, thereby lengthening by weeks or months the time many migrant children spend in U.S. government detention. The harm that results to children is undisputed. Perversely, high-ranking Trump administration officials who defend the policy, none of them experts in child psychology and development, insist it will safeguard children’s welfare.

Their logic, if you can call it that, is that it will dissuade unaccompanied young migrants from entering the country, often in the company of smugglers, thereby protecting them. The flaw in that thinking is that it discounts the factors driving Central American children and their relatives to immigrate illegally in the first place: pervasive violence, instability and poverty in their home countries, along with a job market in the United States that welcomes, and needs, low-wage labor.

The administration’s gambit, as described by The Post’s Nick Miroff, is the brainchild of Stephen Miller, a senior White House official on a crusade to slash legal and illegal immigration by any means possible. Mr. Miller, having failed to embed immigration enforcement officials in the U.S. agency that cares for unaccompanied migrant children, is now trying something different — forcing the agency to give deportation agents biometric information including fingerprints and other data gathered from parents and relatives who come forward to claim the children from detention. In cases where those relatives are rejected as potential sponsors — for reasons that might or might not be valid — the information would then be used to track and target them for deportation.

The Trump administration’s use of children as instruments of leverage is grounded in the explicit hope that their suffering might deter other migrants from making the trek northward. Last year’s episode of systematically dividing families was driven by the same morally despicable rationale. So are the administration’s efforts in federal court to overturn a 22-year-old judicial settlement that sets strict time limits on family detention on the grounds that it is likely to harm children.

Mr. Miller’s current plan runs afoul of legislation expressly intended to prohibit sharing information gathered by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for migrant children while seeking potential sponsors, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation agents. The administration reasons it can skirt that requirement because family members deemed ineligible to become a child’s guardians — perhaps because they committed a minor infraction — are no longer “potential sponsors.”

That’s a little too clever, since the plan is designed to do precisely what Congress hoped to avoid: intimidate and deter migrant parents who would reclaim their children from detention.