President Obama vowed to do more for the nation's children: boosting funding for early education, expanding subsidized childcare programs for working families – and now, asking for billions of dollars to kick tens of thousands of children out of the country. That last bit is reserved for a special group of kids, of course: the ones who came up to the border seeking to escape violence and economic devastation in their hometowns, to find family members, to seek shelter and for a chance at a decent life. And amid their pleas for recognition as refugees, the president is working with lawmakers to make them disappear.
If the White House and Congress wanted to begin to deal comprehensively with the "border crisis", they would not be prioritizing "alien removal" but rather investing in emergency legal aid to these children, working to reunite them with their families whenever possible and granting them broad humanitarian relief as refugees.
But instead, on Tuesday the White House requested $3.7bn in additional funding to launch a border "surge" to facilitate the legal process for the child migrants – with the ultimate aim of expediting deportations. And Obama has even suggested making these children easier to deport by altering existing laws that provide special protections and legal reprieve for children crossing the border from Central America. This, many politicians argue, will send a message that the United States is a "nation of laws", in order to somehow deter other families from sending their children here in desperation. And yet in threatening wholesale deportation and eviscerating due process for five-year-olds, this supposed nation of laws opts to "secure the border" in the most brutish way possible: through the collective punishment of children and families.
Mass deportation will never address the underlying human rights crisis unfolding south of the border. These young refugees represent the fallout of decades of not only America's failed immigration policy, but of our destructive trade policy and inhumane foreign policy. The majority of these children come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – three of the many countries ravaged by civil strife, drug wars and economic turmoil precipitated by US political and military intervention over several decades, as well as free-trade regimes and the corporate plunder of Latin America's natural resources.
And still, willfully ignorant of this bloody history, right-wing activists demonize child migrants as a national security threat or as parasites on the social welfare system – as former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin did on Tuesday in an op-ed calling for Obama's impeachment. Playing into this idea that these kids are "illegal", the White House has claimed presumptively that most of them probably would not qualify for humanitarian relief, and thus would be deported.
But contrary to the political messaging, the law is actually on the children's side. Under current immigration policy, the government generally will not deport children immediately at the border. For kids from Central America in particular, anti-trafficking policies passed under the previous administration have entitled them to due process and a full court hearing to determine eligibility for humanitarian relief. And despite what the crowds of angry bigoted protesters say, that is a good thing. According to a 2012 study by the Vera Institute, "Approximately 40 percent of children admitted into Office of Refugee Resettlement custody are identified as eligible for a form of legal relief", in many cases due to the persecution they suffered back home, or by being a victim of a crime.
There is international historical precedent for providing refugee relief to children fleeing violence and conflict in their homelands. While it's true that the refugee legal process in the US is often arbitrary and politicized, broadening this relief for children would be an initial step toward confronting a massive human rights crisis that is, in large part, one of Washington's own making.
Instead of helping resolve this historical injustice, Obama's main response is to demand more funding for border enforcement and to seek legal tweaks to facilitate the deportation of children. This extends the administration's trend of mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants – now hovering at a record 2m "removals" – and marks a regression from earlier executive measures to grant temporary deportation reprieves to undocumented youth. Meanwhile, legislation to overhaul the immigration system has again died in Congress, and millions of undocumented people already settled in the US remain stranded in legal limbo.
Now we have tens of thousands of kids at the border, with legions warehoused in makeshift camps, stuck in a labyrinthine legal system alone and grasping for sanctuary. The funding Obama seeks for processing deportations and border enforcement will only militarize – not humanize – our immigration policy. To truly help these children, who have migrated as a consequence of global inequities, policymakers must immediately provide them legal services so they can reunite with family or be allowed to claim asylum, and ensure that the system above all protects youths from further harm.
And once the immediate humanitarian crisis starts to calm, Obama and Congress should place an overall moratorium on deportations conducted under its current policies – and then face its deeper social responsibility by acknowledging that how these children wound up on America's doorstep. The discourse around child refugees must ultimately shift from panic to empathy and then to social justice.
The chaotic scenes at the border are a window into the hemispheric inequality that the US has cultivated – and profited from – for generations. To push away this youngest generation won't "send a message" about the nation's rule of law, because the cruel rhetoric of "sealing the border" can't outweigh message these kids bring with them to the border: that they're here, their rights must be recognized and that, when they seek refuge, they are only demanding the dignity that has been unjustly denied to their communities since before they were born.
