This pancocojams post provides a Daily Kos article excerpt and selected comments about Trump's atrocious immigration policy with a special focus on how this policy of separating children from their parents has happened before in the United States to Native Americans and to some other children of Color.
The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, and political purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post and thanks to all those who are working to end this atrocious, inhumane policy.
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For more information about this subject, click https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tender-age-shelters-trump-border-family-separations_us_5b29d2d0e4b05d6c16c8c122
"Trump Administration Holding Babies And Toddlers In Multiple ‘Tender Age’ Shelters: AP
There are three shelters running in South Texas, with a fourth one planned for Houston, the report said."
By Dominique Mosbergen, 06/20/2018 01:04 am ET.
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UPDATE: June 22, 2018 11:04 PM- I added the label "race and racism" to this and other pancocojams posts about Trump's policy of separating immigrant children from their parents/caretakers. I've done so to highlight that I and many others believe that these children's race/ethnicity is one of the significant factors of this policy.
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ARTICLE EXCERPT AND COMMENTS ABOUT THIS SUBJECT
From
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/6/19/1773218/-Gov-t-s-separation-of-immigrant-children-from-their-parents-revives-deep-pain-among-American-Indians Gov't's separation of immigrant children from their parents revives deep pain among American Indians
Meteor Blades, Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday June 19, 2018 · 12:23 PM EDT
..."Nobody with a heart can listen to the wails of the caged children of undocumented immigrants who have been separated from their parents without sprouting some tears of their own. Which is why in the past couple of weeks we’ve had reconfirmed for us that there are heartless people in charge of the nation’s immigration machinery. In all the rancid policies imposed so far by the Trump regime, none matches this one for pure evil.
This is not the first time children in the United States have been forcibly separated from their parents. Our nation has a history of it. This was done to hundreds of thousands of slave children whose parents or themselves were sold to new, often distant owners. It happened to tens of thousands of American Indian children who were snatched from their parents and forced to attend boarding schools where they were abused and their heritage denigrated and desecrated.
In the words of the founder of the most famous such schools, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, these institutions had as their primary purpose to “kill the Indian, and save the man.” In other words, to engage in a form of ethnic cleansing, a forced acculturation that left behind the wholesale slaughter of the previous era, but was as lethal at destroying culture, religion, and language as any massacre or scalp bounty. They dared call it civilizing.
But, in fact, while the mission was supposedly to save the Indian without killing the person, hundreds of Indian children died at these schools with188 buried at Carlisle alone. Others are known to have died soon after they were returned home after years away.
[...]
About 100 government-run and government-funded boarding schools lasted from the 1870s, when the Army was still actively killing Indians physically, until the 1970s. A readable summary of some the horrors of those schools can be found here. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/cultural-genocide-veiled-as-education-the-time-for-healing-is-now-vBOUQUlvUky9sxP6Ukg3BA/ "Cultural Genocide Veiled as Education—The Time for Healing Is Now" by Indian Country Today
Jun 22, 2014
[...]
While most of the boarding schools have long been shuttered, and those that remain are very different than in the old days, hundreds of thousands of Indians today are personally affected by what happened in those schools even if they did not themselves attend boarding school.
In my case, it was my grandmother Simmalikee, who raised me until she died when I was nine, my mother being a young teen when I was born. When my grandmother was nine, she was shipped off to boarding school in South Carolina where everything was done to take away her language and culture for seven years. When she returned home to Florida in 1918, she vowed never again to speak English though she knew it perfectly well, sticking solely to Muscogee (Creek), one of the two Seminole languages.
Another boarding school abductee was the mother of my friend and colleague Neeta Lind, the Navajo who is Director of Community at Daily Kos. Her mother, the late Flora Sombrero, was taken at age five to the Mormon-run Tuba City Boarding School in the late 1920s. The attack on her culture began right in front of her parents at Inscription House on the Navajo Nation. The kidnappers cut off Flora’s traditional hair bun and threw it on the ground in front of them, placed her in the back of a pick-up with other children and drove away.
Her sister, who was also taken, ran away from the boarding school so often that they took away her shoes. So she ran away barefoot. They finally gave up. She was one of the lucky ones. On more than one occasion, indigenous children at some boarding schools in the United States and so-called residential schools in Canada ran away in winter and froze to death.
[...]
My colleague Laura Clawson has noted today that the trauma of immigrant children now being separated from their parents by the government will last a lifetime*. Indeed, the psychological impact may very well be intergenerational, as it has been for countless American Indians.
While most of those immigrant children presumably will not be separated from their parents for years as many Native children were, the parallels are unsettling.
[...]
Deb Haaland
Verified account
@Deb4CongressNM
Follow Follow @Deb4CongressNM
"Tent cities are being built in Texas that Trump hopes will eventually house 4,000 children. 4,000 traumatized children, living in tents in the Texas heat. This outrageous policy needs to stop. I will always fight to keep families together. #EndFamilySeparation #nm01 #nmpolDeb Haaland added,"
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[Deb4Congress retweeted Hillary Clinton]
Hillary Clinton
Verified account
@HillaryClinton
Follow Follow @HillaryClinton
More
What’s happening to families at the border right now is a humanitarian crisis. Every parent who has ever held a child in their arms, every human being with a sense of compassion and decency, should be outraged.
1:20 PM - 18 Jun 2018
* https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/6/19/1773250/--The-earlier-they-re-out-the-better-Migrant-kids-face-lifelong-trauma-thanks-to-Trump?_=2018-06-19T07:15:39.742-07:00 'The earlier they’re out, the better': Migrant kids face lifelong trauma thanks to Trump
Laura Clawson, Daily Kos Staff, Tuesday June 19, 2018 · 10:15 AM EDT
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Selected comments, with numbers assigned for referencing purposes only
1. Neeta Lind June 19 · 12:29:42 PM
"I’ll never get over that photo at the top.
I’ll never get over what happened to my mother. Today’s news brings back the terrible pain of listening to my mom and her siblings talk about being kidnapped and held prisoners. My mom would cry EVERY time she remembered, even as an elderly woman. Multi-generational trauma.
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[photo caption] "This 1884 photo shows some of 10,000 or so Native children the Carlisle Indian Industrial School separated from their parents as part of a government policy designed to take away their Indian-ness by removing their hair, their language, their culture, and their religion."
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2. jennybravo reply to Neeta Lind June 19 · 05:04:40 PM
"Most people don’t understand that by being raised in boarding schools and rarely if ever seeing their own parents, many of the children did not learn to be parents themselves. Most people learn to parent by watching their own parents. Without that living example, traditional parenting skills may not be passed on. And when you take children away, many parents become depressed and lack a reason to improve their own lives. This is how these practices affect generation after generation of Native families."
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3. Neeta Lind reply to jennybravo June 19 · 11:15:27 PM
"Completely agree. I had a conversation with another person like me whose mother was captured and raised by the government. She said she always wondered why her mom never hugged her or was affectionate or lovingly parented her. As an adult she realized why. This is tragic and affects generations after."
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4. koNko reply to Neeta Lind June 19 · 11:48:08 PM
"This was also a common practice to emasculate and shame Chinese immigrants.
The City of San Francisco drafted a law, the Pigtail Ordinance, requiring that Chinese men arrested have their queues (pigtail braids) cut within an inch of their scalps. Although vetoed, the State of California passed a law and proliferated the practice until a Chinese immigrant, arrested for vagrancy, sued the sheriff for irreparable harm, and took it all the way to the Supreme Court, obtaining a ruling that the law violated the 14th Amendment.
Native Americans and Chinese share similar traditions and beliefs about their hair. In fact, I have often advised Western people not to touch or pet adult Chinese in an overly familiar way, as we find it an offensive overly intimate contact if not invited.1
I can imagine your mother’s distress at such a personal violation.
1 Three things my wife finds uncivilized and intolerable: bare feet on the floor, uninvited touching of her hair and a man touching her towels, chopsticks or rice bowl (typically Asian). Modern girl in other respects."
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5. Neeta Lind replyto koNko June 20 · 12:11:02 AM
"Our hair is our memory. To remember who we are. We are not to cut it all off."
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6. slowbutsure June 19 · 02:01:09 PM
"In the movie “Animal Proof Fence”, there was a scene of a priggish administrator played by Kenneth Branagh ripping Aboriginal children from their parents to go to boarding school for ‘their own good’. (Spoiler alert — the kids slipped away and returned home...)"
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Clark Nova reply to slowbutsure June 19 · 02:29:13 PM
"A true story and the last of those kids died just a week ago. BTW, it’s Rabbit Proof Fence."
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7. Meteor Blades reply to slowbutsure June 19 · 03:08:28 PM
Fantastic movie. I once labeled it “my favorite big-screen movie of American Indians”:
But that’s an Australian movie, you say? Yep. The best film of American Indians is a Down Under 2002 movie about aboriginals without a loin-cloth, smear of war paint or drop of firewater in sight. It’s the story of three young mixed-race girls who find their way home after being ripped away from their parents in 1931 by the government and trained to focus on their “white side” so they can become somebody’s servants. A few critics have complained that this based-on-a-true-story movie goes overboard in demonizing the main white character (Kenneth Branagh) and depicting most other whites of the era as deeply bigoted, morally uncourageous paternalists. What could the director have been thinking?
The American version of Rabbit-Proof Fence has been out there for the telling ever since Thomas Edison showed his “movie” Hopi Snake Dance at the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago in 1893 on the brand-new kinetoscope his staff had developed. It’s the story of how American Indian children were torn from their customs, religions, languages, tribes and parents by demons and paternalists who saw cultural genocide as the proper modern alternative to the centuries-old physical genocide that had become no longer an acceptable course of action. But of all the hundreds of movie Westerns depicting Indians, this story has failed to generate excitement among four or five generations of movie-makers. Instead, the Hollywood Indian has prevailed.
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8. elfling June 19 · 01:14:53 PM
"The picture of the rosaries taken from asylum seekers and migrants, to be tossed in the trash, how did we get here? How can this still be a thing?
Not to mention, their ID, their cellphones, their cash, and their children!!!
That children are being taken from their parents and apparently not even with any records of who goes with whom being kept???"
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Click https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-janitors-collection-of-things-confiscated-from-migrants-in-the-desert "A Janitor Preserves the Seized Belongings of Migrants"
By Peter C. BakerMarch 12, 2017 for the above mentioned article/photos of rosaries taken from asylum seekers and migrants.
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9. DragonflyInTheSun reply to elfling June 19 · 02:26:30 PM
"I don’t know how to stop it."
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10. TrueBlueMajority reply to DragonflyInTheSun June 19 · 06:26:46 PM
"yes you do
keep talking about it. to everyone.
keep connecting with like minded people who will reassure you you are not crazy.
keep the pressure on elected officials."
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11. Capuchos reply to DragonflyInTheSun June 19 · 01:38:13 PM
"According to John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE under the Obama administration from 2013-2014; that is a real possibility:
"You could easily end up in a situation where the gap between a parent's deportation and a child's deportation is years," Sandweg said.
As a result, parents may find themselves back in their home countries struggling to find their children. Many do not have access to legal counsel or understand the U.S. immigration or judicial systems.
Children who stay in the foster system for lengthy periods of time may become wards of the state and finally adopted.
"You could be creating thousands of immigrant orphans in the U.S. that one day could become eligible for citizenship when they are adopted," Sandweg explained.
Sandweg says he has seen permanent separation happen when a parent is deported without his or her child.
Immigration lawyers in the U.S. and Central America say many parent immigrants who have been deported are having a hard time locating their children. The Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy was announced in April.
Parents are given a paper slip written in English and Spanish that explains they have been charged with a crime for entering the United States illegally and will be separated from their child while they await their court hearing.
www.nbcnews.com/..."
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12. FJA reply to Capuchos June 19 · 02:50:04 PM
"This really messes with kids’ heads. Not just being taken away, but their sense of object constancy in relationships, identity formation. It’s a recipe for Borderline Personality Disorder down the road, which is no fun.
“Children who stay in the foster system for lengthy periods of time may become wards of the state and finally adopted.” Hundred percent — CPS or whomever will say it’s too traumatic for the child to change guardians again to go back to their parents."
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13. maregug DragonflyInTheSun June 19 · 02:50:17 PM
Not only these children, the largely CA kids now in the concentration camps, but a whole generation of NA and FN kids are in a similar position. This tweet* really hit home...the destruction of brown families is ongoing, whether they be asylum seekers, immigrants, indigenous, or black.
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NA= Native Americans [also known as American Indians]
FN= First Nation [Canadian referent for "Native American"/"American Indians"
* This tweet: Julie S. Lalonde
Verified account
@JulieSLalonde
"Canadians out here, horrified by ICE separating children at the US border but 🤷🏼♀️ that Canada has more Indigenous kids in foster care right now than there was in residential schools.
Cool, cool.
5:19 PM - 17 Jun 2018"
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14. Clark Nova June 19 · 03:02:07 PM
"Here in NM, children were still being stolen from Native families (by the BIA) up til the late ‘60’s (the 1960’s, not the 1860’s but you’d hardly know it). They were adopted by / sold to White families only and the Feds pocketed the profits."
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NM = [US state: New Mexico]
BIA= Bureau of Indian Affairs
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15. susan larson reply to Clark Nova June 19 · 05:02:59 PM
"Stopped in 1979. Some sick Howleys"
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16. ramara June 19 · 01:13:13 PM
"It’s still being done, with foster care agencies separating Indian children, and other minority chidren, from their families, and too often with Indian children, illegally from their culture."
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17. grumpelstillchen June 19 · 01:14:33 PM
As per my comment here*, both these “chapters” in US history are de facto acts of genocide according to the definition of said crime by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
I do not, cannot, will not ever understand why the other member states of the UN have not gone after the US for these clear and unequivocal violations of UN Conventions as perpetrated against American Indians, African Americans, and other Black/Brown peoples in this country.
Now, with this administration most likely to withdraw from any and all alliances with other “civilized” nations, it’s probably too fucking late.
Over the past 20 years, I have learned not to expect a majority of my fellow “Americans” to agree with me on this or to take any action to stop it from happening, so it doesn’t surprise me that it has come to this. But I really expected more from the other so-called “civilized” nations."
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*https://www.dailykos.com/comments/1773305/70486912#comment_70486912
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18. proudliberal4life June 19 · 01:29:53 PM
"We are repeating a horrific historical pattern. This also used to happen with slavery, with families being broken up and sold off to the highest bidder.
This is why we fight. If we allow this to continue, what’s next?"
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19. proudliberal4life June 19 · 02:00:30 PM
"1936 germany"
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