“Home Security and Family Values –
Is that an oxymoron?”
Hundreds of children in immigrant families wishing to enter the U.S. from Mexico have been separated from their parents by U.S. policy. The administration has not released the actual number, but the number of unaccompanied children held in U.S. detention centers jumped up by 20% from 8,000 to a little over 10,000 children after implementation of the “zero tolerance policy”.
In 2016 the Secretary of Home Security John Kelly began to talk about such a separation policy as a deterrent to families seeking entrance either illegally or even if legally seeking asylum on our Mexican border. In response to that proposed policy a coalition of pediatricians, psychiatrists, and social scientists published “Separating Families at the Border – Consequences for Children’s Health and Well-Being” in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) June 15, 2017 and founded the Child Advisory Network to advocate against the “zero tolerance policy”.
Now, nobody really believes that separating children from their parents, unless the children are being maltreated or abused, is good for the children. Our own legal system has a very high threshold for removing children from their parents. And maybe, administration policy makers were probably counting on this universal belief (in all languages, of course) to make their action an effective deterrent to immigration.
The NEJM article summarized the many studies that document the deleterious effects of separating children from parents; all based on the over-activation of the stress response system of the child’s brain and specific hormone producing organs. Proper balance of that system is necessary for normal physical growth, proper and appropriate regulation of emotions, and maintenance of good health. In fact, such stress and anxiety is apparently cumulative and can ever result in an earlier-than-expected death!
The high costs of separating and detaining the children, especially the costs of finding and supporting foster care for U.S.-citizen children of parents who have already been deported, was cited in this review. In many states the foster care system for American children is overwhelmed and an occasional source of horror stories of maltreatment by foster parents.
Perhaps you’re thinking that these are moot points after the announcement of the reversal of the “zero tolerance policy”, but NPR reported on July 12 that in a response to a court order deadline only 57 of the 100 under the age of 5 years had been reunited with their parents (49 other were not). NPR also reported that the total number of separated children is 3000. The next court order deadline in about two weeks calls for 2000 families to be reunited. Both court orders stem from suits brought by the ACLU against the U.S. Department of Home Security.
Reason cited by the Home Security Department for some “failures to reunite” include criminal charges against a parent(s), parent not available since already deported, and a lack of match between the child’s DNA and the parents’ DNA. Wow, talk about opening up another Pandora’s box for the U.S. border staff, Home Security Department, and our judicial system, already creaking under “zero tolerance policy” consequences. Resolution of those instances of DNA “mismatch” will become another nightmare for already stressed-out families and children who were seeking sanctuary from the stress of living in their own country in the first place; a uniquely modern negative consequence of political policy once again trumping science.
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