SPLITTING UP FAMILIES: AN AMERICAN TRADITION.

AuthorHiggins, Maeve
PositionMAEVE IN AMERICA

It's difficult to stay on top of everything that's been happening with family separation at the border. I don't mean it's emotionally difficult, though that's true, too. Anybody who heard the recordings of the Central American children sobbing and begging for their parents can attest to that. What I mean is, it's almost impossible to know basic factual things, like how many kids were taken, and what happened to them.

An October 2018 analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union indicated that at least 2,654 immigrant children were separated from their parents or caregivers as a result of Trump Administration policies. Hundreds of these children remain separated from their families, and the ACLU, which filed the class-action lawsuit on behalf of the separated parents, worries that the data provided by the administration is unreliable and there may be even more children affected.

Despite repeated lies by President Trump that his family separation policy at the Mexican border was not new, it was. This was not something refugees from south of the border had been subjected to before. Yet a cursory look at American history shows us that the government has had plenty of practice at dividing up families, almost always racial minorities, and forcing them to live apart, often forever.

As far back as the 1860s and on up to the 1970s, Native American children, some as young as five, were taken from their families and brought to government-run boarding schools. Native organizations, including the National American Indian Court Judges Association (NAICJA), spoke up against the horror being inflicted on immigrant famiies.

"We as Native Americans have our worst memories resurrected when we see children torn from their parents at the hands of law enforcement, taken to unknown locations, and with an unknown path to reunification," NAICJA said in a 2018 statement, reflecting on the Trump Administration's separation of Latin American families. "We as a people have historically suffered the consequences of such forceful removal of its children from parents and caretakers that created intergenerational harm that we as courts and professionals still struggle to address."

Family separation was also an integral part of chattel slavery, as the historian Damian Alan Pargas has explored.

"Virtually no slave family in the nineteenth-century American South was completely safeguarded from forced separation, yet the extent of family breakups throughout the slave states...

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