For Democrats, like the ‘insurrection’ of January 6th, the Trump policy of separating illegal-immigrant parents from their children in 2018 has been the political gift that’s kept on giving ever since. In 2020, the conspicuously inhumane protocol provided a rallying cry for candidates in the primaries and later for Biden as nominee.
True, the policy did have a rationale beyond sheer sadism. American law restricts the number of days border agents may detain the underaged and likewise constrains children’s deportation. As migrants are better versed on American immigration statutes than most lawyers, savvy incomers (meaning most incomers) were rocking up on US soil with kids in tow — not always their own — as guarantees of release from custody, leaving them in the country home-free. If children were dealt with independently, at least the parents could be sent packing.
Never mind its moral dubiety; family separation was a political catastrophe. Although minors were confined by the same chain-link that encloses basketball and tennis courts, the Dems’ incessant charge that Trump put ‘children in cages’ entailed inspired branding. Detention facilities are for people; cages are for animals. Trump chucked his ‘zero-tolerance’ policy of May 2018 by June, but the damage was done. For years, the New York Times and PBS Newshour continued to run long packages about traumatised immigrant children and their enduring mental health problems. For voters in both parties, the spectacle of lonely, runny-nosed four-year-olds whimpering in bewilderment over why they’d been abandoned triggered harrowing early memories of getting parted from a parent at an amusement park and crying: ‘Mo-omm-eee!’
Right now I’m looking in wide-eyed horror at Kamala vs the Donald in 2024
One would think that when the opposition bestows you with such an invaluable present — boxed, wrapped in shiny foil and beribboned with a bow — you wouldn’t smash it up, much less give it back.
Last week’s leaked news about the suit settlements being negotiated between the Biden administration and previously separated families — some represented by the American Civil Liberties Union — was the best thing to happen to Fox commentator Tucker Carlson for years.
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