Our way since 1818

When children were separated from their parents at the southern  border because of the Trump “zero tolerance” policy, there was an obvious flaw in the procedures. Kids went in one direction, hundreds of miles away from the border in many cases, and their parents were sent in another, and an idea as simple as tickets at a theater’s coat check window  so one could be reunited with the other, was not implemented perhaps not even considered.

The object, after all, was to appear tough, but it did not mean careful thought was necessary.

Although parents could easily identify their children to reclaim them, the government doesn’t have a way to get them all together in one place so parents can identify their kids and vice versa.

Some kids are infants, and are, by virtue of their age, unable to run to, let alone point to their parents.

Here’s what has already happened in one case that could be repeated this way, or could happen in other ways .

The boy was named Carlos by his parents at birth, but his name is now Jamison.

When his Guatemalan mother was arrested in 2007 on an immigration raid at a chicken processing plant in Missouri the boy, her son, was taken from his mother, and put up for adoption in Missouri despite her objections at the time of her arrest and in the time since..

Neither mother nor son have seen each other since the arrest.

Eleven years later a Missouri judge has ruled that the boy should stay with the Missouri couple who took him into their home five years ago while his mother was in federal custody, and the mother has no rights to even see her child.

The adoptive family is happy because they get to keep their adopted son, but they have also expressed a darker thought that this decision “really puts the biological mom in a difficult decision in terms of staying in this country.”

They are happy that she is now more easily deportable.

This recent ruling affirms an earlier one in which the judge determined that “illegally smuggling herself into the country is not a lifestyle that can provide any stability for the child”, basically deciding that the mother’s parental rights had been terminated because she had abandoned her son while she was incarcerated.

Now, with the mother’s objection negated, formal adoption may proceed.

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“I could not love him more, had he come out of me physically.”

So she obviously knows how much the mother most likely loves her child and wants him back.

This removal of a child from its parents to be adopted by someone else is hauntingly familiar, as this practice is not new when it comes to the treatment of “others”  and creating opportunities to “whiten” them up.

Federal and state governments have a history of taking Native American children from their parents,  placing them in institutions, and then making them available to white families for adoption to “civilize the savage born” by Christianizing them. These children were subsequently psychologically battered for the rest of their lives.

In 1818, the House Committee on Indian Affairs promoted the idea that Indian children “will grow up in habits of morality and industry…and become useful members of society if they are given ‘the primer…the hoe…and the Bible.”

As many as 30% of Native American children were separated from their families between 1941 and 1967 with this practice going back to colonization and settling the frontiers, so, obviously, this practice was not lost in the historical past where between 1880 and 1902, 20-30,000 children were removed from their families, and 90% of those were placed in White families according to a study by the Association of American Indian Affairs and presented to Congress in 1974.

This may have resulted in the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) being enacted in 1978, but it took until December 2016 for the Department of the Interior to issue regulations on the law to create legal uniformity and consistency.

One example of the confusion and need for uniformity in the law as it existed was that, in spite of ICWA’s passage in 1978 and implementation in 1979, in Pennington County, South Dakota, more than 1,000 children had been taken from their Native American families since 2010. Not only were children being removed without any evidence that this was best for the children, but with hearings and decisions being made within 48 hours of removal, parents did not have time to obtain legal counsel, were denied the right to testify, or were not notified why their  children were taken.

Most hearings had lasted no more than five minutes with many only about 60 seconds, with the state winning100 percent of the time.

This is similar to how Native American children were treated in the early part of the 20th Century in Oklahoma so their land allotments resulting from the Dawes Commission report  could be stolen by White men who benefited from this so that, rather than the Native Americans being well off because of the lumber and mineral rights, including oil that should have been theirs, the Native Americans are the poor ones while the land swindlers are rich.

Then as now, the hearings were on a 60 second, line up on a court hearing conveyor belt.

It is conceivable that there will be many parents who will not see their children again, nor the children their parents. There will be many children, emotionally and psychologically wounded, who will have good American families adopt them and make them truly “American”, in spite of what the country did to them and the memories they have of that.

And while claiming this is not who we are, and making comparisons between this and Nazi Germany, we do have stop fooling ourselves and accept that this is who we have been since 1818.

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