Post-slavery, and not in Nazi Germany, we separate children and their parents every day in America when the parents are arrested. It doesn't have to be at the border, and it usually isn't. If the parent is too poor to afford cash bail while awaiting trial, they stay in jail and remain separated from their children. Why is this not an outrage when immigration isn't at issue?
3
We live close to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, New York State’s only maximum-security prison for women. Many, if not most, of the women incarcerated there are mothers, often of young children. Of course, many of the women are, shall we say, minorities, and their children are, with few exceptions, illegitimate. Nonetheless, the women are imprisoned without their children. Grandparents have custody of the children in some cases, in other cases it’s the State. That’s the way things work with women felons. Why should it be any different with women who are illegal aliens?
2
This moral exemplum is outrageous. It is nauseating in its crude, ugly, ahistorical analogies. The cop-out conclusion: "No, I'm not really making an authentic comparison" doesn't let Kristof off the hook. It is monstrous to merge the image of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto being rounded up to be murdered with a migrant child briefly separated from his parents -- or to compare the situation of briefly separated migrants to that of black families torn apart during the hellish regime of slavery. The immigrants are also less "innocent" than the piece would have us believe. During the summers of 2014- 2017 the number of children accompanying their illegal alien parents (mostly from Central America)skyrocketed because border-savvy migrants understood children could not be imprisoned in the US and under the lax enforcement regime of Obama that meant a quick interview with immigration enforcement, a date to return for a judicial hearing in months or even years (which no illegal alien with a pulse would bother to do) and then quick release into the huge illegal population in America where illegal aliens vanish. Trump is seeking to bring back the rule of law. Separating children from parents is a morally offensive and politically stupid policy -- which he stopped almost immediately. But the rule of law must be preserved. Hold families together in detention and then deport them together. But don't put up a sign reading:"We Will Accept the Entire Third World."
4
The trump administration and the republican party would fit very comfortably into this narrative....
3
The difference? Trump does it because he likes it.
2
John Kelly has been a vocal opponent of the immigrants saying they would not easily assimilate into the US. His own Grandmother's father had been in the country 18 years and had not become a citizens, could not read, write, or speak English.
2
This is what happens when thirty percent of the population is unhinged and controls all three branches of the government.
8
"I hope you will genuinely stop this cruelty."
Is Mr. Kristof that naive?
When will it end? How long will this man be allowed to represent our country? Churches were responsible for fostering the end to slavery and the civil rights movement. Where are they in this horrendous time of torturing asylum seekers, of name calling, of destroying our environment, of gun proliferation, of objectifying women? Where are the people who can recognize real trouble and do something about it? Speaking of mental health........how can we keep from being depressed in times like these?
2
I'm reading Nick Kristof's column in a Canadian anchorage in the Thousand Islands. Directly across the channel is a cottage flying the Stars and Stripes. A big motor yacht from Florida is anchored nearby. Yes, we're still neighbours. Once we were friends and allies.
I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am for America. Our loathing for your president has given way to pity. What happened to you? Why are you powerless to end this insanity? Was your Constitution this flawed, this meaningless? God help America.
4
We are all entirely too easy with and accepting of what Trump is, what he says, and what he does. Let's be honest and speak the truth, which we all know in our hearts: He is an evil man, nothing short of that.
3
"The children will be... put into foster care or whatever." Utter, total callousness. The plan to separate and ship off thousands of children to points unknown all across your country was in place long before the actual cleaving of families began. The fact that there was, and still remains, no plan as to what to do with the children now that they have been effectively kidnapped, is an entirely new depth of depravity from an already depraved administration.
3
But slaves and citizens of German-held territories in ww2 did not have a choice.
These immigrants have a choice not to enter a foreign country.
If I had a young child I would never take the risk of bringing them to a country that may separate us.
2
"Trump Wasn’t First to Separate Families, but Policy Was Still Evil"
And it is not the worst of America's allies either. Malcolm Tunbull's government in Australia is several levels above Trump in the cruelty stakes. Even Trump agrees with this, as he said when he discussed these policies with Turnbull:
Trump: "That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am."
2
I don't know what to say, my heart hurts, the tears are held back. Excuse my language "What is wrong with this man who calls himself president?" What is wrong with any of them who think they are better than anyone else? This man trump did not come from the cream of the crop, his own grandfather was a draft dodger and exploited poor pretty immigrant woman, his own mother was an illegal brought over by a family as their maid. Our country is being ripped and torn by hate and greed.
3
Nothing you wrote in your op-ed surprised me. People who feel what they do is always right normally do not have any empathy for those they are hurting. What upsets me is how heartless some of the responses have been. The law is broken but people in need of help should not be made to pay the price because we are not able to function like a healthy democracy.
Remember...don't throw rocks because soon they might be thrown towards you
4
An unspeakable crime has been committed here. These children will never be reunited with their families.
2
Thank you for using the words Nicholas. I am a parent. I deeply love my children beyond words really. What kind of monster(s) try to justify the unimaginable. Do 80% of the Republican Party still back these "people". The entire United States if not the free world has got to be in trauma about the news of the last week.
What is going on?
2
The jacket Melania Trump wore as she boarded Air Force One on the way to visit the border says it all about the Trump family:
"I really don't care. Do U?"
An echo of Lewandowski's, "Womp, womp."
They must all be high-fiving each other in the West Wing
over those messages. Middle finger to democracy and human rights.
14
History shows (and teaches, when we listen) that the Trump administration family separation policy IS what conservatives do, from supporting, aiding and abetting any and all forms of involuntary servitude to annihilating Others for any reason or no reason.
There is no progressive/liberal analogue to the three fifths compromise, Jim Crow or Nazi racial laws and other abominations.
Matthew 7:12 , "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you: do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets", seemingly is not in the conservative play book...
3
Nick, please don't stop attacking our miserable faux leader and more to the point, don't think his move is from his heart. It isn't. His priority will be damage control and steps to save his worthless face.
"Wonk, wonk?" We are seeing a perfect example of political rot.
8
You know, Hitler was a very strong leader. Much stronger than Justin Trudeau.
4
Damning.
2
OK. So do people like Kristof and many of the "outraged" commenters here want to let American children go to jail with their American mothers when those mothers commit crimes that require jail time?
Or, do they want all mothers who commit crimes that require jail time to not have to serve the jail time because they will be separated from their children?
I'm confused.
Should mothers who drop their infants off at daycare be condemned? Don't the infants cry and experience separation anxiety?
What about mothers who send their children to summer camp? Should they be condemned when their children cry and experience separation anxiety?
Please enlighten me.
If you don't have solutions, then quit your faux "outrage."
7
Nice try. These are misdemeanors, not felonies.
1
You're not confused. You're being sarcastic. There's a huge difference between dropping off your children at daycare and having them separated at the border. I guess I am the one who is confused. I thought Republicans cared about families.
4
@Jackie: Are you really, truly comparing a child who is sent to summer camp to a child being forcibly taken from his mother-maybe never to see them again? A child far from home, not speaking English? And please don't say "outraged". We are outraged; why aren't you?
3
"“The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.”
— White House Chief of Staff John Kelly last month"
And we all know the sterling historical record of orphanages and other forms of institutionalized child care.
NPR reported that in these child detention facilities, the custodians of the children are allowed to provide the basic needs of food, shelter, and hygiene. However, they aren't allowed to provide physical comfort in the form of hugging or holding. So, children sit alone, crying.
When I took social psychology, some fifty years ago, we studied Harry Harlow's emotional deprivation experiments on primates. The monkeys without intimate care, without their mothers, became terribly stunted emotionally, clearly in psychological distress.
In Eastern Europe, after WWII, the orphanages, like the children in today's detention centers, were deprived of physical love and affection. They were terribly scarred psychologically.
These studies have been around for decades. And you don't need a study; common sense would tell you this. You have only to look at a child sitting on the floor, alone, crying, looking in vein for his parents.
Detain people if you must, but detain them as families. Or give them the opportunity of going back from whence they came, keeping the family unit intact. But in the name of all that is humane, don't, using a subterfuge, take a child away from his mother.
10
Unbelievable crocodile tears. Flores v Reno, 1997, ended with the Flores Settlement (look it up) where this type of separation of minors at the border was determined for specific reasons. Trump didn't invent it. It's been in effect from Clinton through Obama. Trump's attempt to end it with his pen may not work legally.
6
The first comparison that came to me was the slave market, not Japanese internment camps. These camps are what we are now facing as families face internment together, but separation recalls slavery and National Socialism. What Trump did is just as evil, not one iota less, especially since there is no effort to reunite children with parents. Until their is, we should adopt the practice of ahimsa and never, never stop actively resisting this recrudescence of savagery.
This separation policy is one more piece of evidence that Trumpism is fascism.
5
We understand that the government needs to protect the border. An we also know that not all the people in the government have the same degree of maternal or paternal instinct. But America has a wide array of economic, political and human interests throughout the entire world. We remember Gabriel García Márquez saying: "I became a supporter of Fidel, as a result of la matanza de las bananeras in 1928" -the banana massacre- when, he said, the United Fruit Company via diplomatic pressure from the Department of State, got help from the Colombian government to end a strike. Many workers died according to the records. But we also remember hundreds of Colombian poor saying, "Many thanks to the United States for helping us to have a house, via the Alliance for Progress" That action, in 1961, made all those people instant supporters of America forever. It's in Bogotá and the area's name is Ciudad Kennedy with about 2 million middle-class inhabitants. What a difference. And we are grateful for Plan Colombia too. And...
1
I'm starting to worry we haven't heard the half of it. DHS's handling of access to the camps and the secretive moving of children around the country is making me think of the "black sites" in Iraq, where people are held by administrative fiat out of any accountability to the public.
When the public finally gets an accounting of what's being done, I expect we will find a litany of horrors.
We already have thousands of children that were taken into custody, sent to live with someone and can't be accounted for.
We're going to find mistreatment in custody, we are going to find that children have disappeared and ended up with sex traffickers, we are going to find rape and assault by children by other incarcerated children. And not isolated incidents. I'd bet on it.
5
It seems there's never a shortage of little Eichmanns just doing their jobs. Have we no decency?
8
To those responding to my comment yesterday, we will have to agree to disagree. I won’t change your views and you certainly won’t change mine. Illegal immigration hurts this country.
3
"Illegal immigration hurts this country." -- But FASCISM is better, right, Olivia? -- No one is advocating illegal immigration, but people have every right to seek asylum in this country.
2
If there ever was proof that Trump is a very nasty human indeed, then this is it.
Now you have to realize that the Dems have some responsibility here. Obama's virtual signalling with token immigration reform was a gesture of political expedience.
The Democrats have to wake up to the fact that the world is grossly overpopulated so third to first world immigration, along with climate degradation are existential issues. We cant take them all.
2
"We cant take them all." -- Perhaps not. But if all civilized nations got together, maybe each nation could take several thousand. This is one of the reasons that it is good to have ALLIES, instead of treating them like garbage, and alienating them. You could work TOGETHER. But trump's way is the way of HATRED, DECEIT, ARROGANCE, CORRUPTION, CRUELTY, AND THE BIG CON JOB.
2
Have you ever been in a store or at the mall or walking in the street w your child or young niece or nephew ? Then for one quick second you turn to take his/her had and there is nothing there? One second and you look around and can't see the child. Your stomach churns from nausea, you sweat, you feel faint and may collapse.
Then two seconds later you see or hear the child to your great relief.
But that two seconds felt like eternity and crazy scenarios go thru your head.
Well, imagine if after two seconds then two hours then two days and weeks and more you can't find that child and you have no idea where the child is.
We think the two seconds was trauma; imagine....
5
Trump's political calculus is that his zero tolerance stance on immigration will be a winner for Republicans in the 2018 midterms. It seems that significant majorities of white Americans agree with him that Central American refugees seeking asylum in the United States are an "infestation" that should be returned to the death squads that await them in their homelands. Who knows, he may be right. Many white Americans lie to pollsters when questioned about separating children from parents, claiming that they are against it when in fact they support it, just like they lied about supporting Trump for President.
1
Thank you, Nick Kristoff. The Trumps are a heartless, greedy lot. I strongly support building a wall...around them.
5
I thought kidnapping was against the law.
3
We read about Nazi Germany today and wonder, how could that have happened? Why didn't anyone do anything to stop it right in the beginning?
Well, it is happening again. It is our turn to do something now, right in the beginning. There are too many historical realities of how it all ends. It will be no different this time. Clearly, the United States is not immune from harboring a barbaric leader.
5
Every time I think of early American slave owners, and of the "good" Germans who turned on Jews, I have struggled to understand how otherwise normal people can be so cruel to other human being, but I can not. And certainly not in America today, even if we aren't actually beating them or killing them. How can we have such little empathy for our fellow human beings?
6
It is heartbreaking to see children torn away from parents at US-Mexico border. However, the comparison to Nazi's and Slavery are what turns so many well-meaning, smart, educated Americans from NYT. I despise Trump and am voting Democrat across the ballot for the next six or eight years. I am not a Republican. Nevertheless, these comparisons to Holocaust and slavery diminish the credibility of your news organization.
Sincerely
7
In the photographs at the start of your column, your comparison of what is happening now at our southern border with what Nazi Germany was doing to the Jews in the late-1930's and 1940's is grotesquely inaccurate, unfair, inflammatory, and biased, and not mitigated by your last minute, end of article reversal. It should be offensive to anyone capable of clear, fact-based rational thought, and it undermines the persuasiveness of your piece, which appears to be intended to inflame a very regrettable situation.
3
It is also deeply offensive to Jewish Americans, many of whom have lost family in the Holocaust -- an actual GENOCIDE -- not merely an inconvenience.
To conflate these things -- GENOCIDE with illegal immigration -- is revolting, unfair, unjust and purely despicable.
2
There are absolutely legitimate parallels to be drawn between the dehumanization of this administration's practice of heartlessly separating children from their families and that same practice during Slavery and the Holocaust. Shame, shame, shame on Trump and his band of callous, cruel and inhumane accomplices!
3
This cruelty has a long history. Another recent examples is from Australia, where "mixed-descent" people were taken from their parents as children (the "Stolen Generation"). Another is again from Nazi Germany, where blue-eyed blond children were removed from their Polish parents to be "Germanized". In this country, Native American children were taken from their parents and put into government-run boarding schools. In every case, the justification for this abhorrent practice involves dehumanization of parents and children. Africans, Jews, Aborigines, Poles, Native Americans, Hispanics were (and sadly are) treated as lesser beings than Whites. Racism lies at the core of all of this.
3
I wish some kind of fast-acting karma on this evil administration, the kind that will come before the next election, starting with Lewandowski for making fun of a Downs Syndrome child being ripped from her mother. I hesitate to label anyone with the Nazi reference, but every day it seems more apt, and it's in full view of the public.
1
The use of the photo at the top of your column is obscene. There is no comparison. Shame on you, Mr. Kristof.
3
There is a huge difference between the fates of the two boys in those famous photos. The terrified boy in the Warsaw ghetto picture was being rounded up to be deported to his death in an Auschwitz gas chamber. We don't know about the fate of the boy in the other photo. He's still alive and well. Hopefully he'll be reunited with his family very soon.
4
Mr. Kristof, thank you for finally bringing up this infamous page from history. The moment I heard about kids being separated from their parents, this holocaust fact came to mind. For shame, for shame, Amerika.
2
A man and an administration incapable of anything constructive. Bully start to finish, subcontractors, G7, immigrants. My bet is that Melania would be happy to get out of Dodge.
2
How could the parents of these poor children drag them mercilessly across a Mexico and then illegally breach our border knowing they could be separated? How cruel the parents are.
2
Wait a minute, the Nazis denied Jews the right to illegally migrate to the Third Reich? All this time I thought Jews were trying to escape the Hitler, not move in with him. Silly me!
The lazy and exploitative "Everything is the Holocaust" narrative will diminish the nature of the the event more successfully than any Revisionist Historian could.
Give it a rest.
3
People who don't acknowledge the parallels with this policy between slavery in the US and Nazi Germany are deluding themselves. All three were borne out of bigotry and hatred. All 3 have pushed the meme than some people are more fully human than others. All 3 have destroyed and are destroying children's lives. Imagine you are in a foreign country with your child, you commit a misdemeanor, and the authorities take your child with no guarantee you will ever see them again. If that sounds OK to you, you are either lying, or something is very wrong with you.
2
We have to recognize, and own, our lousy, immoral history, yes, but we are talking about 2018, not 1942. This is a very dishonest country.
Yes, truly awful. Zero tolerance might have looked good on paper, but reality showed otherwise.
However, some sense of perspective. The public rose up and caused a change in policy. Isn't that what Democracy is all about? Even someone as completely tone deaf and ignorant as Trump saw that there was no win here. No one was exterminated or sold into slavery. Also, the numbers are very, very small.
Immigration Reform remains a political football, where neither party has any interest in helping the other. It has been tried by pretty much every President as long as I can remember. The failure belongs to Congress.
1
The Holocaust and Slavery. Mr. Kristof, you forgot to mention the apocalypse coming soon. When hyperbole is used, you should go all the way!
3
This may not be a holocaust but is the first step towards it. Why the outcry when we compare Trump to Hitler? Hitler at first tested the waters to see how far he could go in getting rid of people. First it was the mentally ill, mentally challenged and disabled. He tried to get rid of them by getting them out of sight and eventually murdered them. Until people found out and made him stop. These are Trump’s baby steps to getting rid of people he doesn’t like. What is really abominable is that 30% of Americans think zero tolerance ranks above separating families, that it is ok to stop illegal immigration at all costs. What is next? Do they start mowing them down with machine guns as these families cross the border as they did in Berlin at that infamous wall? That’s where we are headed if we let him get away with this. I say zero tolerance of Trump’s fascist policies that treat some groups as less than human and not entitled to human rights. We need to get out and protest these policies and cry “shame!” Until we drive them away. Vote these fascists out of office and protest every day until these cowards back down as surely they will.
This is a sad time in our country and I am ashamed of what I see happening. Please dear readers, VOTE in our coming elections. It will be the only way to elect some decency back in America.
I can no longer support for what the party of Republicans have become.
4
The comparisons between slavery and Nazism are accurate.The perpetrators of both movements had this idea of white supremacy, and that is what Trump is fostering in his base.There is the movement toward "White Nationalism" that has taken hold of many in the Republican party, but especially in Trump's base. Look at how he fans the flames at his rallies. Many in the Republican leadership hold the same beliefs. The ones that don't necessarily ascribe are beholden to that base, and therefore are afraid to speak out, unless they are dying or retiring. The only way back to sanity and following the moral compass that our country is known for is to oust as many of these politicians as possible at the midterm and replace them with men and women who believe in our core beliefs: freedom, equality, and justice.
7
I can add nothing to the chorus of outrage about the disgrace that has been most recently added to this administration's
actions. I cannot find it in my heart to turn a deaf ear or blind
eye to the suffering inflicted upon people who come to this country in hopes of making a better life for themselves and their families. My own grandparents did the same when they
escaped certain death in Russia just prior to the Russian Revolution. That lady on Ellis Island welcoming all in a language many do not yet understand but that offers a safe haven is a guiding beacon still but tragically less so in this administration.
Let us all not fail to vote.
6
Mr. Trump and his minions are the brutes,. Most Americans are horrified by his separation policy. My grandfather was separated forever from his mother when she unselfishly sent him to America in 1905 to escape Russian pogroms and possible conscription. He was 12 years old. My family bears no responsibility for the horrors of American slavery. We were not here then. Since we became American, we have spoken out against injustice. We continue to do so right down to our youngest members. I invite other families to join us. This what freedom means!
7
This is a shameful practice. As was stated by a physician last week, we are a better country than this. Shame on this administration, and more fully on this Congress, maybe the worst since the Civil War.
That said I am not sure the Nazi removal of children from families followed by concentration camps and extermination via a gas chamber is an appropriate comparison.
2
What makes this different from all the quotes you stated is that these people knowingly and voluntarily come to the border not knowing what exactly will happen. Granted they may be forced to come because of the conditions in their own country. What is Mexico doing for them? Not much except giving it to us ! You may think that most people are in agreement with the vast media opinions around the country but people I talk to believe something has to be done - this is practically chaos. Instead of invading far off lands we should be controlling these smaller countries in our own hemisphere so the incentive to leave in the first place is not there. Let’s compare apples to apples next time.
5
Very well written. A powerful message quoting past and present victims of the fear and powerlessness of forced separation of family. And a clear contrast between the cruel perpetrators closed minds, hearts and conscience.
2
Wished that Nicholas Kristof article made mention of the Stolen generation of Australian Aboriginals, which is even more relevant to the separation of immigrant families than the Holocaust and slavery (in the case of Australian Aboriginals it is a combination of both).Not only were Aboriginal children separated from their mothers in systematic fashion, but it was done under the guise of good intention, (imbued with racism). Hardly by gone history since the practice occurred during our generation and only stopped in 1970, yet the silence of the world has been and continues to be deafening.
8
Truly evil, indeed.
I had to close my Facebook account this week because I was so disgusted by my "friends," who were posting away like life was normal - and ignored my post that was a call for more to do more.
The sad fact is, there are still Americans who defend and justify slavery. There are Americans who defend and justify what is happening at the border. It's not just Trump. Many people agree and see no issue.
It's disheartening and disgusting.
Why, it was just revealed that a white supremacist group has filed a request to hold a rally in Washington. It's not getting better, it's getting worse.
It's hard to keep hope. But somehow I believe there still is some, I think.
2
I urge every American citizen to go online and type in Holocaust/children/photos. Don’t think for a moment that this cannot happen again. The extremes of the human psyche have been and will always be capable of such blatant, power-seeking brutality – especially when the comfortable masses are too busy to get involve, do not see themselves at risk, assume someone else will fix it, or believe it couldn’t happen here. Like cancer, these things begin too small to recognized at first, but grow exponentially in the midst of normalcy. NOW is the time to stand up, speak up, and do not give up.
5
One small mistake Kristof. For the child, the practice is EXACTLY the same as what was done during slavery and the Nazi holocaust.
6
Trump and the Republican Party continue to slide closer and closer to Authoritarian style government reminiscent of Hitlerian/Stalinist/Maoist archetype.
Vote them out starting in November and then in every election until they no longer have any power left.
Vote
5
The Cossacks also stole children, riding through villages and kidnapping boys for the Tzar's army.
And when they use the bible to justify this, I ask, "Should Moses' mother have turned her baby over to the Pharaoh of Egypt? Should Mary and Joseph have turned their son over to Herod?"
1
Trump still needs to be held accountable for the "high crime" of government-sanctioned child abuse—and the damage done to over 2,000 children. That's damning.
And if government-sanctioned child abuse is not a "high crime", I don't know what is.
The remedy: the Congress of the United States. There is great upset, and perhaps the calculus has been reached to secure 18 Republican Senators. At that point, à la Nixon, Trump is informed that the Senate has the votes to remove him. Let's get going before the full swing of midterm elections.
3
So you are giving Trump cover, in your exculpatory headline, because slaveholders and Nazis were just as bad?
You are really incredible. What we need now is straight-out fighting, powered by straight-out truthtelling - not clever, teasing headlines. These children, and the world, are much more important than arch demonstrations of your cleverness are.
There is no comparing what is happening at the southern border to the holocaust or chatel slavery. But you pushed those emotional buttons anyway. If you keep pushing them they will wear out and won't be available when their use is actually justified.. The times should be ashamed for running this.
10
Add one more Nazi behavior to Trump's, Lewandowski's and Session's children-snatching: Sippenhaft. The Nazi's "most modern" of old Germanic justice for those clan members' outlandish misbehaving was to kidnap family members in order to force offenders to comply. Hitler and company invoked their "Sippenhaft Decree" to punish the "other." First it was Roma /Sinti (those with other skin colors, language and culture). Then it was the Jews, hardly indistinguishable - if at all - from any other European (maybe better manners and education?) In this latter case, separating children on the way to the gas chambers was a purely pragmatic tactic, as Nicholas Kristof explains. But when it became clear to many that Hitler's and Goebbels' caper was up, those in opposition experienced summary snatching of their wives and children. Why, you ask? To force them to comply. But let's face it. That act was also a form of punishment. Siegfried Knappe's book, Soldat, recounts what one man said of Hitler before the war, our 20th century prototype authoritarian: he's a gambler and won't stop until he's stopped.
2
It is evil. To separate child from parent.
We are evil. We do it.
Our president does it. Our congress lets him.
We are the evil that men do. We put them in office.
Half our country and most Republicans support this despicable creature who lives in our White House.
There is no one to blame except ourselves.
4
There's a simple answer: put up huge signs, in Spanish, all along coyote trails across Mexico: "If you are arrested for illegally crossing the US border, you cannot take your children to jail with you."
Second solution: use all the 747s that have recently been removed from airline service and fly all the parents and their children to the Westchester Airport so Cuomo can solve the problem.
Third solution: be prepared for civil rights cases from all convicted US felons, arguing that they have a right to take their kids to prison. ACLU and SPLC bound to be working on this.
5
Some of the parents are illiterate.
Another great article and totally on point. I think your slave days comparison was very needed and more of it is needed. What did Marx say: "HIstory repeats itself, first as a tragedy and then as a farce." (Referring to Napoleon and then Napoleon III). Trump is in fact part farce. He's easy to mock, with his bizarre hair-do and weird orange make up (or whatever it is) and his facial expressions that seem indicative of dementia. It is natural to look to the past to explain the present and of course the most horrible (or among them) example was Nazism and Hitler. And there are elements of the Nazi rule that we see now: ridiculously inaccurate statements, demonization of opponents, and of course cruelty. A big difference between trump and Hitler is that trump is just a vicious con-artist grubbing for money and applause. He is way too stupid to develop a national strategy. Hitler was not. He was no intellectual but he had a grasp of history and strategy and, for a while, his views (of strategy and politics) proved correct. When you read about the Pact Hitler and Stalin negotiated in 1939, it was a real thing and benefited both countries. When you look at the trump-kim farce, well, what is there to say? More like working the tables at mar-a-lago. But make no mistake: trump is a joke but a very cruel one and one we need to rid ourselves of, asap.
3
All the detention centers for children should be named: TRUMP TOWERS.
10
"“‘I’m going to take your child to get bathed.’" This has echoes of the "shower ruse" at Auschwitz. Obviously not the same, and yet these similarities keep coming to mind...
3
Not Nazism? How can we know? In Germany they did not know till it was too late. You think "it can't happen here"? Guess again. Trump is a cruel, sick authoritarian personality. He will take all the slack we give him. Read some of the comments by his supporters, who agree that immigrants are vermin. I respect the views of Jews for whom the Holocaust was so evil, but I for one don't want to wait till it's too late should it happen here.
4
Our shameful history, over and over:
Kidnapped Africans sold in slavery
Native Americans, forced into "reservations"
German Jews denied asylum from Hitler's evil
American-born Japanese forced into "internment camps"
A ban on immigration from some Muslim countries
and now we kidnap Hispanic children from parents trying to find safe haven.
Unfortunately, it's not just the current administration that has moral failings. We the people elected these monsters!
SHAME!
1
Pitiful column. Let me ask Mr. Objective journalism a question. Were children of illegal immigrants ever separated from their parents under Clinton or Obama. Yes they were. And you know it. And despite your flippant little comment at the end that what WE are doing (as this mess on the southern border has existed for decades) this isn't Nazi Germany and this isn't slavery.
The progs are trying to make political hay because Trump is trying to do something that will solve the problem of our porous border. Notice Nick offers no solutions -- only throws the biggest bricks he can pick up.
Who in the heck wants to separate families. No one. But when people show up with kids -- and no ID to prove they are their kids -- and they bring the kids knowing in many instances it can give them a get out of jail card free if they are caught -- what are we supposed to do? Just let them all in? I know the Dems would love that as they will soon become good little Dems voting legally or illegally as the party bosses tell them.
And where is the outrage about the millions of American kids who have been separated from their parent or parents because the parents were sent to jail here? American citizens. Separated families. Because they broke the law.
So what is your solution Nick? Sit on your brains and weaponize the immigration situation against Repubs when both party's share the blame. Or offer a solution?
10
This is not true. It was not the policy in the past to separate children from their families. That is why all former First Ladies have spoken out so eloquently against this.
Some sources: http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/392852-trump-cannot-blame-policy-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/fact-check-d...
https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/did-the-obama-administration-separate-...
Thank you. I am so tired of this constant tirade. Let's remember, we did not go and search these people out and take their children, if in fact they are their children. They came here, illegally, crossed into our sovereign territory, and demonstrated a complete lack of regard for our laws. All of the comparisons to Nazis and whatever else the left dreams up is nonsense. Nazis invaded the homes of lawful citizens. These people are neither lawful nor citizens, and they came here knowing their actions were not lawful. There is a way to ask for asylum and they didn't do it. We cannot have illegals roaming all over the country. We cannot send a message to the world that our laws are just suggestions, and if you don't want to obey, you don't have to obey. Don't make Trump out to be the villian in this. Mexico allows these people to go through their country knowing they will seek illegal entry into the US. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
1
Family separation is destroying children's lives, no matter who is doing it.
1
I'd like add that during the Nazi occupation of Poland 1939-1945 many Polish kids who fit the "Aryan profile" were taken from their families and given to the German families to be raised as Germans. After the WWII many Poles could not find their children.
4
We must remember that Hitler did not start out murdering 6 million Jews. He started out urging his supporters to beat up people who disagreed with them.
He started out with about 35% of the vote.
He started out demonizing people who were different, thus easy to scapegoat.
He started out saying "Let's make Germany great again."
I hear over and over that we must be careful about the Nazi/Hitler comparisons. Well, I am being very careful.
The two do differ in a couple of ways:
Hitler was a lot smarter than t rump;
I believe that Hitler probably really loved his country, somewhere deep within.
I do NOT believe that about t rump.
The momentum for cruelty is being ratcheted up every day; every day the so called president must do something even more appalling so as to keep being noticed.
He does something unhuman to somebody or some group and most of US are appalled and the sense that some of US are appalled gives some kind of joy to him and his very very base base.
Vote this November for Democrats across the board like your life and the lives of your children depend on it. Because they do.
4
@ Donald Trump. "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Do you love no one but yourself? Is compassion for children and their parents beyond your reach? Tragic. Indecent. Sad.
1
As foster parents of older, traumatized children (two of the six we have adopted are clinically diagnosed with PTSD), I can tell you that it is hands-down the hardest work my wife and I have ever done. I don't think people who have not been foster parents can begin to imagine the damage, the chaos, the relentless grief. To hear these officials describe things in homes like my wife's and mine in rosy, fairy-tale detail angers me so much. But to do nothing...I couldn't live with myself.
5
How surprising that Obama, who also separated children from their parents didn't make it into Kritstof's shock-value list. The hypocrisy and dishonesty of the left knows no bounds.
4
Ridiculous. The separations are sad - yes - but the intransigence of the Democrats to do anything about securing the border while also pandering to the illegals that they hope will be future Democratic voters is the real scandal. The Democrats have no idea how much their stance aids the human traffickers and the drug cartels and apparently don't care. I'm a Democrat and I'm with Trump on this one.
3
But liberals think it's ok to drop an infant off at a daycare center for 8-10 hours a day to be cared for by strangers? Don't they cry? Don't they missed their mothers? Someone please explain.
3
This shouldn't need to be explained.
False equivalences don't help constructive debate, i.e. a sanctioned daycare business who has been approved by the parent versus 'strangers'. The people at the daycare will be there tomorrow. Infants are picked up each day. The infants referred to in the article (that you don't seem to care about) are likely to be traumatized for the rest of their lives if they can't be reunited with their families.
This is the whole point.
Please observe your apparent perspective of simply hating liberals. What good does that do? Please think about it.
1
Jackie, perfect.
Those people saying that comparisons to the Holocaust are unfair should be made aware that the Holocaust did not start out with extermination camps. It developed incrementally.
Despite the wide spread anti-semitism already present in German society in say 1930, the vast majority of germans at that time would have been completely appalled by the idea of concentration camps. The Nazis cultivated and exploited this anti-semitism for political gain. Once in power they increased their defamation and propoganda, then passed anti-jewish laws and applied public pressure. Then came the deportations, the ghettos, the interment camps, step by step until the final solution became a reality, growing to industrial proportions. All along, each step was rationalized by their supporters, each rationalization made easier by the ones that preceded.
A look at the developments during the Weimar Republic show many alarming parallels with what is happening today in the US as well as in Europe. As Orwell said, history doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. So ok, Trump may not be Hitler but John Gotti wasn’t Al Capone and Ivan the Terrible wasn’t Atilla the Hun. All are, however, power hungry psychopaths willing to trample over anyone on their quest for more.
1
I have spent this last week in tears. And then last night, after listening to more lies from Trump and only a partial measure of relief from his own policy in yet another EO, listened to a Congressman from Kansas, shaking with fervor defending his leader while spittle flew from his mouth, extol Trump and I could almost hear the words "glorious leader". I used to not understand how the Nazis and Hitler could have come to power. I understand now. It is not only the misled who get caught up in dogmatic adoration of a snake oil salesman, but those who are too busy or too self absorbed to notice what is going on. The events this week week have been going on since Sessions did his "Zero Tolerance" speech in April, and there are about 2,500 kids who might never see their parents again because they may be lost in the system. The Press is saving us with their investigative reporting, and thankfully we still have HAVE a free press. Fair courts? I'll reserve judgment on that. But there almost half our country swallows the stories on FoxNEWS, who has virtually ignored the horrors of this last week's coverage. If Mid-Terms do not yield a checks-and-balances government again, I fear we are doomed.
1
The headline says it all, but that's not the way it's been proclaimed by Nick and NYT. An irrelevant photo of the Jewish Internment from WW2 is completely out of order here, as is shfting all the blame from previous administration policies to Trump. It's true many of his policies are the same as the previous administration and it's high-time to change them. But first, we need a wise immigration policy and a compliance by the immigrants...instead of shifting the blame to those who have to enact it.
3
Trump enacted the ripping of children from the arms of their mother. Period. Don't try to blame that on anyone else. It doesn't wash.
1
The parents are responsible, always.
Trump lied saying HIS policy to separate children from their parents is the fault of Democrats. He used the suffering of inconsolable children and the anguish of desperate parents to play politics.
Disgust! Outrage! Fury!
These words don't adequately describe the reaction decent people have to Trump's policy, his lies, his political con game.
But, even more disturbing, many people are NOT outraged by Trump's policy or his use of crying babies to force Democrats to build his wall of shame.
Many people support separating babies from their mothers, toddlers from their fathers. These people hear the children's' cries of terror, the parents tearful stories of torment. These people don't care. They think the end justifies the means. They absolve themselves of any wrongdoing. They are Republicans. Lifelong members of the Republican Party. Proud Evangelical "Christians," who have deep hatred for others.
So now Trump reverses HIS policy. Thousands of children and their parents have been traumatized. But Trump and his supporters could not care less. The only objection to this inhuman policy came from Republicans in Congress who fear to lose their seats in November.
How sad. How very sad. How pathetic the Republican Party!
Ousting Republicans from Congress in November is a beginning. Holding Trump accountable is a step. The truly formidable challenge is, What can be done with Republicans who voted for Trump and his abettors? Republicans who still support the torture of children!
If the only time one can compare to Nazis is after they kill millions of people, than the knowledge of that history becomes useless.
We remember, so we don’t repeat. All governments should be judged by the metrics that define barbaric and atrocious action.
With killers, we are constantly looking for signs, for red flags that tell us what might be coming. Yes, we have to be careful not to over diagnose, but we should be aware of the sort of behavior that killers exhibit before hand.
The same is true here. If you act like the Nazis did I the thirties, it is entirely reasonable to question whether something more sinister is coming. Trump on immigration is a great example- his rhetoric has always been racist (rapists, infest, etc) the fact that it led to policies like the separation of children should come as no surprise if one looks at the Nazis of the thirties his actions are similar to. We should worry that worse might becoming, because the trajectory has been that for the course of this administration.
1
Indeed, what's been going on in the US these past months cannot be wholly equated to Nazism or slavery...yet. It is imperative we remember that those vile institutions did not spring fully formed onto the Earth. The flowers of evil start as a seed.
2
Separated children across America are saying "Thanks, Obama!"
In all seriousness, when did the Left give up on the idea of population control? When did the Left decide that more Americans driving cars and eating fast food were good for the environment?
You don't actually think these millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal, are going to remain subsistence farmers, do you? They want cars! They want X-boxes! They want supersized junk food! Get ready to crank up the imports of crude oil to power their desires!
When the last empty field in your neighborhood gets paved over to put up a Wal-Mart to curry to their consumer drives, pat yourselves on the back and say "If it's good for GDP growth, it's good for 'Merica! God bless overpopulation!"
Welcome to the new Climate Change Denialism: it's called "Open Borders."
2
Family separation is the buffeted exterior of radical policy immigration advocates would rather not discuss. The left wants open borders. Since that's widely unpopular, the refugee system is an attractive alternative. It allows that single mother from Central America to petition for asylum over 'domestic violence.'
That's the game and, like the Holocaust comparisons, it's absurd. Voters intuitively know most are destined for dependancy. But - still - they'll tell pollsters they hate Trump's immigration policy and post means things on social media, then vote for him on election day - again.
2
Thank you, Mr. Kristof for drawing the frightening parallels between Trump and Hitler. We can more easily discern the fascistic instincts of our current President. We're one Reichstag fire away from a police state and it's questionable if there is enough political backbone among his followers to try and stop him.
"Don't mourn. Organize".
1
If this wasn't such a serious problem, it would be comical. That guy made the policy to separate families and then when under pressure he changed it; he couldn't stop patting himself on the back. His entire staff lied by calling it a law to begin with....which it wasn't. Don't any of those people have a conscience. Now where are the babies, toddlers and little girls. How can they be reunited with the parents who have already been deported. He just isn't human. Hey republicans, are you proud of your leader. He has ruined your party, now what will you do.
2
Then there was the government policy of separating "Indian" children from their families and sending them hundreds of miles away, with the express purpose of destroying their culture and making them forget their native languages.
2
Earlier this week, Alan Dershowitz called out former CIA director Michael Hayden for tweeting out a photo of the Nazi death camp, Birkenau, while discussing ICE's separation of parents from children. Dershowitz referred to Hayden's analogy as a form of holocaust denial; Hayden offered an apology to "all who may have been offended." And yet, Mr. Kristof, you seem to see no problem with being just as offensive (and historically inaccurate) as Mr. Hayden.
People leaving Guatemala and Honduras and traveling through Mexico to escape local gangs or abusive spouses want a better life for their children, and ought not to be separated from them while they are prosecuted for illegally crossing the border.
But this is not analogous to children separated from their parents in order so that the children and parents can be sent to separate gas chambers to meet their hastened death in a cloud of Zyklon-B.
There are historical parallels that can be drawn to the Nazi's systematic liquidation of 6 million Jews and roughly 0.5-1 million Roma, including children, in Europe. The Ottoman perpetrated genocide of the Armenians, Daesh's attempt to wipe the Yazidis out of existence, the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s, and Germany's early 20th century genocide of the Herero people of Africa.
There is no genocide being carried out by ICE agents, Mr. Kristof, or by the Trump administration more broadly. You work for the NYT, for God's sake. Please write something worthy of that privilege.
2
Trump's adoration of the worlds worst dictators, his desire to become one of them, and the overt racism and bottomless cruelty behind the separation of children from their desperate parents does indeed evoke the memory of children sold into slavery, the unspeakable Japanese detention (including US citizens) of World War II and of course the Holocaust.
Trump is a figurehead for the meanness, racism and hatred which has boiled to the surface in America. Trump has thrown open the curtains revealing in high definition his innate bigotry, the massive numbers of Americans who share that bigotry and the unforgivable abandonment of human decency by the Republican Party.
The citizens of Germany and Austria failed to believe that their countries could be taken over by a minority of ruthless thugs. Failure on the part of Americans to recognize that it is happening here is exactly what Trump and his Republican enablers count on.
Let us put aside cautious politeness and and label what is happening correctly as the White Supremacy movement and, yes, Fascism that we face in America. Let us resolve to do all within our power to save our democracy by, donating calling, to get out the vote and peacefully protesting in the streets when needed.
1
Silly me! From the headline I thought the article would detail the exact that the same child detention practices were used by the Obama administration! Photos of the same 'cages' with rows of beds for children only appear on many websites, in use in 2014-2016. That is before Trump's election!
3
Can we at least be COMPLETELY honest about all the ways we legally wrench children from their parents? A parent that is sent to prison, a parent that loses custody, a parent sent to war, a parent considered unfit or mentally ill and the children are sent into foster care. As horrendous as the border separation is, it is only marginally more so than many other situations we accept without question. The children in all instances are just as innocent and just as heartbroken and traumatized. Can we keep this in perspective so we can act properly in all cases involving separation of children and parents?
2
Trump, his staff, his Fox News cheerleaders, and his ardent followers will continue to promote racist and fascist solutions. This was made clear from day one, and continues to be manifest with each political opportunity.
1
"The black family 'suffers little by separation'.” "Womp, womp." Such sentiment emerges only from figures for whom "otherization" is some kind of sick joke, who gleefully cast these "others" as less than human.
Of course, it is the "otherizers" who lack the DNA of basic civilization that confers the mantle of full humanity upon walking, talking bipeds. Not fully human themselves, such figures strive to strip the common traits of humanity from the broader culture.
Today, we are governed by mutant monsters followed meekly by a train of congressional ciphers, and I am not talking only about Republicans. If anything, silence is worse than perpetration.
2
The leading photo comparing the experience of Central American children experiencing a temporary separation from their parents to a deliberate and intentional genocide of the Jewish people is misleading and absurd. If I am not mistaken that photograph of the child being confronted with a gun is from the Warsaw Ghetto. Seeing this argument over and over as well as the comparison of Trump to the Nazis shows a regrettable lack of understanding of history - and of intent and scale. All of these children would be with their parents if they had stayed home or come through a port of entry to apply for asylum. Jews in Europe has no options. Stop using his comparison which trivializes the experience of the Holocaust and allows dismissal of the current situation. It helps no one.
2
All I could think of is the “kinder transport ” in Nazi Germany and the underground to fight against evil. We must band together and not let this evilness go on. My first thought was “how did the good people in Germany save children and families? “ they managed to spirit away the children and so can we. We must take action immediately against the evilness of Donald Trump,
Is Trump's crime against humanity an impeachable offense?
1
The Australian government took Aboriginal children away from their homes and tried to extinguish their culture and replace it with “white”. Is the Trump administration intending to keep its kidnapped refugee babies and children in foster homes—and then do what with them?
This incompetent bunch have no idea what they are doing.
Vote them out!
Americans are horrified when bad thing happen to children, no matter how bad. It was front page news in Houston when a family was evicted and a mother left her children in the apartment. It was front page news in Rochester when a naked 3 year old was found outside by himself. It was front page news in Iowa when a mother took a European vacation, leaving her 12 year old to take care of the 3 younger kids. Nothing bad happened in any of these cases. But it was the principle of the thing. That's the same with child separation. We don't have any indication that any kid has even been hospitalized. Hundreds of millions of Americans don't care whether or not any kid is hospitalized. When it comes to kids injury doesn't matter. Unless their parents have every available moment to screw them up, they'll certainly be screwed up for life. and, anyhow, it's the principle of the thing.
One of the most important things people can do is bear witness to this current travesty. I read Night in highschool by Wiesel and what I took the most from that book was the power of human memory and the power of human eyes- to BEAR WITNESSS. Carry the knowledge of what is happening so that others cannot accuse you of lying or making things up, giving the enemy the powerful tool of denial. And after you bear witness, act. I know its hard when we've all got our own loved ones to deal with, bills, work, seeking out own pleasure- but all of those things are for naught if we let the rest of humanity suffer.
1
The party that promotes itself as the protector of the fetus is the stealthy and deadly enemy of the child.
The man that this party claims as it's standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, closed his farewell speech with these words:
... after 200 years, two centuries, she [the shining city on the hill] still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home."
How stunningly low the GOP has sunk since then.
2
Your history of child seizure and families split by the uncaring and cruel thoughtlessness of the villains should be read by all. Trump is still oblivious to this deepest level of cruelty, as evidenced by his non-chalance toward serious reuniting of these families. This reflects the true depth of his wicked evil. Your description helps make this clearer. I hope it is read by many more. Thank you.
2
"but is truly evil". Some folks don't like to hear that trump is evil - just that he does evil things now and then. But I say the man if you can call him a man is himself truly evil. As are all of those around him that support these evil behavior.
3
Thank you, Mr. Kristof, for putting the cruelty of Trump and his minions into the larger historical perspective for all to see. Human greed and lack of compassion for people of a different color was behind the institution of slavery. Hatred of "the other" was what the Nazi criminals first inflamed and then used to justify their brutal ethnic-cleansing policies. One wonders what could be the driving force behind our society's acceptance of the insane immigration policies of this Republican administration. My guess is that the shameful desire of a significant fraction of our population to receive their share of "tax-cuts" -- at the expense of their humanity -- is the fuel that keeps the fire burning, the fire that Mr. Trump ignited when he descended those stairs at the Trump Tower in New York to announce his candidacy. I, for one, am sick and tired of keeping my mouth shut when I see and hear Trump supporters applaud his various and numerous indecencies. Someone should show the pictures in your article to these men and women who continue to support Trump (despite his atrocious acts in plain sight) and ask them: Is this what you're willing to do to children in order to receive your filthy tax-cuts?
1
A Congressman was shouting at Donald Trump, Sr. (I refuse to refer to him as "President") the other day, before he was backed down by 3 year old's, "Don't you have children?"
Read the recently released book, "Born Trump" or the article by Julia Ioffe about Don Trump Jr., and you will never bother to appeal to Trump Sr.'s alleged parental sensibilities. He has none. He couldn't relate to the normal human feelings about attachment between mother or father and child any more than he can understand .... well, just about anything. He's as ignorant and narcissistic as the day is long, and that's all there is to it.
Trump is simply the refection of the great heart of darkness that lies within 57% of white Americans.
His ideas would be nothing without the consistent support of the 40% of the population, which is made up pretty exclusively of the 70% of our population that is White.
Yes many whites may find this policy repulsive "to see" but are going to vote for Trump again anyway. In fact, they are in favor of this policy; they just don't want to see it in the news--like lynching in years gone by.
The only meaningful protest against Trump is Register to voted then to vote for the Democratic Party in November.
There are no decent Republicans. They are all Trumpist Slavers now.
On Evil:
"If you try to cure evil with evil you will (only) add more pain to your fate."-Sophocles
""Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art."-Baudelaire
1
"Until the announcement of the zero tolerance policy, adults traveling with their minor children were generally exempted from criminal prosecutions, a policy that was well known throughout Mexico and Central America. A family that was caught entering illegally and put into deportation proceedings was likely to be released quickly to await its day in court.
“I had thought that if a mother like me had gone to the border with a child, I’d be allowed to leave detention,” Ms. Flores said.
Yolanda López, 21, who was staying in the same shelter, said she fled El Salvador with her two young children after their father, a gang member, violently threatened to take them away from her. Now, she said, she was wondering whether to go through with her plan to enter the United States." - Mr. Kristof, this is from a yesterday's article in your paper. This particular loophole has been advertised and propagated in SA for years. Basically, bring your children, and you'll just walk through. A free pass.
The Jews were being rounded up in Europe to be EXTERMINATED. Slaves were bought and sold to be EXPLOITED for labor until death.
A badly thought, and cruel policy by this administration? Yes, but, still, no comparison.
What's YOUR solution? Open borders? Ain't gonna happen. Look at Europe now.
If escaping from violence, is there NO safe country in SA?
Let's do like Mexico does, and bring most of the economic migrants to Canada's border, and see how soon they cry "uncle".
2
I detested Donald Trump and his administration before this latest horror but now I am unable to find words that describe the depths of my hatred for him.
In a recent email to my representatives I asked if the whereabouts of the children and their parents were being tracked, and when they would be reunited.
Now it appears that the administration, through its gross incompetence and worse, may not have been keeping track of these children some of whom are now in New York City. Nor, as well, are there plans to reunite these families.
I rely on the New York Times and other interested media, charities and legal organizations, the courts and citizens to push without letup for the immediate reunification of these families.
This man, Trump, is truly evil. He is a constant liar, a grifter, conman, and thug. We must not allow him or the Congressional majority to continue their reprehensible policies.
Can you forward this article to all your fellow op-ed writers who claim over and over and over again that these sorts of policies don't represent "what America really is" or that they don't represent "true American values"? Clearly, this is who we are. Let's own up to it and then change it and stop pretending we stand for something good and great that we have strayed from.
Founded on genocide and slavery: that is America.
1
If you are horrified by the events taking place in our county. If you feel that our country has sunk to new depths of cruelty just remember that you can change the direction. Get out and protest on June 30th. There are country wide protest being scheduled - be part of these protests.
And in November get out and vote for a Democrat. I don't care if you are Democrat, a Republican or an Independent, vote Republicans out of office at every level of government.
Now is the time for each citizen with a soul to stand up and say "Enough is enough. We are better than this"
1
Mr. Kristof, thank you for showing the similarities between what Trump is doing to children now and what history has shown has been done to the most vulnerable for centuries. Just because Trump's atrocity against Latin American children may not sink to the barbarity of Nazi Germany in the eyes of adults, don't think for a minute that it is any different to the victimized children. They will be scarred just as badly.
1
Truly, truly, family separations are the depths of sadness. To deliberately create this level of distress is cruel and a misuse of power.
Among the reasons Trump gave for signing his executive order:
“crying babies doesn’t look good politically”
“I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated”
Nothing about the terror children and their parents are experiencing. Nothing about the morality of tearing families apart.
Nothing about people fleeing horrors most of us cannot even begin to imagine.
Nothing about the legality. . .
I. I. I. All Trump understands (and cares about) is how things look, how they impact him, how they make him feel. Thinking and behavior devoid of empathy or remorse is sociopathic and it is terrifying.
1
Separating children from their parents is evil. But so is making immigration policy to benefit corporations looking for cheap labor. Liberals have turned a blind eye to the latter evil for a long time.
Immigration policy should be made with an eye toward furthering the common good. That's the common good, including the good of working-class Americans--not just the good of wealthy professionals like Nick Kristof and many Times readers.
Those policies should be enacted into law and the laws enforced--fairly and compassionately, but enforced. In recent years, the Times has been a leading voice for not enforcing immigration laws, leading to an immigration status quo that rightly has many Americans fed up.
For a comprehensive argument for why liberals should rethink our knee-jerk support for open borders, see: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Progressive-Case-for/151195
3
The crisis is acute and still GROWING. Every separated child who is currently being held is getting more and more traumatized with each passing hour.
One mother on the news was separated from her 14 month old son for 85 days before being reunified... months later, the child still wails screams whenever she leaves his sight.
Little children's brains cannot process "temporary." So being separated hits them just like a parent's death or a deliberate abandonment would.
Hundreds of preverbal babies experiencing worse and worse despair, grief, terror, and stress with each passing day.
We must maintain full outrage until all these kids are reunified.
VP Pence, the man who is so pious that he won't even eat dinner with a woman unless his wife is present, stood behind Trump the entire time.
Not one word of concern did this man of the bible utter publicly. What kind of religion does he practice? Certainly not one that emphasizes empathy for those who are suffering, like the children and parents whom he surely knew were in pain because of Trump's horrific policy.
3
Every morning I wake up and dread the coming day because I know it is my civic duty to stay abreast of the news, and to write my congressional representatives, and to add my pitifully small voice to the chorus of those of us protesting in the only ways available to us.
I've lived in this country for 65 years and never imagined I could be more ashamed of my government and certain of my countrymen. I never imagined a president who could foment such irrational cruelty as the slaveholders and sellers of the distant past, or entertain the same tactics used by the most hideously evil regime that operated in the middle part of the last century.
Yet here we are: The monster is again staring us in the face. Our fellow citizens are wallowing in hatred and lashing out at the poorest and weakest among us. And here we are again, seemingly helpless against the onslaught of the mob.
I can only speak for myself, and I know my evidence is selfish and anecdotal, but I am nearly bereft of tears as I read and write every day seeking solace in the thought that good people will prevail this time. But I'm losing hope. The terrorists are winning. God help us.
1
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
I vividly remember at the vast 2017 Women's March, a group of people of color trying to talk with Trump supporters. Several young women of color, with strained patience, talked about the red flags, the dehumanization, the alarming policy promises, the real danger for families. "Just wait and see what happens," the Trump supporters pleaded. "Don't take it all so literally. Give him a chance."
I never thought I'd get a firsthand lesson in the banality of evil.
1
It is always appropriate to remember history. This type of cruelty has been used for time immemorial, which does not make it moral. What history tell us is that we should avoid committing the errors of the past and wake up our ethical sensitivities. If we lack the latter, history will be useless. It is obvious that those who conceived the policy of zero tolerance and those who approve it have neither a knowledge of history nor a sense of justice and what is moral or immoral.
1
The brave left danger to come to the land of the brave, but they didn't find the land of the free.
1
Separating children is an abhorrent practice and no one is surprised that Trump can do it without compunction, but killing children is far worse.
Bill Clinton initiated murderous economic sanctions on Iraq in the 90s resulting in the deaths of an estimated 500,000 children, later referred to by our then UN ambassador to the UN as a price that was "worth it".
I posted the same comment on Krugman's column yesterday: some replies ridiculously concluded that I must be a Trump supporter, another reply suggested that the 500,000 figure was fake news.
It's time for the corporate-media to get honest about US history and the savage policies both parties have initiated. Looking at Trump's horrific act as an isolated occurrence - in Kristof's mind, an abomination that hasn't happened in hundreds of years - obscures a long, consistent and regrettable history that includes the internment of Japanese-Americans, the fire-storm bombing of Dresden and atomic bombing of civilian targets in Japan, the genocide of Native Americans.
3
The sanctions were imposed by the UN and initiated in 1990. The quote is from Albright who was then Clinton's UN ambassador.
We need to remind people at every turn of the horrific policies of the current administration. The need to take back Congress in November is dire.
1
Thank you, Mr. Kristof. You brought home this trumpian evil as no other did. Keep it up, please.
Even to hope or plead with Donald Trump to stop this cruelty Is to sentimentalize this monstrous individual and his team of supporters and enablers. Trump's new executive order has not nor will not do anything to re-unite the thousands of parents already separated from their children, and was enacted only out of political expediency. The evil that is Trump's America continues and can only get worse.
If what Trump and Sessions and Nielsen are doing is "... is not just cruel, not just abhorrent, but truly evil" then why can't they be charged with crimes against humanity? What is going on at our southern boarder certainly seems to me to qualify regardless of whether it occurs during a war.
1
We compare the past to the present as if to say, it's wrong. We all know child abuse is wrong. No comparison necessary. We cover up our values and stamp labels like Republican or zero tolerance to hide the wrong. These are human beings with their children showing up at the borders to a country filled with immigrants with the exception of the Indian. Where is our compassion? We have no right to express this wrong as if we have a reason or justification. We do not own this land. We all immigrated. We have stopped leading the world and have earned a stamp of hate among the other worlds nations joining some of history's worst. These times are nothing to brag about, be proud of or teach our children. These are sad voices we hear at this time. Voices filled with hate and fear. Further voices of our nations embarrassment.
Please allow me to say this, while it's still allowed : I deeply, truly, desperately hate HIM, and his entire Crime Family. Seriously. But, that's just ME. Thank you.
1
I did not know, before reading this story, that a common ruse used to separate small children from their parents near the border is that the child is just being taken to be "bathed." There is no way to read that without immediately thinking of the "showers" in the Nazi camps. Yes, the children in Texas were not being taken away to be immediately killed. That is not enough to make the parallel go away. Keep in mind, someone came up with this idea. Someone thought a clever way to separate the child from the parent without fuss would be the ruse of a "bath." That person learned in school about the Nazis' fake "showers." That sends chills down my spine.
2
It doesn't matter one Iota if anyone else performed such cruelty before President Trump. What matters is that we evolve, and we get a better understanding of what evil looks, smells and sounds like.
Trump knew his policy was pure evil. Even if his own brain couldn't consider it, he was told by everyone on the planet that his behavior was beyond inhumane.
I don't care that Trump wasn't the first to take such horrific action against children and their families. I just desperately want him to be the last.
1
Trump is responsible for the hideous acts committed with no plan in place for reuniting 2,300 children with their families. This is a needless, senseless tragedy that will forvever be a stain on this country.
His on the fly decisions effect 320,000,000 citizens of this country. It's been proven repeatedly he is not capable of that responsibily.
He will scorch and burn, like Grant moving South, everything in his path if he is not removed before 2020.
Don't forget "schools" for indigenous children, hete and in Canada and Australia. Now's a good time to watch the movie "Rabbit Proof Fence."
2
Could also add past US policies about separating Native American children from their parents. The problem with the NAZI analogies here is that this isn't something foreign to us.... it is as American as apple pie.
2
In the interests of historical accuracy, could NYT recount that happened under the Obama Presidency with regard to those caught sneaking across the southern border? I've heard Republicans claim that a judge deplored his government's treatment of children apprehended with their parents at the border. Is this true? Accuracy please. I am sick and tired of Republican lies and Democrat denial. An accurate, true, account please.
4
Trump has no shame. If he could have gotten away with it, his next step would have been to humanly euthanize any mentally or physically challenged detainees as an act of mercy.
He would have used the Bible to justify it.
1
Thank you, Mr. Kristof, for this wonderful collection of quotes that precisely place the current situation in historical context. I am reminded of Stowe's plea at the end of her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin: "And you, mothers of America,—you, who have learned, by the cradles of your own children, to love and feel for all mankind,—by the sacred love you bear your child; by your joy in his beautiful, spotless infancy; by the motherly pity and tenderness with which you guide his growing years; by the anxieties of his education; by the prayers you breathe for his soul's eternal good;—I beseech you, pity the mother who has all your affections, and not one legal right to protect, guide, or educate, the child of her bosom! "
1
Only someone without a heart could treat children being wrenched from their parents as business as usual. Such people as these should not be in charge of a country of good and virtuous citizens.
1
Mr. Kristof, Over the years I have especially appreciated your attention to the treatment of girls. The evil of Trump's policy of family separation has been eloquently addressed here by both you and commenting readers. However, I am troubled that I have seen almost no investigation of girls' facilities, or commentary on the specific dangers to girls in these chaotic circumstances. I am haunted by the question of whether men are permitted to work in these facilities. I would hope that in this grim situation you would hone in on the the specific treatment of girls, as you have done throughout the world.
2
Thank you. We need to remember. We need to be reminded. We need to see---the truth of our history. We may deny it, but we cannot erase it.
2
I shed tears daily for the weakening of a common morality in a country that, however imperfect the practice of its democracy has been, had not succumbed to leaders and followers who advocated the kind of harshness and cruelty. Our hope rests in protecting our press, journalists, and public media) from assaults, name-calling, and unfounded accusations. Thanks to Kristof and others who persist with their valuable messages and experience.
2
No one wants to separate families.
The intellectual dishonesty inherent in the piece is astonishing. Blaming anyone other than Congress for this mess is actually remarkable.
The legislature in 2008 passed this idiotic law that has caused this stupidity to occur. This law was passed by Congress led by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, How could it have ever even come up for a vote, or was it passed in spite? Mr Reid's partner in the Senate leading this charge was Ted Kennedy. It was the result of a failed comprehensive immigration reform bill from then President Bush.
Mr Bush, Mr Obama and Mr Trump as well as the courts have struggled with the extraordinary flaws in the legislation created by Congress. Most important, Congress has not corrected the flawed legislation over the last 10 years. Hard to believe.
Blaming this on anyone other then Congress borders on deceitful. Mr Bush wanted to do immigration reform and the current Harry Reid/Nancy Pelosi led bill was passed. Mr Obama wanted to do immigration reform but didn't. Mr Trump is supposedly trying to do immigration reform but has been turned back by Congress.
The one fact of your article is correct: Not the first time. President Bush, President Obama also had the same problem.
Comparing these 3 Presidents to Nazi Germany and slavery is intellectually dishonest. Congress needs to act like adults and fix this tragedy known as our immigration laws.
6
You missed the part of his op-ed, like many who want to absolve Trump, where he pointed out that Trump began this and then stopped it. How could he do so if it's Congress' fault?
1
The Biggest Lie of All.
Trump said he, the President of the United States of America, could do nothing to stop the separation of families.
Then, with an Executive Order, he stopped the separation of families. No lie told by the Liar in Chief has had a more tragic effect. Two thousand children have been separated from their parents. The Liar in Chief has not taken any action to reunite the children and their parents.
3
Where is the "wherever" that the children end up? How do we know they do not end up in slavery?
1
While you're at it, instead of eulogizing the late, not so great last president, how about a close review of the Obama Administration's execution of the same policy.
5
You can research it at FactCheck and discover that the Obama administration decided to NOT separate families unless there was valid speculation that the child was not a child of the adult (trafficking). Your what-about-ism falls flat.
2
That is a bald-faced lie and one that I've read in these comments dozens of times. Please do research before spreading untruths.
https://trueviralnews.com/fact-check-did-obama-administration-separate-f...
this is not an immigration problem: People have been crossing the border for years and years-working in fields, picking produce, as day laborers, etc. all in plain site. They contributed to an underground economy. They worked for lower wages, no benefits. And employer's profits grew. Now, these immigrants, are rapists, murderers, criminals, animals. Well, close the borders: let Americans work in the fields, cut your grass, wash cars, baby sit, do the jobs that we always thought was 'dirty'. be careful what you wish for!
1
As a retired owner of a construction company what you are proposing is wishful thinking.
Americans do not for the most part want to do dirty jobs.
The construction industry is short two million workers.
I believe Mr. Trump's plan is to "close" the borders, in it's self a misnomer, and force everyone on any kind of assistance into work. This approach assumes that this is just a math problem. Your elderly aunt on disability is not going to mow lawns.
Meanwhile millions of tax payers dollars are spent on one child: poor little Barron Trump, who would not move from New York to Washington because you know, that may prove disruptive for his school year... Isn't he the son of an immigrant himself?
1
Just goes to show ya that in any era the CONservatives are cruel and brutal by nature. What ever contact they ever had with a moral compass was lost ages ago.
To escape this brutality and barbarity your only choice is to vote the bums out. Even if you have to hold your nose you will have to vote for Democrats at any and all levels for this march to oblivion to get turned around.
Resist.
2
A chilling photo - all the more so given what is happening to immigrant children.
The devil may quote scripture – and so may Jeff Sessions. I am going to endorse the Bible on this one, though not the distorted version quoted by Sessions:
"You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in Egypt." (Exodus 23:9). “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”
Matthew 7:12. Oppress the stranger’s children instead?
Once again, I am sick at heart over these developments. Just appalling.
1
Not directly on the topic of separation, about which much has been said, but, Mr Kristof, can you answer this question for those of us who are wondering: Why haven't we seen or heard about any GIRLS? All the pictures of children separated are of boys. Where are the girls? Why are they hidden and invisible? As a woman, mother and grandmother, I want to know what happened to them. Thank you.
4
Historians will have to determine how much responsibility our country rightfully bears for the circumstances that have created this flood tide of refugees from corrupt and impotent governments that cannot protect their citizens from violence and chaos. But our War on Drugs certainly does bear some. When we then fail to offer asylum to the victims, as our own and international laws require, we abdicate an important aspect of our humanity. I believe that fear underlies most hatreds, and that the remedy for fear is familiarity and understanding. I recommend setting up a system of family foster care for asylum seekers, instead of detention. These refugees have endured unspeakable trauma and loss, and they need respite care and compassion, not "zero tolerance.". The response to Trump's policy of ripping apart families has brought enormous resources in the form of donations, which demonstrates popular intent but doesn't provide a coherent alternative. I suggest allowing any American citizen to offer foster care for asylum seekers by taking a family or individual into their home for temporary refuge and support, pending their appearance at their initial asylum hearing. This would create a space in which we would get to know our neighbors in need, offer help and support, and begin the process of curing our fear of them. Eventually, less hatred. A space for solidarity to grow.
1
What makes this an even worse atrocity is that there were already highly effective case-management techniques in place for handling these poor people--so effective that according to a lawyer I heard last night, nearly 99% appeared for their hearings in court.
Ironically, we are spending billions to traumatize people, when for much less, we can treat them in a humane manner consistent with our values, and highly effective as well.
The infliction of trauma is gratuitous, except that it satisfies Trump's need for adulation from that wretched base of his.
2
What is missing from all the “hate everything about Trump crowd” is that the separation of children is a direct result of either a parent or guardian’s illegal action. Those that follow the law, and attempt to enter the country in a legal manner, are not, have not, and will not be separated.
That small nuance tends to be over looked by “the resistance.” Separating families is a terrible, revolting idea, there is no doubt. Following the rules and the law eliminates such a policy from ever seeing the light of day.
It’s just not that difficult to grasp!
6
The "if you do something bad, we'll do something worse" argument does not fly. That's like hitting a child with a baseball bat because he misbehaved and saying, well, ya shouldn't have misbehaved. One does not abuse a child no matter what.
2
Here's what's also not difficult to grasp. Laws give a general framework from which detailed policy arises. The border policy from Clinton through Obama was that first time crossers who had not committed another crime while crossing were charged with a misdemeanor and deported. During the brief detainment period the families were not separated. Of course, those maniacs who were smuggling drugs, weapons or dealing in gang related activities who crossed and also brought along their families were separated. But of course, if you or I committed a felony we would also be separated from our families.
Trump has instituted a "zero tolerance" policy where even first time crossers must be put on trial as criminals and thus are separated from their families. We are now equating seasonal tomato pickers with cocaine smugglers. That is absurd.
It’s just not that difficult to grasp!
There is a fact that people trying to enter legally are prevented from doing so with a variety of excuses (insufficient processors or room) because those who established the policy don’t want it to work. It’s easier to mess it up with incompetence.
Why can’t they bring the 2,000+ children and the 2,000+ parents to the same place and have them find each other? This is not rocket science.
5
The utter cruelty of Trump is rightfully the story of the day. But let's not leave out the GOP. Their main concern is the "bad optics" not the real impact on the lives of those children.
This is the same group that cut Medicaid, and wants to cut the CHIP program and Food stamps.
There are now officially 30 million poor people in this country, most are children. The number is actually much higher because if you make $1.00 over the official poverty threshold, you aren't counted as poor.
The GOP may not like "bad optics" but has no problem sending these kids to bed hungry every night.
They have no problem throwing them out of affordable public housing and as far as medical care is concerned, they should simply get what they can afford.
We are one of the most child-unfriendly societies in the industrial world. We lock children up as if they were adults, we deny them health care, food and decent housing. We saddle them with debt simply because they need to get an education and now we tear babies from their mothers bosom.
This isn't just who Trump is. This is who the GOP has become. And their "solution" is to throw refugee parents and kids in jail together and deport them both as quickly as possible.
After all, they have to get back to the real business of government, which for them is making the rich richer.
8
Nick Kristof, why can't you say that President Trump's practice of separating migrants' children from their parents at our southern border is as barbaric an evil as were slavery in America for centuries and Nazism in Germany only 85 years ago? You preach that "today's practice is not the same", but it's "The World As It Is" in America today (h/t to Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama's wise writer for 8 years). The incalculable trauma and crruelty of separation of families is happening here under the worst president ever elected in our country. "Infesting" (DJT, about immigrants to our Mexican border) is a verb that resonates back to America's days of slavery and 85 years ago in Gerrmany. People are human beings, not cockroaches or rats. If we aren't experiencing the run-up to World War III, what is happening to our country? Like the scary runaway train in "The Fugitive", we can't avoid the coming trainwreck of our Democracy under Trump and his loyalists.
3
Readers of facts and history will see the parallels that Nicholas Kristof is pointing out. Anyone still on the fence about the MAGA movement and Donald Trump now see just who and what they are.
3
The next step should be for those of us with a heart to grow the backbone required to support it, and be more open about what we want.
And what do we want, what does this nation really need? We need open borders, immediately! We need amnesty for every single undocumented immigrant already here! And we need to expunge the record of minor crimes that may have been committed, that are being used in many cases to deny entry or to justify deportations.
Dancing around the implications of Flores won't cut it. Invoking the immorality of detention centers and family separation - per this column - only opens the doors for other solutions to closing borders.
Why is it important for us to openly support open borders and amnesty? Because we're at a tipping point! White deaths now out-number white births, and 16% of Americans are now immigrants. The groundswell and support for open borders is huge, and may not ever be as big again. Plus, we know from Germany that support for open borders can be fleeting. At the first sign of minor trouble, we need to be ready for the fact that many of our fellow liberals will jump ship. Hearts will shrink. Look at how Merkel has been abandoned! Look at the governments elected in Italy, France, England, Poland, Australia, Hungary and Austria!
Basically, we have a brief window of opportunity here to reverse centuries of Anglo oppression, colonialist theft, and institutional racism. We can change this country forever, but the time to act is now!
2
Build the wall. Today.
These kinds of depredations will continue until, borrowing the cue from Mr. Lewandowski, we all administer a massive womp-womping to the Republican party over this and the next several elections cycles.
In fact, "womp-womp 'em out of office" might just about fit on a baseball cap or bumper sticker. (If you feel you can use the phrase more pithily, please suggest slogans of your own.)
4
I agree - we need to make "womp womp" a campaign rallying cry and break it out for each House seat lost by the GOP. I sure hope there is a lot of "womp womp"-ing going on in November!
Just as Mr. Trump has laid waste to normal behaviors by a president and by an administration, so too has he driven us into an unenviable hunt for words adequate to describe his debasement of our country.
While true, "evil" just seems to be inadequate to the task. One may be accidentally evil or even purposely evil or even both as Mr. Trump has proven.
Mr. Trump has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, Mitt Romney, as a quantum politician best summarized in a wonderful 6 year old NYTimes piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/a-quantum-theory-of-mi...
But now, instead of Schroedinger's cat in a box, we have 2,300 children in an unknown number of boxes in an unknown number of locations.
How well you teach us about quantum mechanics, Mr. Trump! You wish us to believe you are compassionate while you continue to inter infants and children apart from their parents. You ask us the old question: "Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?" I choose my eyes and they see you for what you are and what you would have our country become.
2
Mr. Kristof, you are the last person in need of revisiting the childhood of Louis Malle, the French movie director in his homage to young friendship, where his classmate at their boarding-school during WWII is taken away by the Nazis, along with a priest who tried to save some of these children. Au Revoir, Les Enfants, or Fare thee Well, Children. They all died in prison camps.
This early dawn the following report came in from the international news bulletin: 'Medical groups and international advocates have said the policy of separating children from their parents under the "zero tolerance" immigration policy, could do significant harm to both their physical and mental health. "Early experiences [such as forcible separation] get into our bodies and affect brain, immune, cardiovascular, and metabolic systems. It has a multi-system effect, from disrupting brain architecture, which impacts learning and emotional development, to affecting how well our immune systems fight infections,” Center on the Developing Child Director, Dr. Jack Shonkoff, told ABC News. UNICEF, the International children's agency warned of the dangers faced by children who are separated from their parents at the border.
When a border patrol agent jokes about separating children from their parents "We have an orchestra here", it is long overdue to reply that a louder one is taking place at this moment, where the drums are causing a din loud enough to send Trump and his administration out of town.
4
Can theses ongoing crimes go unpunished? Isn't there one prosecutor to be found who will file charges of mass child abuse against, Trump, Kelly, Miller, Nielsen and especially Sessions?
5
There are (allegedly, at least) physicians who are in these internment centers seeing these children. Aren't physicians considered mandated reporters? So don't they have a legal duty (and maybe also a duty arising from medical ethics?) to report to the local authorities that these children are being subjected to continuing and systematic abuse?
I do realize that said local authorities are likely to respond that they are powerless to interfere in the actions of federal agents. However, they need to be inundated with abuse reports. They need to be forced to wash their hands of the reported abuse very publicly, if they refuse to act. The local authorities refusing to act need to be asked whether there is any conduct by the child jailers that would lead them to action. If their response is that they would need to see evidence children were being beaten, they need to be asked publicly to explain why emotional and psychological abuse gets a free pass.
1
The separation of infants and toddlers is a horrendous abuse - a crime against the most innocent among human beings. It is quite unbelievable that such a horror is imposed by the Justice Department of the United States. Why is the Supreme Court silent? This is a constitutional crisis of major proportions. It rattles the constitutional foundation of the State on the Rule of Law.
At the same time the US Congress deals with the "high crime" of government-sanctioned child abuse—
Trump should also be brought before the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
Time to move on this, now.
4
Please do not forget the English separating Irish children from their parents during the Great Hunger - to be sent to separate workhouses. This included infants.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/story-of-famines-youngest-victims-...
2
It might come as the shocking discovery to the naïve and uninformed liberals, but we have been separating the children from the parents here in America for many decades, usually when the parents commit the crime and are incarcerated or misuse the drugs and put the lives of own kids in danger.
Do we have to mentioned the dozens millions kids that were separated from at least one of their parents due to divorces when our personal hubris and conceit jumps in front od the wellbeing of our very own children and family values that are best for the infants, toddlers and siblings.
What about the parents being chronically absent due to pursuit of their professional careers and working the long hours?
Where is that liberal outrage at separating those children from their parents, in spite of them crying and being deeply emotionally disturbed…
Should anybody be surprised with the epidemic proportions of the drug and alcohol abuse among the youth?
4
You are seriously comparing a child of divorce and working parents living in the comfort of their own home to the complete removal of a child from their parents and placement in a shelter by government force? Seriously?? I
I'm a child of divorce and working parents, as are millions of people all over the world. Trust me we are not traumatized and scarred for life. My goodness. Why do I even bother to reply to this. No wonder it's impossible to have a conversation with Trump supporters.
3
Kenan, typically separations occur when there is a perceived danger or risk of neglect to the children in question. And of course episodes like divorce, and subsequent custody battles for children, are traumatic. That much is clear.
But if you're having a difficult time distinguishing between those all too common domestic events, and this systematic, barbaric practice of separating children from their parents who are seeking asylum in the United States, then your comment here is impotent.
And don't come back and say that it happened under the Obama Administration either because if and when it did occur, it was because the authenticity of the parent-child relationship couldn't immediately be determined. In other words, it was for the safety of the kids, not some nefarious act of tyranny to punish those who were desperately fleeing their abject circumstances.
Be well.
4
Are you aware of the deadly epidemic of drug and alcohol abuse?
You think that's not related to the tragic divorces of the parents from a child perspective and growing up in the child day centers without motherly love while a single parent is working the full time and a part time job?
What is exactly the difference between the governmental workers and the employees in the privately run centers?
Do you really believe in the ads that those employees provide the children with all the love they need?
That's pure self-deception and wishful thinking...
My wife cried when Trump denied her parents visit in the Muslim ban, and cried again hearing about the fate of even less fortunate little victims of this vile man.
The only solace I take from this shameful period of US history is to look at it as a nation in the final stages of sickness after swallowing the poison of racism.
Obama was the antidote, and now this patient is vomiting the vile. In all his nastiness, Trump carries the soul of that original sin of this nation, being exorcised we may rid of the disease. I just hope this passes relatively safe, and with fewer victims.
2
The kids need separation for safety purposes. They need to be screened, questioned, searched, showered, identified, tagged and housed. To do otherwise would open yourself to liability. This is Obama's policy.
4
I was twelve when I read Anne Frank's Diary. At the time I thought that I would have hidden Anne and all of the other children and their families who had been poisoned by the Nazis. For years I believed that such a nightmare could not happen here. Several years later, after watching the television mini-series, the Holocaust, I would lay awake at night wondering why didn't the people rise up and stop such evil. I simply could not understand how hundreds of thousands of Germans could be brainwashed by a crazed, ranting, hate-filled man the likes of Hitler. And now I know --
there are many, perhaps even most of us who want to take a stand but we don't know what to do other than hope that the next election will end this nightmare.
3
Our nation will never recover from this cowardice.
1
“Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.” - a character in Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett
1
History doesn't repeat but it certainly rhymes. I know that many people are shocked at Mr Kristof for including quotes from Nazi Germany in this article. You must keep in mind that he is the son of a WWII refugee and that gives him a unique perspective on this issue that those of us who don't have that background might miss.
Whether it's slave owners or Nazis, they have the same motives when it comes to removing children from their parents. The intent is to cause psychological harm. They don't view these people as fellow humans and this practice causes fear and dehumanizes the victims. There's a reason why removing children from a parents custody is considered the nuclear option only acceptable to protect the children from the parents if they are guilty of harming them.
Other presidents have managed to deal with illegal immigration without resorting to needless cruelty. Trump made a choice to punish these people because he didn't get his wall. He tested us to see if we would do anything to stop this needlessly cruel action. Thankfully we rose to the occasion and said absolutely not. But we must remain diligent because this is far from over.
3
Thanks, as always Nick, for your timely words and moral compass.
As you know, today, under intense pressure from human beings of all persuasions and from all corners of the earth, President Trump - with mendacious stagecraft and signing statement - reversed his own family separation policy; all the while blaming past administrations and congress.
That he is capable of such treachery is no longer a surprise, though it remains shocking.
What sticks in my brain from his comments, today, is that he didn't like "how this looks"...
Consider that for a moment. Not how it affected children, or brought the United States under intense and justified international scorn - but how it looked.
A moral compass requires that, at minimum, our society vote this November, and remove President Trump's cowardly congressional supporters from office.
2
Thank you Mr. Kristoff. Wasn't just last week that people were talking about Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize? I guess that's not gonna happen.
2
Why is it ok to separate a convicted female from her children? Happens all the time in New York State when the mother is incarcerated. The villain in this separation story is is the mother who violated some law. For families that illegally enter the U. S., the villain is the parents, not President Trump. Why is this so difficult to see?
5
Maybe now that America has found a new fancy in maintaining families together for the sake of the children, it's the time to consider the evils of no fault divorce which exponentially separate children from their parents.
1
From both their parents???
Thank you for putting this in the context of our long and shameful history. I had hoped no more of these chapters would be written, at least in the U.S., but here we are in 2018 with another story. Horrifying.
It's disappointing that Kristof can't demonstrate true objectivity and an absence of partisanship by also decrying the cruelty and inhumanity of Barack Obama's immigration policies. Indeed, Obama did separate children from their families, although not at the border the way Trump is.
From the 2011 ARC Report Shattered Families:
Josefina’s baby was just 9-months old and Clara’s 1 children were 1 and 6 when they were placed in foster homes with strangers. Clara and Josefina, sisters in their early 30s who lived together in a small New Mexico town, had done nothing to harm their children or to elicit the attention of the child welfare department. In the late summer of 2010, a team of federal immigration agents arrived at the front door of Clara and Josefina’s trailer home in New Mexico. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had received a false tip that the sisters, who were undocumented immigrants, had drugs in their home. ICE called Child Protective Services (CPS) to take custody of the children and ICE detained the sisters because of their immigration status. For the four months that ICE detained them, Josefina and Clara had no idea where their children were. In December, the sisters were deported, and their children remained in foster care.
3
Such separations under President Obama were rare. Under Trump it is normal practice.
So you’re comparing an event that involved one family with the systematic separation of thousands of children from their parents, codified as government policy by Donald Trump in an attempt to blackmail politicians into funding his obscene wall along the U.S. southern border — the one Mexico was going to pay for. Can you see how cheap your anecdotal stab at equivalency is? I sure can.
1
"... to wrench shrieking children from the arms of their parents is not just cruel, not just abhorrent, but truly evil."
For the upcoming election, I would equate swing voters (who still can't "figure it out") to Trump voters. So the question is: does this horror show register with Trump voters? I don't think it does. And what does, they applaud.
Trump supporters will simply say that Trump is being tough on crime, after all, these are illegal immigrants. But they are not. There is no law against requesting asylum at a country's borders. Now many of these families will never be reunited. We are abdicating our humanitarian responsibilities under international treaties.
We have become a nation of inhumane monsters. Can we figure out how to stop it?
Democrats need to get their voters to the polls in record numbers in November. The young voters who didn't vote in 2016. The minority voters who didn't vote in 2016. The protest voters who didn't vote in 2016. All the irate and disenfranchised voters who didn't bother to show up in 2016. Now is the time to show up. It may be now or never.
3
Nicholas, you touched on history. As the saying states about doomed to repeat history.
If we had a President who learned history and was willing to never repeat history, along with those who support Trump and his toxic policy your column would have value. As it is, anyone who dare question the policies of Sessions, Nielson and Trump are for illegal immigration, are for allowing murderers, thieves and other things, words from Trump, into the country (when statistics state otherwise).
While true in our history we practiced the separation of children from parents. One would hope that over time we would evolve. We haven't at all. Our racism, our bigotry and our propensity to follow the school yard bully and pander to that bully so we don't get bullied has never diminished. Our nativism has never diminished, it has grown in the era of Trump with his America first policy (while forgetting we are a nation of immigrants).
Hopefully that nativism will not lead to the actions in NYC during the conflicts of nativism.
I love you, Nick, and genuinely think you are a national treasure, but the headline on this is going to be something that Trump supporters seize on to reinforce their lie that separating children started under Bill Clinton. (It did not. Obama did not do it, either.) Great piece, but can your paper think through the headlines, because they are used as propaganda. We're fighting a war against the illiterate who fall for soundbytes.
The common denominator among the situations of family separations--parents from children--is the debasement of another human being. Only a "superior race" knows what's best.
I would have thought that the passage of time would prevent repeating the same mistakes. In the case of "zero tolerance" and the Trump administration, I am mistaken.
The irony here, was the indignation and offense taken by DJT during the campaign when HRC referred to his followers/supporters as "a basket of deplorables". Here he and his "gang" are engaged in even more deplorable behavior—both in words and actions. Appears that HRC called it right.
2
"Leaders don't inflict pain, they bear it." -- Max Dupree, former CEO of Herman-Miller.
Trump is no leader. But he still wants people to bow to him.
"I hope you [Trump] will genuinely stop this cruelty."
Nicholas, even after yesterday's Executive Order, there is no provision for reunification of those ~2,000 children with their parents. Reuniting them will be an operational nightmare because there are several agencies involved and no central database. Moreover, there is no desire on the part of the White House and Homeland Security to reunite them. After all, that would be viewed as a weakness because they would be helping them.
1
I saw the title of this essay and I thought, terrific, someone is actually going to deal with the heatbreaking and cruel complexity of the border issues.
But no. No attempt to solve problems, find even a tiny spot of consensus. just an attempt to fan the flames of hate.
Apparently, Mr Kristof feels there isn't enough hate in America already and its his job to turn the outrage up to 11.
Because more hate helps the kids.
Or is he just cynically playing politics and welding suffering as a weapon to be dropped when the news cycles erupts.
2
...or maybe ther was no hate at all except in the eye of the beholder?
The hate is coming from the right. The righteous indignation from Dems just as it should be.
Trump didn't end the practice of separating children and parents because he thought it was wrong. He ended it because too many others thought it was wrong. Trump is not guided by a moral compass, but by a racist base; and it was only after the cries of the children and the world became louder that the appeal of his base that he ended his dreadful policy. Trump deserves no credit, because, if he thought he could get by with it, he'd reinstitute the policy in a heartbeat.
See: RevolutionOfReason.com
1
We have forgotten how and big and rich a country the United States is. And the immigrant has always been significant player in our growth and prosperity. Always!
But from the very beginning of his presidential campaign, it was clear that Trump was going to use Muslims and Latin Americans as a tool regardless of what damage he was doing.
So now it has come to this.
If you travel the vastness of the United States, can you not imagine to make room for those that come here seeking a better life for themselves and of course, their children? What will it take for us to be more inclusive and welcoming?
It is remarkable to me to those immigrants that are now citizens of United States speak negatively of those that are seeking the same level of hope that they themselves were a beneficiary of. As if only they were deserving of charity and opportunity.
I imagine the cost of this type of incarceration is extreme. What if those tax-payer dollars were spent to relocate these families, give them shelter, education and hope. My guess is that the latter would cost us all much less than the former and at the same time, inject into our economy the fuel that helped grow our nation into the super power it once was.
16
Thank you, Mr. Kristof, for your moving description of the evil that can be manifested by anyone of us with a supposed best of intentions to “solve a problem like immigration”. I only hope it can influence Trumpers” and “non-Trumpers” to: stop hating and blaming each other; come to our senses(as Jon Kabat Zin’s Book suggests); and dialogue, legislate and vote to strengthen our country’s values, Bill of Rights and global co-operation for ALL people’s human rights and sanctity.
2
I won't give Trump credit for intentionally planning it this way, but this has worked out well for him. Had he started by interning families together there would have been a big hue and cry over the detention of children beyond the 20 days that the law allows. Now his executive order - which clearly violates the law - will have to be accepted by Mr. Kristof and others. Yes, some will protest the detention of those allegedly seeking asylum but that part of Trump's actions are legal. As for international opinion, we can ask all those other countries critical of Trump's actions how many of the asylum seekers they will accept.
1
The policy is evil, sure, but what are we to make of the parents who bring their children here? They DON'T have any right to admission unless it's through the proper channels laid out by Congress and delegated to various agencies.
The essential difference between Trump's policy of separation and other similar acts lies in the fact that the parent's of these children are willingly subjecting their own children to it.
These migrants have had plenty of warnings regarding what the policy is and who the administration in power is.
As long as they keep coming, they share part of the blame for this mess.
This whole outrage makes for compelling journalism but it's reaching hysterical levels. Example: a nation reads ultimate suffering into a toddler's crying face when toddler's will cry at pretty much anything it doesn't understand including the patdown of its mom (who subjected the child to the journey in the first place).
I know most NYTimes readers don't agree with Trump. I know that there's probably not one NYTimes reporter, editor, columnist, or maintenance worker at the place that agrees with Trump.
But some respect for borders, border patrol personnel, and the rule of law of a democratically elected administration.
7
LR: "What are we to make of the parents who bring their children here?" One thing we can do is empathize. Imagine your family living in extreme poverty, in an area with constant gang-related murders, with corrupt police and no where to turn. These people see their decision to cross illegally as an affirmation of their moral obligation to their families to get through situations that were brought on through no fault of their own, such as a crop failure or an economic crisis, or the dangers of daily life where gang activity rules. They are willing to risk a journey of thousands of miles for the chance that they can enter the US, get a job and provide for their families. They are not all criminals, as Trump would have us believe. One study found that these individuals viewed themselves as moral, law-abiding people who respected national borders, despite their violation of US immigration laws, and felt they had no choice but to try to enter. Most are just regular people, like you and me, wanting a better life the only way they can think of.
Few Americans think we should have open borders, again contrary to accusations Trump makes. But, most Americans think these people should be treated with respect, kindness and dignity. Process them quickly and deport them, unless they qualify for asylum (which few do). But, don't kidnap their children, don't house them like animals, and don't treat them as sub-human.
1
They most certainly do have a legal right to request asylum, which Border Patrol prevents them from doing. After they are they are denied from requesting asylum, their children are torn from them and they are labeled as criminals.
2
The United States is a country that both respects the rule of law and respects human rights (or at least strives to.) It is hard to find solid evidence of either in the current executive branch. Respecting the rule of law at the same time as respecting human rights is a big part of what makes America great. I hope we can return to that again.
1
The separation of children from encacerated illegal immigrant parents is mandated by federal court order which is the law of our land. Reported by the WSJ: "What is the Flores agreement? The Flores agreement was reached in 1997 after two organizations filed a class-action lawsuit more than a decade earlier, challenging the former Immigration and Naturalization Service’s handling of children. Under the terms of the agreement, the government is required to release children from immigration detention as quickly as possible to parents or other adult relatives, and if not, to a licensed programs willing to accept custody of the children. Those facilities generally need to be licensed to care for children. The Trump administration says it wants Congress to overturn the Flores agreement so the administration can keep families together in detention. Until that happens, the administration says it must separate families to prosecute the adults." If this report is accurate the courts have mandated that children be separated from incarcerated parents.
7
People fleeing certain death in their countries have every right to request asylum in the USA. Border Patrol has been instructed to deny their requests of asylum and label them criminals.
There is no law that says asylum-seekers must be separated from their children, including infants; that was a Trump administration policy to hold them as political hostages.
Ask yourself what horrific conditions these people are fleeing, knowing they are unwelcome and held in contempt in the US by people like you, yet are desperately seeking asylum here anyway.
94
It's a matter of interpretation here and the Trump administration with the consent of Sessions, has decided that it wants to make it as hard as possible for potential immigrants seeking asylum to be granted asylum. Other presidents and administrations did not interpret the law this way. Trump telegraphed his attitudes and this sort of action during his election campaign. This is no surprise to anyone who has been watching what this administration has been doing.
The question is if what Trump is doing is legal. It's not humane but it may be legal under our laws. America does not have a good record when it comes to granting asylum or keeping families together. What is truly disturbing about this is that they aren't keeping track of where the children are so that they can be reunited with their parents no matter what the decision is. Even more horrifying is that Sessions probably doesn't want asylum granted no matter what the proof is.
We are creating enemies here that we don't need. We can well afford to treat these families with dignity, courtesy, and kindness. There's no reason, unless it's medical, to separate anyone. Asking for asylum is not a criminal act or wasn't until Trump took office.
3
Asylum seekers are supposed to present themselves at US diplomatic outposts or at proper entry points to the US.
2
You can and should implore him to act decently, but Trump is and will be Trump. He will continue to do evil. It's up to decent Americans to stop him.
8
The loss of a child is the most traumatic event a parent can experience. This is a psychological fact. A government policy that does that is both criminal and inhumane. There is absolutely no justification for it even if you support "protecting the border." We are appalled as we witness "state-sponsored" cruelty not seen here since slavery and only in more recent memory during the Holocaust. It's a monstrous policy that only monsters would implement and defend. This is the true "American carnage" of Donald Trump and his all-too-willing accomplices John Kelly, Kristjen Neilsen, Stephen Miller, and Jeff Sessions.
13
Great article. We need to know our history, and know it within context. We need to share it in our children’s history classes, not just romanticized versions. A civilized society, learns, grows, and evolves from not repeating thought, words and deeds that degraded humanity in the past. We always should be striving to be better.
4
It’s an enlightening idea to illuminate Trump’s cruelty through a “slide show” of quotes. His border security policies stand squarely in the tradition of slavery and other crimes against humanity. To be sure he uses their methods but slipping towards a totalitarian mind set is a shorter distance than most people want to realize.
7
Anyone who says cruelty is not part of the American character is a liar. Every time I hear someone say, "This is not who we are," I realize how infected by propaganda Americans are. Trump is right about one thing at least, when he says the United States is no better than the countries we accuse of human rights abuses. “You think our country is so innocent?”Trump asked Bill O’Reilly. Trump fits neatly into America's history of barbarism. Our fairy tale of "equality" has been false since 1776. Trump and his followers can't make the country great again. It wasn't great to begin with.
13
If you get rid of DT and most of GOP it will be fairly great.
Really? So just erase the hatred and bigotry experienced by Native Americans, Blacks, Jews, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese--let's just even it out to any non-White-- throughout our history. Hatred of Hispanics is just more in a long line of hostility directed at any non-White who dared to enter our country and had the audacity to try to earn a living. Both before the days of immigration laws and after, when even American-born, non-Whites faced discrimination and hatred, White Americans of every political party have looked down on them. Our history is steeped in White supremacy. The current GOP didn't invent it.
This is what we need, and more of it. Every day. New or continued current personal stories, and excerpts from books, front and center. Thank you! But who wrote the headline? I hope not Kristof, because I think he would be more responsible. My first thought was that the article was giving Trump leeway for not starting what Obama did, that Trump was "just" making it far worse. That seemed strange coming from Kristof, and is antithetical to the impact of the article.
4
Dear Mr. Kristoff.
Not that it lessens the current wrong and actual cruelty, but you accidentally left off what happened to Native American children. I cannot speak to it myself, as I am not a Native American, but many, many thousands of Native American children were taken from their parents, in the most cruel way, and forced to give up their families, language and culture. A good friend has taught me about the multi-generational trauma that afflicts Native people today... so yes, we, the white culture, has done this before. I have to wonder if the men and women inflicting this, are descendants of those people who did the internments of the Japanese, the Native American children, and the slave holders. How hard their hearts must be. And bless all the journalists, who are keeping our dear Democracy alive, there are embers of justice there.
16
Years ago, a fifty year old Lakota friend asked to sit in my class on native americans. During discussion of the reservation period, I asked her to tell the class about her experiences forcibly taken from her family and placed in a boarding school.
During her narration, she broke into inconsolable crying (I felt guilty and terrible). But years later her pain at having been separated from her family, culture, and language still seared her soul.
9
I asked myself when would someone bring up the separation of Native American children and placing them in the custody of white immigrant families or dumping the children into the infamous boarding schools (we had a few in Utah).
I had friends who were taken from their parents in the Navajo Nation and placed with more desirable white families.
I did not understand the mental anguish my friends went through until my later years.
Yet, we have learned nothing from these dark days in our history. We still have the nativists who preach and promote the policies.
We are a nation that appears to have no compassion and are easily manipulated by serial liar.
1
In Canada, the federal government, with the assistance of the Catholic Church, took native children from their parents on reserves and sent them away to residential schools, where many were beaten and sexually abused by priests. The schools were finally closed in 1969, and the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard the appalling testimony of survivors and in its final report, characterized the entire enterprise as "cultural genocide". As a Canadian, I am ashamed, but also pleased that our collective crime, supported by the white majority at the time, was finally confronted, with the government pleading guilty and apologizing.
1
Trump wasn't the.first to separate families but he is the first to come under severe attacks.
And that tells me a lot about the priorities of the Democrats.
It is NOT about keeping families together. It is about attacking Trump.
6
No sir. You are completely wrong. It is about humanity, compassion and caring. Trump is collateral damage along with being "the buck stops here" person.
While true that Trump wasn't the first one would hope we learned from history.
Apparently Trump and his supporters do not understand history or are loathe to learn from history-or both.
1
There are none so blind as those that will not see.
1
Who else separated families apart from those who these quotes reference?
Thank you for the disturbing historical reminders. The hearts of men are capable of cruelty, and we are not exempt. But we can refuse to accept these acts done in our name, just as we refused to accept torture done in our name. That is what strength is. Men who speak crudely and ugly, who bully and rejoice in it, are weak. Preying on the vulnerable is craven weakness. Stephen Miller deliberately fostered this policy in part so that an uproar by the left would be seen as weak and politically correct, providing more fodder for the base. But this uproar comes from the strength of morality and Mr. Miller's shrinking base will not eat from that trough.
9
Although the examples of slavery and Nazi genocide are extreme and offensive to some, I think the columnist makes an important point. A government that will separate children from parents based on immigration laws and policies of its own making will also do even more inhumane things in the name of law and order. It is up to the voting citizens of our democracy to draw lines that our government shall not cross. The fact remains, however, that illegal entry to our country is a problem we have to solve. Compassion for desperate migrants and their children should be a given, but it is not a solution.
5
Asylum is the solution. And these people are being denied the right to request it.
Thank you, Nicholas. Evil is definitely the applicable word for this circumstance.
16
Every day these children who have been separated from their families wake up thinking that mother and father will come to get them.For them a week is an eternity.There must be an all hands on deck effort to reunite them.The government is quick to snatch but slow to repair damage.This trauma cannot be repaired but it can be mitigated- everyone stay at the barricades until children are reunited!
13
Sobering quotations from the annals of cruelty.
The US is simply not used to this in modern times. It jars, and makes us pinch ourselves to try to comprehend what's happening, and why.
Well, the "why" part isn't hard--this is fear-mongering, race-baiting, and demagoguery 101.
It makes those of us who recoil in horror--particularly at the cheers and applause from his base whose blood lust Donald Trump is exploiting--wonder if there is anything this man would not do in the name of "law and order."
While I doubt that Donald Trump has some grand design at this point other than to attract maximum attention, I have no doubt at all that if he remains unchecked--this week was an aberration when you think of it--he is capable of anything.
However, his instincts, desires, and goals are unchecked power. He will become a dictator if the country lets him.
About 40% of Americans think this is A-okay. Little do they know.
I've never lived under authoritarian rule but I was well educated in 20th century history, and I read widely.
Once under the thumb of a despot, there's no return except all out war. I return to my original premise: 40% of Americans would have no problem giving Donald Trump unlimited power.
To commit unlimited evil. Of all the people in the world, would anyone in the world have predicted this NYC celebrity attention seeker and corrupt real estate mogul would be handed the keys to the American kingdom?
30
I believe we will look back on the moral horror and the gross political incompetence of this week as the week that trump lost a significant piece of the grip he has had on the nation. The lies were far too thin, too forcefully pushed to work anywhere outside the base, and I imagine some base supporters have been squirming in their seats. Trump got 46% of the vote -Did 46% of voters really fall for this con?- which included independents and some democrats. Polling of likely voters showed that he lost about a quarter of his support almost immediately. The approval ratings inched up over time to 45% in the last poll, meaning he had regained his initial level of support. Trump will be less than pleased with the next round of polls. His hardcore base is probably in the mid-thirties; the rest are clearly willing to abandon him. The moderate republicans, suburban women especially, are locked in now to vote against trump in the midterms. The stunts of the past week set the stage for the coming flips of Cohen and Manafort, followed by whatever actions Mueller takes. Trump has set his own nightmare in motion.
A powerful column today. Mr. Kristof.
31
I don't know. Seems to me the polls are showing that trump is getting more popular, not less: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?ex_cid=rrpromo
About 1,000 protesters showed up at trump's speech last night in my formerly deep blue MN vs. over 10,000 trying to get in to see him.
He's a monster, but nobody should believe he's not winning. Remember 2016?
19
This column overlooks the "boarding schools" that took Native American children from their families with the intent of completely separating them from their communities and their culture.
44
Thank goodness for the power of the people! I hope someone or some group is continuing to monitor the situation.
Our immigration system does need to reflect today, so there’s work to be done by the Federal Government. I agree with other people posting that a Wall would not work and would be a gross waste of taxpayer (my) money. Other people posting spoke of the importance of some sort of aid to the Countries that were home for the migrants. If their conditions could be improved at home, they will stay. Certainly they don’t want to leave. Who, with children wants to venture into unknown territory? That would be a much better way to use Federal money. Making improvements to immigration will take time, but then this is a complex issue. Unfortunately, unless Congress can get it together, I don’t see Trump doing anything but making more dramas. He and his Administration use Putin’s methods: disruption and lies, to avoid sound policy.
3
Thank you for the painful and poignant reminders of cruelty through the years. Quite amazing in a country of wealth and awash in religiosity and pride in the ideals of the USA to have this lesson as it rebounds to the current time and current POTUS. My mother was in an orphanage and always remarked on the nuns and her feeling of safety v-a-v war in the country. That was in another century far away. This is now and the visuals of children in cages covered in foil is frightening. This a.m. I listen to Mayor Blasio about the children housed somewhere in Harlem w/o his knowledge. He is outraged. I am outraged. Policy changes could have been carried out in a more civil and moral manner but w/the current POTUS, that would be unimaginable. We as a nation and as lucky humans in a world of hurt--literally--need to stop and reflect on this and how it has happened.
12
With more than 2500 children in custody, some very young, and some parents already deported, there is a likelihood that at least some will never be reunited with their parents. Add that to Trump's list of crimes. Add the 4000 excess deaths in Puerto Rico to his list of crimes. The harm is done. These should included in his impeachment proceedings.
48
The article brought tears to my eyes. Having experienced losing my wife and the mother of our children when she passed away , leaving me with a new born and 5 other children. Seeing the grief on my own children's lives, I empathize with these children and their parents. The Trumpsters are evil people.
It was only a few days ago that a cabinet member said there must be a special place in Hell for Mr. Trudeau. He was mistaken, There is a special place in hell for those evil enough to use the pain of children for political gain.
124
Yesterday MSNBC aired an obscene spectacle--some sort of meeting where various flunkies/appointees were lauding Trump's efforts. Every statement was either a gross exaggeration or a lie. It could have been in Germany in 1942.
2
The international community should bring the leadership of the US Government responsible for the separation of children and associated events to the International Criminal Court as a Crime Against Humanity.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in The Hague (Netherlands) and the Rome Statute provides for the ICC to have jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. n addition, the Rome Statute definition offers the most expansive list of specific criminal acts that may constitute crimes against humanity to date.
For the purpose of this Statute, "crime against humanity" means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.
(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;
(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;
(i) Enforced disappearance of persons;
(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health;
78
The US is not a member of the ICC. This has been the status under Rep and Dem presidents. Many thought that we were above such actions that would bring us to such a court.
2
From your lips to God's ears.
Let's just lay it out there. A policy of separating 2,000 kids from their parents for the 3 weeks their parents are in prison and then reuniting the families is not a big deal as long as the kids are adequately cared for. We're not talking a mass shooting or a hurricane. We are talking kids being suspended from school for 3 weeks for no good reason and then being forgiven and allowed to return to school.
7
It's been 3 weeks already and there are no immediate plans to reunite the families. Even if that was the actual length of time, it would still be unnecessary and cruel.
37
These children have been placed in a safe environment for the time being, only because there has been a national and global outcry.
It is the principle of the matter that is at stake where America does not recognize a policy of tearing children apart from their parents When a woman stands in front of a train with her two children and is asked by a patrol officer to choose and spare one of them, the audience of 'Sophie's Choice' is speechless and grim.
We have now seen this take place on our home territory and remain in denial that this evil could have happened in the Land of The Free, once known as America.
12
Sam: actually it has a purpose -- deterring future incidents like this one. Because you think it's so cruel, surely you think it is serving that purpose.
Separating children from incarcerated parents is not a policy but a federal court order that Obama and Trump are forced to obey. In claiming that this order can be ignored Trump is breaking the law. See what follows:
Reported by the WSJ: "What is the Flores agreement? The Flores agreement was reached in 1997 after two organizations filed a class-action lawsuit more than a decade earlier, challenging the former Immigration and Naturalization Service’s handling of children. Under the terms of the agreement, the government is required to release children from immigration detention as quickly as possible to parents or other adult relatives, and if not, to a licensed programs willing to accept custody of the children. Those facilities generally need to be licensed to care for children. The Trump administration says it wants Congress to overturn the Flores agreement so the administration can keep families together in detention. Until that happens, the administration says it must separate families to prosecute the adults." If this report is accurate the courts have mandated that children be separated from incarcerated parents.
11
The report you cite is not accurate. The administration has many options for meeting the requirements of the Flores agreement. The Obama administration selected a humane and legal option. The Trump administration used a humane and legal option up until 10 weeks ago. Then, for reasons the administration won't present, it changed to its current inhumane and perhaps illegal option.
Instead of presenting reasons, the administration says "womp womp".
1
Hmmm. Seems Trump overturned this 'court order' via executive order. Maybe you ought to pay attention to the 'fake news' mainstream media who have been reporting this for some time.
1
Oh really! The courts are forcing poor DT to take the decision to tke a two year old from their parents!
And now he are -REVERSING- that order by force of public opinin!
Too bad Obama didn't follow that order, right?
This is just a ridicolous attempt to defend the undefensable.
Pathetic!
1
With each astonishing act perpetrated by Trump and his followers I keep thinking it cannot possibly get any worse. I am finally cured of that idea. The WH has just said that there will be no attempt to reunite the children and parents separated at the border. The brutality continues.They are on their own. No money or law will be put forward to help them. It will fall to private citizens. I recall the movie "Sophie's Choice." She was sure that because she and her children are not Jewish that they are safe, until she is forced to choose which child will be taken to the gas chamber. Is this the worst the Trump will do, this separation and zero tolerance policy? We don't know. It also brings to mind the following poem:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
98
I think it's way too early to use "wasn't" as the verb of choice to describe Trump's policy of separating children from their parents. This episode and these policies are by no means over and done with. Even if and when every last one of the approximately 2,300 children subjected to the recent zero tolerance policy have been reunited with their parents, many more immigrants, some of them longtime legal residents of this country, will continue to be separated from their families, either through deportation or being refused re-entry after visiting family outside the U.S.
22
Mr. Kristof, How dare you compare the most evil of evil - Hitler and those Nazis to the treatment of children from South American countries. Many of the Jewish children died horrific deaths at the treatment of the Nazis! What Trump did was cruel, but at least these children are alive and being fed, and will now be united with their parents. I would have preferred (not that this is any better) the horrific treatment of the Muslims in the Bosnian genocide, where men, women, and children were horribly butchered! The holocaust that happened in Germany was the worst of the worst terrible events that almost cannot be compared!
17
The thing is that no one experiences an atrocity collectively. It really doesn't matter if one child is separated from their parents or a million children. One is enough. These comparisons are perfectly appropriate.
50
You don't know that the children and parents will be reunited. Trump has said the government will not help. The parents are poor and in fact have had everything in their possession taken from them. Few speak English. Children have been placed in fifteen different states and records are scant. The parents may be deported before they can find their children. If they find them, and if they are far away, they won't have money for transportation. Some of these children are too young to talk. Just because no one has been killed, it is still brutal, traumatic and cruel to these innocent children. If you want to do something good, donate to the organizations who will do the work of reuniting these families.
136
The reason Mr. Kristof dares to compare these two evils is that they are comparable.
1
If this is all over (for now), it simply means that we can go back to wringing our hands over this president's usual assortment of outrages. There's always tomorrow, I guess; another day another disaster. When the President of these Disunited States does something that makes Ted Cruz look like Ted Kennedy it really is time to flush the toilet and start all over again.
80
It's not over. Kids still need to be reunited with their parents and there are no plans to do this yet. Keep the pressure on.
112
@Boggle: Thanks for the reminder.
Q: Why are there so many immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and so few from Nicaragua????
A: Because the Nicaraguans were able to resist Reagan.
13
I believe you meant to say "Why are there so many imigrants from Ell Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala..."
"Womp womp"
The smirking execrable Corey Lewandowsky managed to distill the cruelty , racism, and inhumanity of the Trump administration into just two "words".
Even Trump usually takes more than a few words to express the evil at his core.
Trump may have changed his policy that resulted in the story that that Lewandowsky found so entertaining -- the forced separation of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome from her mother.
But he hasn't change his sociopathic belief, and the sociopathic belief of many of his supporters, that human empathy is a weakness and recreational cruelty is strength.
We can start the countdown to the next Trumpian attack on basic human decency.
I give him 4 or 5 days. Tops.
150
Corey Lewandowsky should be stripped of any role as a spokesperson and never ever ever again be given a slot on TV.
26
LT, I agree with you 200% about Lewandowski — but you forgot to mention that other sociopath, the Border Patrol agent. I can think of lots of nasty things to do to men who act this way, but if we get rid of one or two, inevitably more will appear. The only hope I have is that we can muzzle "Dear Leader" djt in the November elections and vote him and his totally deplorable cronies, sycophants and other types of followers out of office in 2020.
1
The headline on this story makes me cringe. I can see Trump, despot and demagogue that he is, trying to use this to back up his claim that he didn't create this problem. He has no shame when it comes to lies and distortions. I think a better headline would be something like this: Trump's Family Separations Had Evil Predecessors: Slavery, Nazi-Style Tactics
8
The last few months provide additional clarity to the identity and deep discriminatory values held tightly by the Republican Base and their Tea Party members.
Zero Tolerance, on the heels of exposing Charlottesville White Male Supremacy supporters, tells even the most casual moral observer, fully what we need to know going forward. Apologies, hedges or mitigations are no longer needed or desired.
We were told directly what to expect in a chaotic, corrupt and biased Trump administration during the lengthy 2016 campaign process. Too many voters were not listening even as they paid attention.
9
Unfortunately, Mr. Kristof, Donald Trump owns an 85% approval rating from the Republican Party. His poll numbers, hovering in the 40's since his tenure began, are now climbing; the ascent in approbation has not slowed.
Your great excerpts here of the rape of children from their families should scorch the conscience of every decent human being regardless of national origin. But in Trump's America, we have the rule of the mob. His press secretary defiantly defends her boss. One of his advisors feverishly salutes the president for enforcing a law that does not exist. A Cabinet member flounders badly in public to exonerate a man who is so far from absolution that one is shamed to think that this America.
We read elsewhere in the pages of the Times that a movement of evangelical "Christians" seeks to turn the blue state of California by dyeing the state's inland pockets of Republican enclaves a bright red. These "Christians" extol the virtues of the president as honoring their agenda, one that is naught but the destruction of the wall separating church and state. The hypocritical Franklin Graham told us he was aghast at the family separations but said "I don't point the finger at Trump." This from a "religious evangelist" who commands weekly audiences into the millions.
It's people like the good "Reverend" Graham who stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump. They can deplore the acts that divide parents and children while completely justifying a practice as old as America.
66
Mr. Kristof, it's nice for you to cite past injustice and join the chorus against immigrant children being separated from their parents. You do not have to back that far in history. I have not heard you or many others who loudly protest the separation policy say anything about the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of children across the U.S. who are taken away from fit parents by Child Protective Services using lies and judicial deception. Contact me and I can give you dozen of victimized parents and children I came across in one county in California (Contra Costa) just in a few months. I am an attorney from California.
10
Yes. It has happened before. I never dreamed it would happen in America. I am the biggest fool I know.
66
Re-read Kristof's piece. Slavery--right here in the U.S., was notorious for ripping families apart. Any time people are objectified, seen as less than the ruling class, horrors happen. Yes, even here. Doesn't make trump's actions any less sickening, though.
Thanks Mr Kristoff.
I’ve seen many writers try in their own thoughtful ways to condemn these practices and yet words can’t describe the evil. Nor will the words have any effect on this administration and their enablers, all of whom are cold and dead inside. I admire your work sir.
25
It should sound alarm bells in the mind of every decent American when international human rights watch dog organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch start talking about our country in terms it had once reserved for despotic regimes in Africa and the Middle East. Amnesty International director called Trump's policy "spectacularly cruel" and "a flagrant violation of the human rights of these parents and children and is also a violation of U.S. obligations under refugee law.”
25
Thanks to the children now residing in our border detention camps, the name of Donald John Trump now takes its place in history alongside Pope Pius IX, kidnapper of Edgardo Mortara, and Bruno Richard Hauptmann, kidnapper of the Lindbergh child.
Who says President Trump hasn’t accomplished anything of historical significance?
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/edgardo-mortar...
9
Both Obama and Trump would have liked to have kept the children with their parents, in detention, until a judge could hear their belated requests for asylum. (I wrote “belated” because the parents did not request asylum until they had been caught crossing illegally.) Obama put such families in centers which had been equipped especially for them with outdoor play equipment, etc. Immigrant activists sued, saying the families were being kept in the centers for too long. A court limited the time a family could be kept to only 20 days.
20 days turns out to be enough time for the family members to recuperate from their journey. They could get medical treatment, were housed and fed, and had their children educated, all at no expense. After 20 days, a family could be re-vitalized and ready to make a life for themselves in a new country.
Word spread back to Central America for people to take a child with them so that, if caught, they would be detained for a 20 day “respite” and then released, if they requested asylum. Tens of thousands of families are now coming annually. They know if they are caught, to ask for asylum because once they are released, they need not show up for their court hearing. They can just blend in with the rest of the unauthorized population.
While no one wants to see a child taken from a parent, one wonders how to stop illegal immigration. Are we capable of accepting everyone who wants to move here?
12
You might have captured some of the facts accurately, but your last statement/question fits the Fox-Trump narrative and reveals your true bias. No one is saying America needs to promote "open borders" or accept everyone who wants to move here. No one. Immigration reform is needed but a policy that automatically criminalizes people and separates them from their children--isn't it.
16
Actually, Ann, the answer is "yes, we CAN accept just about anyone" who wants to make a better life here. We have a process for screening, a waiting time, etc. However with so much global instability, much of which WE have caused, the tide is flowing faster and people are actually having to "escape" their home countries to avoid death and abuse. We DO need immigration reform, but that should not include victimization of innocents.
1
Immigration of all sorts has been in decline in the US for some years. Immigration into the US across the southern border is lower than the emigration out of the US across the southern border -- again, this has been the case for several years. Meanwhile, farmers, especially in California, are having trouble finding enough workers for harvest. Most undocumented immigrants arrive by airplane and overstay their visas. There is no real crisis of undocumented immigration. There is a crisis that the President is an unrepentant racist, which he has demonstrated again and again, publicly and loudly, for over forty years. There is a crisis that the Attorney General is also an unrepentant racist. It is a crisis that racism is so deeply rooted in American society that tens of millions will blindly follow and cheer the overt, deliberate racist and inhumane policies of these two awful men (and the many other awful people working with and for them) out of some false sense of patriotism and some delusional belief in a phony national strength. That so many of those people do so while claiming to follow the teachings of Jesus is sickening and no doubt part of the reason so many others are repulsed by so much of what is now called 'religion'. The nation may survive this; it may survive Trump. But it will take the party he represents decades to get beyond this monstrous stain of cruelty.
1
I think we have reached the standards for impeachment in that high crimes and misdemeanors include failure to supervise, dereliction of duty, unbecoming conduct or when the President has "rendered himself obnoxious," (Benjamin Franklin). To these one might add failure to uphold the constitution in that the above offenses are associated with cruel and unusual punishment of children; while lying to the American people attempting to shift blame, pretending impotence to act.
18
Add: Abuse of power (for all that you mention). Take another look at the eradication of "due process" (no bail offered for misdemeanor offenses).
We can't afford to let this character make it up along the way, as he tramps over our values, traditions, alliances, and humanistic aspirations.
Elect a psychopath and expect psychopathic policy. This time the cruelty was so blatant and the victims so innocent even the Trump cult was having trouble swallowing the cool-aide.
Thousands of children have been damaged- undoubtedly many permanently by the trauma created by the actions of a man who doesn't really connect with the emotions of other people.
He has to be told when he has crossed the line of basic humanity.
Our president.
176
"He has to be told when he has crossed the line of basic humanity." Nah. His measurement: "Is it good for ratings?"
8
Actually, I have friends who have become members of the Trump cult, and they had no problem with the Kool-Aid. They had a problem yesterday, but only after Trump signed the EO ending the practice.
1
Now we are hearing from cultists that terrorists are using these kids to come across the border.
Terrorists! That's so Bush/Cheney.
13
When an American parent commits a crime, his/her children do not accompany him/her to jail. So it is with adult illegal aliens; they are detained and provision is made for care of their children. Also, in some cases it is necessary to determine whether youngsters are actually the children of those claiming to be their parents (one of many forms of gaming the system).
The US has immigration laws that allow foreigners to seek entry and citizenship. Those who do not follow these laws and procedures are in this country illegally (i.e., lawbreakers) and should be detained and deported, though allowed to seek legal entry and citizenship after they return to their home countries.
The US cannot afford to support its own citizens: the poor, the ill, elderly, disabled, veterans, et al. It is therefore utterly impossible for US taxpayers to support the millions of people from other countries who would like to come to the US. That is why there are laws limiting the numbers of immigrants allowed into this country each year.
The cruelty lies not in detaining and deporting illegal aliens, or forcing those who wish to enter the US to wait for processing. What is cruel, unethical and probably illegal is teaching foreigners how to game the system to enter the US by falsely claiming asylum, persecution, abuse, etc.
Note: The children are well cared for in good living conditions, not in "cages" as shown in deliberately misleading photos published in the media.
8
These people are not criminals,they're refugees seeking asylum and have a constitutional right to a hearing. Trump and his misnamed DOJ have criminalized what has always been a misdemeanor.
Even if these children were housed at Mar a Lago it wouldn't diminish the cruelty of separating them from their parents.
I just don't understand why people like you don't get it. Or maybe, like the slaveowner quoted in the article you really believe that humans of color don't seem to be affected by this.
4
Do we separate children from their parents when the parent receives a speeding ticket? Because that is what illegal entry into the US is, in terms of level of affront against the law.
When people buy into the rhetoric that these "illegal" immigrants are murderers, rapists, and members of MS 13, and are "infesting" our country with their otherness, then we dehumanize them and make it easier to accept forcible separation of families and putting children in cages. And we speak to our superiority by claiming that this is actually better for the children because it's the same as sending them to summer camp, while blaming the parents and the political opposition for this state of affairs.
And we come to equate illegal entry with the worst of crimes, such as homicide, rather than the least of crimes, such as speeding. The federal government is focused more on jailing these immigrants than on stopping the repeat horror of mass school shootings.
3
Remember when Hillary was criticized for using the word, deplorable? She was right.
I use that word now. If you support Donald Trump and this policy you are deplorable. No apologies.
363
Remember, Hillary was barraged day after day with the vile and obscene chants, posts, and emails attributing to her the worst qualities imaginable. Then she was castigated in the MSM for saying, mildly by comparison, that half of Trump supporters were locked in a basket of deplorables.
These are the same people now calling for a shoot on sight policy at the border. They think their dear leader had not gone nearly far enough.
2
When writing about horrific American policy like separating families why is it that pictures and comparaisons to what happened to Jews in Germany are used rather than that of slavery in America?
6
Two wrongs don’t make a right? Both analogies are ridiculous and way off base, and an insult to the memories of both tragedies. Yet the readers of this newspaper lap it all up.
2
Neither is appropriate. Jews were gassed, shot in ditches, burned in ovens, by the millions (6 million to be exact). Slaves were beaten, raped and worked until death. Ridiculous comparisons, both - even though what is happening to these children is incredibly evil and inhumane.
1
When will these ICE Criminals be prosecuted for Kidnapping ???
" Just following orders " won't cut it. Seriously.
126
The border agent who cruelly called the children's cries "an orchestra" should be fired and not allowed to work in any field requiring compassion and people skills.
29
You're right PhylissDalmation. And highlight the fact that so many who are offended at any mention of comparing the US to Nazi Germany forget...."Just following orders" was the main defense of most of the war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials. Germany swallowed Hitler's KoolAid because he helped the floundering economy, built roads and factories and promised greatness, along with purging the "others" from German society. Sound familiar? It is, except we don't have even a hint of any infrastructure improvement, or factories springing up across our nation. I used to think "It can't happen here". Actually it can, and is.
2
"Not just cruel, not just abhorrent, but truly evil." I think you just invented the Trump 2020 campaign slogan. Will it fit on a hat?
311
Agreed, Rick. Bumper stickers should be issued, too.
2
A bumper sticker.
2
NJC
NJA
BTE
Yes, I think it'll fit. It doesn't roll off the tongue like MAGA, but if the hat fits, trump and his supporters should wear it.
3
The comparison of anything to the Holocaust is beyond offensive. Is anyone being shot, exterminated, gassed, burned in ovens, or systematically being starved to death? The Jews and others who were murdered did not commit any crime. And, no, I am not Jewish. My Jewish friends, are you not angry about this constant use of the Holocaust to fit someone’s narrative?
The parents of these children entered the country illegally. They did not present themselves at a port of entry and ask for asylum. They were apprehended by Border Patrol trying to sneak into this country because they know they do not have a legitimate claim for asylum. They are economic migrants. If they had presented themselves and asked for asylum, they would not have been separated. It is the parent’s fault they have been separated, not Trump, Sessions or Miller.
Illegal immigration has to stop. Those who disagree don’t have kids in classrooms that are overcrowded with illegals and never have to go to an overcrowded emergency room, use overcrowded public transportation or drive on clogged highways because their chaffeur is doing the driving.
America and Americans First.
16
The "crime" that Jews and others committed was being who they were. There were a lot of lies and distortions about the harm they were doing to German society. Ancient fear and prejudice were used to fire up people who were suffering because of the worldwide depression and the terms ending WWI, which punished Germany.
The US failed to step up to welcome people fleeing persecution. That is one of the shames that mar our history as exceptional people. We can't go back and fix what went wrong, but we can, and should, do something different in the future.
Under the Trump administration, the US has refused to admit refugees from the violence of the Middle East. Our government has, in our name, defined the terms of asylum to eliminate people who have legitimate reasons to fear for their lives. Some may be wanting better lives, but many just want to live in safety.
If we don't want them to come here, why don't we try to do something about the conditions where they live? That is the big question that doesn't even seem to be asked.
The irony is that we will be needing more immigrants in the future as the trajectory of our population growth goes down. We could also use investment to address overcrowding in our public spaces. Dare I say that we need to pay more in taxes for our own sakes?
91
@Olivia
I appreciate your point of view, but disagree with it.
This administration is physically stopping people from crossing over into American territory at those ''points of entry'' and forcing refugees to cross over elsewhere. (to enter them into the justice system as migrants and not refugees)
Then this administration is/was separating babies/children from their parents, because they deemed them not to be refugees.
I understand you want to raise the drawbridge and keep what's yours, however America is a country founded on immigration and will continue to be into the future.
I am sure you don't want to tear down the Statue of Liberty and the declaration upon her.
Regards,
180
Olivia, this is what is happening to families who legally seek asylum. They are being arrested and detained. This is a complex issue, and this is one of the facts that sometimes gets lost in all of the drama, but the US treats a legal practice as a misdemeanor crime. Sometimes they close the border crossings, sometimes they refuse families entry, but either way, this is a willful act on the part of our government.
75
His daughter Ivanka said it best, "There is a special place in hell for those who abuse children."
55
I doubt that she was talking about her father, which makes one wonder who the heck she was talking about. "But I was only following orders", said Trump's cabinet"
17
@Jane
- and yet Ivanka (like the whole family) makes deals (that we know of, yet there might be so many other backroom ones) with China.
Do you not think that China (a totalitarian) state does not do the same on daily basis ?
Which is worse ?
1
The horrors of Nazi Germany. Slavery in the American South. Forced separation of parents and children at America’s borders in the 21st century. The president’s Chief of Staff John Kelly saying that the children will be taken care of – “or whatever”. Mimicking a disabled child by one of the president’s staunchest supporters and best friends. An indifferent Republican Party that couldn’t care less about the suffering of immigrant families. America’s shame is that she can now be mentioned in the same breath as Nazi Germany and shares more in common with Hitler's Germany than the America we used to know.
72
I agree with Mr. Kristoff. When I heard about the separation of immigrant parents from their offspring, the first thing I thought of was when the Nazis separated parents from their children.
26
Well, now we know how far Trump will go. Left to himself, he will burn the U.S. government—or at any rate what is good about it—to the ground.
We must not let him do it.
26
A long and earnest read into M. Scott Peck's masterpiece "People of the Lie" will convince you will have an evil person in the White House.
9
True Believer: I may read it, but "believe" me, I and millions of others are convinced. Try reading "It Can't Happen Here," by Sinclair Lewis!
1
Very powerful essay, Mr Kristof. The parallel of slavery and of the holocaust are appropriate here. It is unnerving how low we have sunk in these troubling times. What is particularly tragic is that neither parents nor children know where their other family members are. Certainly there is no cell phone communication between mother and three-year-old, nor between 13 yr-old and father. And are siblings of different sexes and ages also separated?
"...fits neatly into the annals of barbarism." Yes, indeed!
When will the families be united again, now that the Trumpet has displayed his signature to the world?
God bless America, from sea to shining sea.
22
And what is the complementary/historical picture here?
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2018/06/20/obama-reminds-tru...
And beneath all of that are the very difficult questions we face with regards to illegal immigration.
A more subtle but significant question is when is it a net positive to immigrate (even legally) to the U.S.? I work with refugees (who came here legally) but it very difficult, in particular as an adult, to be comfortable in another country/culture. Journalists should investigate this if only to encourage some healthy doubt into those trying to move here.
This column is so moving and there are so many examples of this type of cruelty that not all could be included. But we should not omit examples of parent child separation in the Native American tribes to attend schools designed to isolate children from their own cultures.
158
Yes—it's a huge and glaring omission.
1
In order to solve the problem of Central American immigration, we need to solve the problem of violence in these countries …. which we created in large part thanks to our useless war on drugs. But don't blame the victims for trying to save their lives or those of their children.
And yes, we are now stopping the practice of seizing the children at the border, and therefore not separating the families, who will now go into indefinite detention.
We therefore have not taken the road to Theresienstadt (or worse). But we are certainly on the road to Manzanar.
82
@John
I was going to comment meself, but then I read your post and you encapsulated exactly what I wanted to say, so well done. I would only had that we must make the people (all) responsible for these actions and do so at the ballot box.
This cannot stand.
21
Solving the problem should not be our objective; keeping it outside the US should be.
1
@QED
Fair enough. Then you are in favor of non-American involvement in South American governments. No more meddling, and no more covert ops. No more ''war on drugs'' and no more propaganda to sway those citizens from voting in their own best interests. No more taking away of their resources and no more demanding anything of them when America hypocritically does the same.
This is good to hear.
The issue that concerns me is there is NO serious discussion about what can be done in the central American countries where MOST of the undocumented are from, to make those countries safe, so their citizens don't feel they have any other choice but to flee.
Nicholas Kristof I think many many taxpaying Americans are also asking what about our homeless veterans, poor elderly, poor working class Americans who need help?
9
1) to help Central Americans at home, stop the NRA-enabled profiteering gun running
https://www.thetrace.org/2017/05/gun-trafficking-central-america-immigra...
2) "what about our homeless veterans, poor elderly, poor working class Americans who need help".
--The Democrats will help them once they are allowed to repair the damage done by Republicans. there was a lot of money the Republicans gave away to multimillionaires and billionaires in their tax bill that could be used to help the people you mention. The Republicans don't care--their next step is to destroy Social Security and Medicare.
--many of the elderly poor who need help are being helped by immigrant caregivers.
20
@Lynn
If government(s) around the world acted as they were intended, as by the people and for the people, then there would be absolutely no need for charity. You are absolutely correct in that Liberals will again need to clean up a republican mess. (especially on point 2)
I would only add that there should be a guaranteed minimum income for all.
Mr President has suggested cutting off the aid we do send there now.
1
What we have discovered over the last few weeks is truly obscene.
Although Trump has retreated somewhat from his original stance, more than 2,300 children who have been separated from their parents will not be immediately reunited with them, as recently reported here in the NYT
Not only will no effort be made, but in most cases no effort can be made, because ICE does not track the whereabouts of separated children adequately and parents whose children are taken from them are not told how to find them or reunify with them.
THEY SIMPLY DO NOT KNOW WHERE THESE CHILDREN ARE. People deserve jail time for this, at the very least.
343
These kids are not lost at all -- you are mixing this up with stories from the OBAMA era, where 1400 children were RELEASED and not tracked, and disappeared into the greater illegal communities around the USA.
1
I really don’t like Donald Trump,
He’s an awful pain in the rump,
Believes he is smart,
A thinker apart,
Non-white immigrants he would dump.
By instinct he makes his decisions,
Impacted by gross imprecisions,
He acts from the gut,
And all thought free but
With results not what he envisions.
A return to the past he’s depicted,
The rest of the world he’s evicted,
His pleasures are carnal,
The payments gosh darnal,
His "fixer" is rarely restricted.
The chutzpah of Rudy he’s tapped,
Who for Trump’s survival is apt,
For eons has been,
Redolent with sin,
Conspiracy theories unwrapped.
36
Larry, your poetic chops are impressive and, in the past, I’ve enjoyed your verses. Having said that, this issue is so sad, so obscene, so frightening that light-hearted poesy just doesn’t feel right.
6
good work here Mr Kristof, showing us these comparable situations from the past, which have always been deplored, but what is the alternative?
What can we do to change this situation?
Sure, stop separating parents and children, but what about the future?
With increased pressures upon resources among our Central American neighbors, corrupt mafias in control and justice unavailable, these refugees are not going to disappear overnight.
We need to intervene and change the conditions within these countries so that their people will not be forced to seek refuge elsewhere.
There is ample reason here to engage.
A wall will never work, and unless we address the conditions at the root of this problem it will continue to afflict us here at home.
58
We can become human first, American next, and find ways and measures, viable solutions to help our neighbors who are not as fortunate as us.
15
@ Bruce:
I agree that intervening appropriately in these underdeveloped nations would produce positive results. But to do so “appropriately” will require a more global perspective, genuine good will, and serious discussions and planning - three things that will never happen under this Trump regime.
3
Bruce asks "What can we do to change this situation?"
The solution has been clear for a dozen years: We can pass the "Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act" ("McCain-Kennedy Bill," S. 1033) introduced in the United States Senate on May 12, 2005.
The solution is clear and present. The American people want the problem solved. But many in congress DON'T WANT the problem solved.
Trump is a man who issued an executive order to fix a problem of his own making: that order holds in place the separation of more than 2,000 children from their families, as tales emerge of children being permanently lost by the system, and the threat of cognitive/emotional/psychological damage through neuro-chemical imbalances increases daily.
Law is inflated as an absolute and a substitute for justice; law is stripped of restraint, placed above humanity and the context and circumstances of the "crime" (for over 90% a first offense misdemeanor!). The humane violations os family as a sacred universal institution are omitted by a callousness that revels in cruelty and that implicitly argues for a punishment that doesn't not fit the crime nor is bound by humane restraint, choosing to blame victims wholly for the excesses perpetrated by the government.
Trump has replaced justice with excessive power and privilege, adorned as care and political coin.
42
Perhaps in some perverse way this sinister, cruel practice will highlight the obvious need to seriously address immigration reform, but this is not the president who cares about it, just as he cares little about tax reform, foreign policy, infrastructure, climate control, health care, on and on. Real immigration reform should start with reaching out to Central American Countries and addressing the horrific conditions which propel these families to take life altering and life threatening decisions to leave places where daily life is life threatening. Where is an immigration policy which is planful and, over time, set goals and objectives? Not the knee-jerk rants and ravings of a cruel, sinister and impulsive tyrant who sees building a wall, promises zero tolerance for illegal entry but in the end accomplishes nothing positive or productive... or maybe, in his simple mind and in the cruel comments of cowardly Sessions and Miller, separating children from their parents will be a real deterrent, just the same as water boarding was supposed to be a humane and productive interrogation intervention, yup POTUS supported this as well. No support here for illegal entry but condemnation and scorn for a president who, despite his lying assertions to the contrary, allowed the flagrant illegal abuse of children on his watch while the world observed.
47
A lot of people support a stronger border, and have no problem with these people being turned away. This is our country. We're within our rights to say who comes in, and I have no problem with us turning these people away and telling them to pick up all the trash they left on their way back. Furthermore, we have let so many people in from this region over the past few decades (and so much money to be let out in remittances) that our southern neighbors really have no right to be upset about anything - it's time for them to fix their problems, starting with the Central American math that says if you are unemployed you can afford to have 10 children.
However, this is the dilemma that Trump voters (of which I am not one) need to contemplate: The nuance of policy matters - a lot! And the temperament and humanity of the executive matters almost as much in executing that policy. These people could have been turned away, kept with their children, and in ways that didn't generate this kind of uproar. Mexico could have been diplomatically enlisted to do its part now that its decades-long immigration to the US has resulted in an economy there that can support others. All kinds of nuance could have been used to make this work smoothly.
But, yet again, simple-minded voters support a simple-minded policy to be executed by a simpleton. Policy is sometimes hard, and citizens that support policy need to be less angry and more informed.
44
Yes indeed, more informed, and that would include your views on who we are as Americans. Simplistic characterizations and assumptions of whole ethnic groups of human beings is part of the problem. The interference of the U.S. in the politics and government of many of these countries, unfair trade agreements that favor the U.S., the voracious appetite for drugs in the U.S. have all contributed to the dangers and violence these people seek to escape from. See the connections and perhaps you will not be so quick to judge the victims. Policy is hard and the determinants are complex. Look deeper before condemning others to poverty and death. And to "make this work smoothly (for who?", we need to look at the underlying factors and address the root causes.
1
The big question is who decided where the border should be and how was it decided.
A couple of centuries ago people moved freely back and forth over the Rio Grande.
Also consider that the river is not called Big River. Neither name is in the language spoken by the people who once crossed the river freely.
This is cruel beyond belief! My heart breaks for these families and for our country in general. History is repeating itself right before our eyes. I am horrified that there is not more being done to stop it. My husband's great-grandparents were turned away from the US border in February 1942 and ultimately died in Auschwitz. I cried as I read this column today. I have 5 children. I ache to think of the agony those families being separated are feeling. We cannot let Trump brings us down and destroy all the best that America is and has been. Please help us know how to put a stop to this cruelty.
141
Yet more poignant and devastating reminders of the cruelty toward "the Other" by the most inhuman of the powerful and corrupt of soul. Yes, perhaps this ruthlessness of Trump does not rank with the Holocaust and slavery. But it is all relative, isn't it? Have we not learned from past atrocities? Is not history a lesson of morality as well as dates and facts?
Let us think back at Mr. Trump's escalating maneuvers against the most vulnerable: Muslim prejudice, Puerto Rico, defense of gun violence against innocent Americans, the chipping away at the ACA, the determination to destroy our environment for the sake of the greedy and corrupt. And now this...children, toddlers, infants. People, this president is descending into madness unparalleled in this nation during my 70 years of life. Before our eyes, in one form or another he is killing the principles of a just and compassionate democracy. And this nation to date is letting it happen...
135
The seniors in our society have live through the Apex of good a President can do. We have seen the benefits of the Democracy. We have seen the benefits of the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson, administrations. Both Democrats and Republicans tried to make the world and especially America the land of better angels among us. The presidents since those I mentioned continued to keep America on the path of freedom. But the Trump administration has ended the streak. He has certainly not done anything to MAGA, but instead has made us look foolish and greedy and now Evil! Protest and Resist! Rekindle our Light to the World! Vote in Nov.
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It's the callousness of the policy and the fact that, unlike what we thought centuries ago, we now know how these separations hurt children and parents. A two year old is dependent upon her parents for life, love, and her sense of safety. The parents need the two year old too. It's one thing to lose a parent to accident or illness. There are things in place to help a child deal with that. But to be taken from a parent, even a bad parent, is a horrific experience for any child.
Trump and his minions seem to forget that the word humanity includes every human being on the planet. Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Christians, Africans, Arabs, Hispanics are human. The situation at the border is not one that calls for more barbarism. It calls for decency, courtesy, diplomacy, and a resolution that isn't sending people back to the horrors they left. It doesn't require whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment in a country composed of immigrant descendants. Requesting asylum is not a criminal act. Since there are businesses that knowingly hire undocumented immigrants perhaps they should be forced to sponsor them. Maybe then they'd think twice.
For a country that is composed of the descendants of immigrants American politicians are surprisingly intolerant of them. Trump himself is not far removed from his immigrant ancestors. His wife is an immigrant.
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Trump's own mother immigrated from Ireland.
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These examples leave me crying.
What happened to the Republican Party that 58% of them actually approve ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them -- even babies and toddlers -- in cages and detention centers?
I do not think Republicans are inherently cruel, or at least, they did not use to be. But there has been some deep corruption of the spirit, some adoption of the most malevolent forms of bigotry, particularly since the rise of Trump.
Pres. Lincoln once said, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is not democracy."
There is something soul destroying when you support atrocities or even when you are indifferent to them. This is inhumane and cruel. Especially when they are happening now. In America. To thousands of innocent children.
Vote all Republicans out of office. They are unrecognizable now as the Party of Lincoln.
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I really bristle when people refer to the Republican Party as "the party of Lincoln". Ask yourself, if Lincoln was alive today, would he want to be a member of this party? Would the party want anything to do with Lincoln?
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When children were taken from parents for the "unforgivable crime" of seeking asylum in these United States, the current administration thought Americans wouldn't care about what Trump characterized as "vermin" coming across our borders. Thank goodness his policy is backfiring. But Trump still has many tricks up his sleeve.
As my 88 year old mother and I watched the noon news today, she said that she felt like Trump wasn't really a president to our nation anymore, except to the small percentage of voters who stick with him -- his base. Everyone else is just waiting for him to leave. The sooner the better.
I thought that if the more morally upright party could get a majority this November in both the House and Senate, then impeachment is a real possibility. Before, I had always thought it would be premature, but now I don't.
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Don’t let your guard down. The next round may be worse. They are allowed to keep children in these new Family prisons upnto 20 days. No one knows what will happen at the 20 day mark. Will he get a waiver so that families can be imprisoned indefinitely? Or will he split them up again at that point.
Also, they have made clear that they will not be reuniting the 2300 children already taken immediately. My personal opinion is that they are not doing so because they don’t have a mechanism by which they can match parent and child.
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What cruel about this is how these migrant families are being used as pawns to serve the political ends of both Republicans and Democrats. The Trump administration attempted to use this situation to force Congress to act but the our representatives are beyond shame. The Republicans can't agree on what would constitute amnesty for undocumented immigrants and are therefore unable to achieve consensus within the party. Meanwhile, our 'heartbroken' Democrats have zero incentive to solve the problem prior to the midterms. Trump's immigration policies are far more useful to them as a cudgel with which to beat up Republicans in the upcoming election. Who's are biggest losers in this mess - families trapped at the border, separated or not and our reputation as a refuge for the dispossessed.
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As a technology person, and one who works on modernizing systems in DC, I'm really afraid for these families.
IF there was some sort of system in place to help manage the borders, if there was something to help track and manage all the people coming in and out of the country effectively then we wouldn't not have a border crisis! The very fact that we have such a crisis tells me there's nothing adequate in place. And we could have a smart system for a tiny fraction of the cost of a physical wall.
It's so frustrating watching politicians kick immigration around like it's some game instead of OWNING this problem. I'm reading, in another NYTimes article how contractors are making a fortune warehousing these kids. Convenient huh? For all that money we are wasting we could have actual solutions. But no.
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Please write an Op Ed about it. People get distracted and assume that the logistics to get everything tracked are magic. Only when you are actually building systems for things to work, you realize how easy it is to fall in the cracks. Usually it is just a bad product, but these are lives that are being destroyed in the name of America.
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If the IRS can track my earnings for over 50 years, from age 16 till present (yes, my mother got me 'working papers' @age 16), yes, we all know this is possible.
This is about priorities, as usual.
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