For some, America is the land of milk and honey. The land of the free, the land of opportunities, the land where a dish washer can become a millionaire. One shouldn’t be surprised that a country with this reputation attracts people from all over the world… and especially from countries that may not offer the same opportunities.
The United States have had a problem with illegal immigration for the past decades: Over 44million foreign born‑people live in the US and hundreds of thousands try to enter each year. Some of them legally, others… less so. By “virtue” of only having two external borders and one of them being to a country with a similar standard of living, immigrants crossing into the US from Mexico and Central America have historically had an image problem…
Under the old US “Catch & Release” policy, most immigrants who had been caught crossing the Mexican border to the US illegally were interviewed, released and asked to return again for another hearing (only around 20percent of immigrants entering the US were held while waiting for this hearing). Most of those who were released were perceived to be of low-risk of fleeing, such as families with children. But despite being perceived low-risk, the majority of those released never actually came back for the hearing (and why would they – after all, they managed to enter the US and chances are, were not gonna get caught…).
As a result, “Catch & Release” policies were deemed largely ineffective in reducing illegal immigration and if anything, may have acted as an incentive for more immigrants to come. After all – an 80 to 20 chance of being able to stay in the country, legally or not, is not too bad. The design of the “Catch & Release” policy may even have created further incentives for families to make the journey to the US together (as compared to only men going) in order to be classified as low-risk and released until the hearing.
Following up on election promises to curb illegal immigration, Donald Trump in April decided that he had enough and ended “Catch & Release” in favour of a “Zero Tolerance” policy. Under this new policy, every migrant who enters the US illegally, will be detained in a detention centre and trialled for violating the entry laws of the US. Now, a formal hearing and process can easily take several months, which means that under the new “Zero Tolerance” policy, the Government needs to detain thousands of people for prolonged periods of time.
“Unfortunately”, US law dictates that children who enter the United States (alone or with their families) cannot be held in detention centres for longer than 21 days and need to be relocated to more suitable facilities, which provide more child-friendly housing and education. While the US has some of these facilities, it has by no means enough to house thousands of children together with their parents. By abandoning “Catch & Release” and enforcing a “Zero Tolerance” policy, the Trump administration was forced to separate families… and this is where the current shit-storm started.
Pictures of children in cages (some of these were old pictures from the times of the Obama administration) and reports of children being drugged emerged, first ladies flew to the rescue wearing strangely mixed-message clothing and the homeland secretary was booed out of her dinner at (did it really have to be?) a Mexican restaurant.
PS: When reading about this topic, I came across a phenomenon that started in 2012: the rapid influx of “unaccompanied minors” aka… children. Driven away by poverty, gang and drug violence and the hope for reunifications with relatives and a better life, thousands of children from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador started to arrive at the American border. The Obama administration – after temporarily detaining children at shelters and detention centres - tried to place these children with sponsors while they waited for their immigration hearings. Many of these released minors (70 percent of whom were teenage boys), did not stay with their sponsors and didn’t show up for their hearings either. Many probably just ran away to try their luck, but there are also stories of sponsors with criminal history and human traffickers forcing children into slave labour and prostitution…
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