US president Donald Trump ‘erased entire families’ as part of his racist, fascist war on millions of legally-settled immigrants – during his first term as president, before his current escalation that has set thousands of rogue ‘ICE’ officers on multicultural communities, put troops on the streets of US cities to suppress protest and criminalised protest against his fascism as ‘terrorism’.

Trump: erasing entire families

The American Immigration Council has just released a report detailing thousands of new government records about Trump’s 2018 ‘family separation policy’. It shows a systematic attempt not just to deport immigrants – specifically targeting those from Central and South America – but to obliterate their family units. It shows that:

The first Trump regime went far further than its already disgraceful policy of separating families, instead erasing them as legal units by recoding parents separated by immigration enforcement from their children as ‘single adults’ and labelling their children as ‘unaccompanied alien children’ who were then put in shelters to face immigration court hearings alone – many of them still infants.Trump’s system created intentional chaos, with officials admitting data was “corrupt” and grossly inadequate, leaving the number of children separated from their families still unknown – but at least three thousand in a matter of weeks – and the government admitting in court that it is probably impossible to reunite many of them.The regime sent many of the abducted children thousands of miles away from their detained parents to foster this chaos and make separation more likely to be irreversible.The Trump regime used the situation it had created as an excuse for child trafficking – deporting parents, using their absence to sever parental rights and then having ‘orphans’ adopted without their parents’ consent.Officials used the trauma they inflicted on children as deterrence to discourage others from trying to come to the US, showing footage of terrified children to show the cruelties that awaited anyone caught up in the anti-immigrant system.

The report concludes that:

when the policy was in effect, the U.S. government separated thousands of families in a matter of weeks, traumatizing thousands of children and their parents and overwhelming federal prosecutors, courts, and detention facilities—all but guaranteeing that hundreds of children would not be able to be reunited with their parents.

Officials who played key roles in the adoption of the zero-tolerance policy knew it would result in family separations and embraced it. The Trump administration intended to wield family separation as a deterrence method, to stop families from seeking protection in the United States.

The treatment the first Trump regime inflicted on law-abiding immigrant families is horrific enough, but it was a chilling foretaste of a second term in which families are abducted off the streets without warrants, moved thousands of miles and hidden in ‘secret’ detention facilities, deported to torture and slave labour camps – and in which the government has made no secret of its intention to deport even natural-born citizens who oppose it, while it has classified opposition and resistance to its fascism as terrorism.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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