This week, we learned the administration has eliminated a protection that allows migrant families not to be deported while receiving life-saving medical treatments; last Wednesday, we learned that the administration would like to indefinitely detain migrant families who cross the border illegally. These are the latest in a long U.S. tradition of government policies and strategies that attack certain families. We have also seen evidence of the intent and effect of such practices throughout the history of the world and the weakening effect it has on societies as a whole.
Let me share a few examples. Students of American history know that our system of government is indebted to the Romans for their system of checks, balances and separate branches of government. But the United States followed the example of ancient Rome in another, much more sinister practice, one that destroyed both individuals and families: the practice of slavery.
In both the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, slavery was so widespread that it is estimated that more than one-third of Italy’s population was enslaved; the American system of violent chattel slavery enslaved one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies. Roman law held that “servus non habet personam (“a slave has no persona”). He has no personality. He does not own his body; he has no ancestors, no name, no cognomen (nicknames passed down from father to son), no goods of his own” (Mauss, 1979, Sociology and psychology. Essays, p. 81). Similarly, Nikole Hannah-Jones says in the “1619 Project” on American slavery currently running in The New York Times, “Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.”
Slavery’s attack on individual rights coexisted with an attack on the rights and well-being of families. As the historian Henrik Mouristen writes of slave families in ancient Rome, “Masters could at any time decide to disregard family ties.... (T)he slave family was suspended in a state of existential insecurity” (“The Families of Roman Slaves and Freedmen,” p. 139). Hannah-Jones reminds us that in the U.S., “Enslaved people could not legally marry ... (and) had no claim to their own children, who could be bought, sold and traded away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts that advertised ‘Negroes for Sale.’ Enslavers and the courts did not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins.” Not only did the individual “not own his body,” but he or she could, at the caprice of another, be denied any and all familial connections — ancestors, family, even those tender parent-to-child cognomens.
The coming of Christianity to the Roman Empire slowly but eventually led to changes in the law, and 35 years before the fall of the western portion of the Roman Empire, Theodosius II finally codified laws that prevented the separation of slave families. Likewise, as a Christian today, I believe that the family is ordained of God and that this “state of existential insecurity” is anathema to the nature and the purpose of families. Yet, instead of remembering that Christianity should stand up for families, Christian nationalism and white-supremacist extremism attack families (too many of the El Paso shooting victims were shot next to a spouse or shielding a family member) and support our administration’s attack on families — if those families are brown or black rather than white. Instead of strengthening families, these attitudes assault the family’s solemn responsibility to love, care for and protect its members.
It is horrifying that the American government — my country’s government — has chosen to disregard family ties and to leave asylee and immigrant families “suspended in a state of existential insecurity.” Children in Mississippi went off to their first day of school and instead of being scooped up by parents’ warm arms at the end of the day, were left to the graces of neighbors and Good Samaritans to comfort them when family had vanished at the end of the day. The administration has proposed ending or severely limiting family-based migration policies, an attempt to erode family ties and increase the insecurity experienced by families in transition.
Families will be further besieged if the decades-old Flores agreement is replaced, removing limits on how long the government can hold migrant children in custody and mandating the level of care they must receive. Now, severely ill immigrants, including children with cystic fibrosis and cancer, are facing deportation with the revocation of “medical deferred action” allowing immigrants to remain in the country legally, receive Medicaid and work while they receive treatment for dire health conditions. Existential insecurity indeed.
Families belong together, and we must do all that we can to uphold and strengthen families. If we add to a “suspen(sion) in a state of existential insecurity,” we contribute to the disintegration of the family. May it not be so. Instead, may we remember that these individuals and these families have names, ancestors, personalities, hopes, fears. They too are part of the family of God, our brothers and our sisters.
Lisa Rampton Halverson is the senior director of education for Mormon Women for Ethical Government. She is an adjunct instructor for Brigham Young University teaching courses in world history and education.