Although there has yet been no official announcement, media have reported that Homeland Security’s plans for a Salt Lake City warehouse to collect, store, traffic and deport undocumented persons is at least temporarily on hold. But even if the proposed detention warehouse will not be used, the ongoing trauma of ICE tactics persists.
The tactic of suddenly grabbing our neighbors and friends off the street or from their workplace, with masked men abducting and disappearing them, is tragic, cruel and clearly aimed at instilling fear and terror throughout our community. This cruelty extends to their families and is especially injurious to their children.
As parents we have all experienced that terrible sudden panic in the grocery store when our child disappears even for an instant. Our breath stops, our heart races, our thoughts are scrambled and for a moment we are frozen in place. Relief of that terror only arrives when we can find and clutch our wandering toddler. ICE is now using that universal terror and a parent’s primal fear of losing a child — deliberately weaponizing the threat of child separation — to dissuade people from coming to or staying in our country.
Children are innocent victims of ICE’s draconian practice of removing a parent. Children are completely dependent on their parents for comfort, protection, emotional regulation and the healing and understanding of any shock or injury.
The separation of a parent — the sudden removal of the child’s main emotional support — injures the child in ways that can be worse than physical or sexual abuse. Yes, children can be permanently emotionally scarred by physical or sexual abuse, and can have lifelong difficulties from that abuse. But most children who suffer those abuses still have a parent to comfort them, to reestablish their sense of safety and self-worth and to help them begin to heal. The abduction of their parent leaves the child bereft of that aid and comfort, alone to deal with their trauma.
As of May, the Brookings Institute calculated that more than 200,000 children have lost a mother, a father or both to ICE roundups. Of these children, 145,000 are American citizens. More than a third (36%) of these children are under age 6, when the emotional damage is the worst. Less than 5% of these devastated children have been tracked by ICE, offered services or referred to child welfare services. For all ICE knows (or cares) these children just disappear into the community to be hopefully cared for by family, neighbors or older siblings.
The current administration claims to be pro-life and pro-family, and loudly decries pedophilia, but their perverse tactics are harming children worse than child sexual abuse. More than 200,000 children have already been emotionally scarred. Parent-child separation is uncivilized cruelty and must be stopped. In punishing parents for the nonviolent crime of just being in the “wrong” place without permission (equivalent to the misdemeanors of trespass or jaywalking) our government has stooped to using nonjudicial terrorist tactics, instilling fear and terror in all of us. They must be stopped.