Now That Family Separations Have Got Your Attention…
Written by Megan Carney and Ricardo Gomez
The cruel and inhuman separation of more than 2,000 children from their parents by U.S. border officials during the past few weeks has provoked an unprecedented level of outrage and scrutiny by the general public. While there is no ICT solution to this human and policy tragedy (you may wonder why we want to post this story on the HCCxB site, bear with us), we note how even basic information resources and technologies are being denied, exacerbating, rather than helping to alleviate negative impacts. There have been rallies and protests organized in the name of a National Week of Action, crowdfunding campaigns to support the reunification of families, and open letters from scholars of all disciplines calling for an immediate halting of policies that separate families. Many families have not yet been reunited, despite court-imposed deadlines. Information and technology obstacles such as giving parents an 800 number with endless phone trees and requirement to leave call-back numbers (which parents still in detention cannot offer), ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) databases that mix up the compound last names commonly used in Latin America or that mismatch migrants and children who don’t say or correctly spell their full name, and requirements for fingerprinting and background checks for all adults at the households where children are to live, are not technical glitches: they all highlight the lack of political will to find real solutions on the part of the administration.
As in the past, what happens at the border is often made a spectacle. While we greatly appreciate that the suffering of the many asylum-seekers arriving to the U.S.-Mexico border has garnered widespread media attention and emboldened public protest, we need to realize that these policies are not new. We need to move beyond the current spectacle at the border to extend our empathy to all who have suffered from the unreasonably harsh and destructive monster of current U.S. immigration policy. While abhorrent, the Zero Tolerance policy does not represent anything new. It is the most recent iteration of restrictive immigration policies and enforcement practices that have separated young children from their parents for decades. Studies of the children of immigrants have underscored the deleterious and enduring effects not just of the traumatic experience of being ripped from one’s parent in cases of detention and deportation, but of the looming threat of this experience on the psychosocial wellbeing of these youth. The US system of immigrant detention is disconcerting for the health both of children locked inside of it and the millions of young people feeling its ripple effects from the outside. It is reminiscent of the forceful family separations of Native Americans, and of the detention of Japanese Americans, among other egregious racist practices from the recent past. And the failure to deploy effective information and technology tools to actually help with solutions was just as familiar to Native Americans and to Japanese Americans then as it is to immigrant families facing family separations today.
We are sickened by the cries of children and babies being torn from their caregivers as they arrive to the U.S. seeking asylum or economic opportunity, or by the lines of asylum seekers who are made to wait for days outside ports of entry in the hopes of a credible fear hearing, the first step in the asylum process. We just witnessed one such line, in Nogales, Arizona, where about eight families, with six kids between one and four, had been waiting for days to be called in for a hearing. They sat on the floor in over 105 degree heat (over 40 C); some had been waiting there for days. This is a far cry from the welcome and refuge our fellow humans deserve as they flee the everyday violence and abject poverty that render survival nearly impossible. We have been equally sickened by the apprehension of thousands of undocumented individuals across our country whose lives have been upended by the U.S immigration regime. As we’ve come to learn first-hand in our research, these individuals will be detained for months or even years only to then be sentenced to deportation. The ruthless actions of ICE have left children orphaned, impoverished families who can no longer afford the basic necessities of life, and stoked chronic fear and anxiety within households and communities about the perpetual threat of deportation.
The U.S. immigrant detention system imprisons around 30,000 individuals on any given day, ensuring healthy profits to the private prison contractors who oversee it. We pay for this system with our tax dollars. As a privatized system, it is subject to barely any governmental oversight. Human rights’ violations persist unabetted within this context. Rather than helping with solutions, ICT use is helping exacerbate the problem. The stories of the tens of thousands of families enduring the ongoing effects of family separation through detention and deportation of a loved one and living amongst us across all the US are just as newsworthy as those currently coming from the border. We need to look at the bigger picture of the dysfunctional, unjust immigration system, not just the current spectacle at the border, and demand the humane, inclusive immigration system that this country deserves.
Megan A. Carney is Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Ricardo Gomez is Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington.
