What Is ‘Sad and Disappointing,’ Mr. Cuccinelli, Are Your Policies

Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us to refuse to stay silent in the face of injustice.

Our country, particularly this Administration, is failing children in far too many ways.

This matters and we should not be silent.

Every child, regardless of his or her immigration status, deserves to be protected and kept safe at a minimum. To those who fail children, purposely put them at risk, and cause them harm, there should be outrage and blowback.

We should not be silent.

Our nation should be committed to and abiding by a very simple “best interest of the child” standard when it comes to public policies that impact children — all children. Instead, our public policies far too often ignore, or worse, purposely harm them.

This month is the one-year anniversary of the death of Jakelin Caal Maquín and last week a disturbing video emerged demonstrating the failure of Border Patrol agents to appropriately care for Carlos Hernandez Vásquez, who tragically died in his detention cell in May due to the failure of the Border Patrol to monitor and address his deteriorating medical condition. The video does not match the account of the Border Patrol as to the circumstances of his death.

After a decade in which no migrant children died at the hands of our government, at least seven children have died in U.S. custody in the past year. Their names are: Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle (10), Jakelin Caal Maquín (7), Felipe Gomez Alonzo (8), Juan de Leon Gutiérrez (16), Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez (2), Mariee Juarez (1), and Carlos Hernandez Vásquez (16).

Say their names. We should not be silent.

These deaths and the harm done to thousands of other children could have and should have been avoided. The Trump Administration was repeatedly warned about the danger and harm to children of their “zero tolerance” policies that has included both family separations and the caging of children. In July 2018, for example, Drs. Scott Allen and Pamela McPherson spoke out as whistleblowers and publicly reported that, after 10 investigations of family detention centers over four years, they had observed “serious compliance issues resulting in harm to children….”

They concluded:

The fundamental flaw of family detention is not just the risk posed by the conditions of confinement — it’s the incarceration of innocent children itself. In our professional opinion, there is no amount of programming that can ameliorate the harms created by the very act of confining children to detention centers. Detention of innocent children should never occur in a civilized society, especially if there are less restrictive options, because the risk of harm to children simply cannot be justified.

As experts in medical and mental health in detention settings, we watched in horror as innocent children were forcibly separated from their parents as the administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy was deployed. In our professional opinion, this was an act of state sponsored child abuse whose specific consequences will significantly threaten the children’s health and safety. The over two thousand innocent children traumatized by that policy now face a lifetime of increased risk of significant physical and mental health consequences including, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and poor physical health. The likely alternative — detention of children with a parent — also poses high risk of harm to children and their families.

They refused to be silent.

Unfortunately, the Trump Administration failed to heed the repeated warnings from numerous observers, including civil servants arguing the “zero tolerance” policy was unlawful and harmful.

The Administration also ignored health professional societies arguing that it would lead to trauma and have devastating consequences to the health and safety of children throughout 2017 and 2018, including from the American Medical Association (AMA), American Psychiatric Association (APA), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) (see here and here), and American College of Physicians (ACP).

Compounding the intention disregard, Trump Administration officials dismissed or ignored the very cries of children and others failed to disclose to Congress and the American people what the policies actually were and the impact they were having. In fact, despite families being ripped apart, parents being deported without their children, and children being scattered across the country in various detention centers being a clear and intentional outcome of their “zero tolerance” policy, Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen publicly declared there was no policy of family separation.

And yet, breaking up families was a choice and was quite purposeful. Consequently, thousands of children were separated from their parents and, compounding the harm, the Trump Administration did so without figuring out how to even track and care for those children despite taking on the role of caregiver. Our government tracks luggage better than the children and parents it has separated and the policy of family separation continues today.

This is all part of a policy agenda that has demonstrated utter disregard and lack of concern about the harm their policies are having on children. At congressional hearings throughout 2018 and 2019 on the topic of their “zero tolerance” policies, Trump officials, including Homeland Security Nielsen said they were unaware as to the concerns raised by pediatricians and other medical professionals about family separations and the traumatic and health impacts on children.

At the conclusion of her question of Secretary Nielsen at this House hearing in March 2019, Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-IL) said:

From what I have heard today, I am not sure if DHS was so negligent that they didn’t know how traumatic family separation was for children or if they knew and did it anyway. But in my opinion, both are unacceptable. Tearing kids and their parents apart like this is immoral, its un-American, and its just plain wrong.

Rep. Underwood is right. It is just plain wrong. It is cruel and immoral.

Instead of addressing these policies that harm children, Secretary Nielsen declared that “children in DHS and HHS custody are being well taken care of.”

They haven’t and we must not be silent about it.

Other Trump Administration officials, irritated that a court decree referred to as the Flores Settlement limits time periods for detention, sets minimum health and safety standards for the treatment of children while in detention, and provides for some accountability and oversight by outside observers, went to court to demand that the basic protections and standards, including access to items like toothbrushes and soap, for children be eliminated. They lost.

Consequently, they issued an administrative rule that attempts to gut the Flores Settlement consent decree, and instead, codify child abuse.

As if all of this isn’t bad enough, other Trump Administration officials sought to minimize concerns about placing children in detention centers by making rather tragic and unfortunate comparisons of child detention centers to “summer camps” when the more apt analogy would be to the internment camps during World War II.

George Takei, who was a child in those internment camps, describes how it feels to be placed in such a detention center or camp. In Foreign Policy, Takei explains:

When a government acts capriciously, especially against a powerless and much-reviled group, it is hard to describe the terror and anxiety. There is nowhere to turn, because the only people with the power to help have trained their guns and dogs upon you. You are without rights, held without charge or trial. The world is upside down, information-less, and indifferent or even hostile to your plight.

As former First Lady Laura Bush writes:

I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.

Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso. These images are eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. We also know that this treatment inflicts trauma; those who have been interned have been twice as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease or die prematurely than those who were not interned.

Takei describes what is needed to end such human rights atrocities. He points out:

America is a great nation but also a fallible one — as prone to great mistakes as are the people who inhabit it. As a survivor of internment camps, I have made it my lifelong mission to work against them being built ever again within our borders.

Although the first camps for border crossers have been built, and are now filling up with innocent children, we have a chance to ensure history does not repeat itself in full, to demonstrate that we have learned from our past and to stand firmly against our worse natures. The internment happened because of fear and hatred, but also because of a failure of political leadership. In 1941, there were few politicians who dared stand up to the internment order. I am hopeful that today there will, should be, must be, far more people who speak up, both among our leaders and the public, and that the future writes the history of our resistance — not, yet again, of our compliance.

We must not be silent.

Sadly, the President does not care about the problems his policies have on children.

White House aide Stephen Miller, who has long promoted white nationalism, obviously isn’t concerned about how all of this impacts children either. His emails both before and inside the Trump Administration demonstrate a shocking, disturbing, and cruel xenophobic agenda.

And then there is Kenneth “Ken” T. Cuccinelli II, whose titles (and I am not kidding) are Senior Official Performing the Duties of Acting Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

His most public action in his role is the decision to stop processing humanitarian requests from unauthorized immigrants for medical deferred action, which is where families with sick members, including children, can seek to remain in the U.S. while family members are under health care treatment. Cuccinelli admitted to be being the person that decided to send denial letters to applicants that said USCIS would “no longer consider deferred action requests….” It called for people to “depart the United States within 33 days of the date of this letter” and led to significant anguish among patients and health professionals about the significant harm this would cause families in treatment for serious medical conditions.

Opponents of such action were not silent and so the policy is now being reconsidered and deportation decisions are on hold or being made on a “discretionary, case-by-case basis.”

As Senior Official Performing the Duties of Acting Deputy Secretary of DHS, Cuccinelli has oversight over many of the harmful policies to the children of immigrants that this Administration has adopted. In that context, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and Cuccinelli ran into each other at a pub before a Gonzaga High School alumni reunion on the eve of Thanksgiving.

O’Malley explained to the Washington Post that he told Cuccinelli “very directly that his ripping of refugee children from their [parents’] arms and putting them in cages on our southwest border was shameful and contrary to every value we hold dear, as Americans, as Christians, as Men for Others, and as human beings.”

How this relates to the Gonzaga reunion is that they both graduated from that D.C.-based Jesuit high school in 1981 and 1986, respectively. O’Malley emphasized that he let Cuccinelli know that “putting refugee immigrant kids in cages [is] certainly not what we were taught by the Jesuits at Gonzaga.”

Cuccinelli complained to Fox News about O’Malley’s criticism of Cuccinelli’s complicity with Trump’s policies to separate migrant families and to cage children. Cuccinelli argued it was “as sad as it was shocking” that O’Malley confronted him.

Cuccinelli added that it was “odd” for O’Malley to raise these issues because “they applied to President Obama’s policies, a fact he clearly did not appreciate me pointing out (without screaming it, btw).”

Rather than defending the indefensible, which would be to actually attempt to defend the Administration’s atrocious immigration policies, Cuccinelli engaged in “whataboutism,” which attempts to discredit an opponent’s position by charging the opposition with the same accusation or something just as egregious without refuting or disproving the original point.

Cuccinelli attempted to do so by arguing that Obama also separated families and caged children. It is akin to a child that failed a test at school and tells his mother “well, I got a ‘F’ but Johnny failed the test too.” It is as if everyone is guilty, then nobody is.

As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer explained a few months ago:

…when those in power are caught abusing that power in ways that are morally indefensible and politically unpopular, they will always seek to turn an argument about oppression into a dispute about manners. The conversation then shifts from the responsibility of the state for the human lives it is destroying to whether those who object to that destruction have exhibited proper etiquette.

Furthermore, Cuccinelli should have used Google before directing his “whataboutism” toward O’Malley because O’Malley repeatedly spoke out on immigration issues during the Obama Administration. As just one example among many, O’Malley was quoted in a Washington Post article entitled “O’Malley, Obama aides spar over unaccompanied immigrant children” back in July 2014:

We are Americans, and we do not return refugee kids who find themselves on our doorstep back into war-torn or famine-racked places where they will face certain death.

O’Malley is right in his criticism of both administrations.

However, as I am sure he would agree, the level of harm directed at children is unparalleled to the policies being promoted by this White House. Thus, what’s truly “sad” and “shocking” is the Administration’s policies toward children rather than O’Malley refusal to be silent in the face of the tragedy and cruelty of those policies toward children.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said:

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting it is really cooperating with it.

In Cuccinelli’s situation, he is not just being a passive acceptor of evil. He is actively promoting and perpetrating policies that do immense harm to children. The harm is callous, atrocious, and extreme. Among other things, the Trump Administration is:

• Separating families seeking asylum at the border
• Failing to keep basic data related to parents and children so they can be reunited after separation
• Caging children in detention centers
• Keeping children in danger in Mexico while awaiting their asylum hearings
• Denying children in custody immunizations against the flu and other communicable diseases
• Taking away medicine from children
• Subjecting children to prescription behavioral drugs without parental or child consent
• Threatening to deport family members of children with life-threatening illnesses
• Having children die in U.S. custody for the first time in decades
• Covering up the deaths of those children
• Denying children basic health and safety protections and proposing to gut basic standards and protections
• Threatening to deport TPS-status parents of children who have lived here their whole lives
• Proposing to end all protections for DREAMers by repealing DACA and putting their lives in limbo and putting them back under threat of deportation to countries they do not know or remember
• Proposing to remove all family members, including citizen children, from housing if one person is an immigrant
• Causing the uninsured rate and hunger to rise for children for the first time in decades in large part due to the Administration’s proposed public charge rule
• Forcing children, including babies and toddlers, to testify in immigration court without legal assistance
• Changing the criteria for asylum to dramatically increase denial rates
• Failing to provide adequate oversight over private contractors
• Threatening to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed in the 14th Amendment in the U.S. Constitution
• Conducting immigration raids that lead to family separation and destroy communities

This week, a number of Catholic leaders came together to mark the one-year anniversary of Jacklyn Caal Maquín’s death in my hometown of El Paso, Texas, and to push for change.

Dominican Sister Quincy Howard, of the Catholic social justice lobby group Network, said:

Such callous and cruel indifference violates basic principles of right and wrong. A child is not a problem to be disposed of or caged; she is a gift from God and must be protected and cherished.

Franciscan Action Network’s executive director, Patrick Carolan, adds:

When children die of illnesses, we feel helpless and mourn their deaths. But when our government enacts policies that deliberately put immigrant children at risk of sickness and even death, we cannot stand by helplessly.

Yes, we mourn the death of little Jakelin on the first anniversary of her death in CBP (Customs and Border Protection) custody, and the deaths of at least five other children in detention. But we must also cry out with righteous anger at cruel policies and work to end detention of children and separation from families.

They will not be silent.

To avoid some of the deaths that have occurred to migrants in government detention centers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that the Administration vaccinate both migrants and Border Patrol agents for the flu. That could have prevented at least three of the deaths of children and possibly more to come. Unfortunately, DHS declined to do so.

In response, a number of doctors from Doctors for Camp Closure volunteered to provide vaccinations to anyone who consented in a migrant detention center in San Ysidro, California. Dr. Mario Mendoza, a retired anesthesiologist, said:

We are doctors. We are against death and we are for humanity. . . They are passively letting children die from influenza, something that can easily be prevented.

Doctors for Camp Closure (@Doc4CampClosure)

DHS refused their offer to vaccinate people in detention centers. Shockingly, here was DHS’s (where Cuccinelli is the Senior Official Performing the Duties of Acting Deputy Secretary) public response to these doctors offering humanitarian medical assistance.

Doubling down on harming people, now DHS is arresting those doctors for their non-violent protests of that decision. The doctors will not remain silent.

The Administration’s actions have reached a point so far beyond “sad” and “disappointing.” So Mr. Cuccinelli, we have reached the point of cruel, outrageous, and dangerous.

Children deserve far better. We must demand it.