“At a bare minimum, let’s hold those who commit wicked deeds in our names and with our tax dollars accountable in the 2020 election”
Stunning. During the Senate Judiciary Hearings, Amy Coney Barrett refused to denounce Trump’s family separation policy that has ripped more than 5,500 children away from their families, some never to be returned. In response to Sen. Cory Booker’s question on the morality of the policy, she said, “That’s a matter of hot political debate in which I can’t express a view or be drawn into as a judge.” State-sponsored child kidnapping is a matter of “hot political debate” and not a matter of moral outrage for a presumptive Supreme Court justice?
In a column today in the New York Times, Jennifer Senior writes about the moral stain left by the policy. She excoriates Rod Rosenstein for going along with the policy because he was following orders. As Senior writes, “Separating families was the objective of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, not a byproduct. The children were the targets of the policy, not collateral damage.”
Frank Wilkinson has a new Bloomberg column that questions whether anyone in power will be held accountable for this deliberately cruel policy. He writes:
…the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant parents from their children, including infants, some of whom were lost for months or more, was always intended to be brutal. Anyone who has had a child, or been a child, intuitively understands how depraved the policy was. Experts predict that victims will suffer trauma and repercussions for the remainder of their lives. Yet the officials who approved and executed this policy seem unlikely to suffer legal consequences.
Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
The separation of children from their parents in a deliberate attempt to punish their parents for seeking freedom and safety will go down as one of our nation’s worst human rights atrocities.
Future generations will look back and ask how this nation, one that traditionally prides itself in welcoming refugees and immigrants and believes in the sanctity of the family, inflicted torture on little children and unthinkable cruetly on their parents in the name of keeping them out of America. They will also ask, if it comes to be, why no one held accountable for these moral crimes.
Trump and his enablers have assaulted our democracy and our sense of fair play in so many ways that it seems to all run together. But the separation of children from their parents to inflict deliberate pain and suffering on little kids and young parents stands out. It cuts to the core of how we think of ourselves. It obliterates boundaries that we set for ourselves and for others. It puts us in the company of the world’s worst dictators and cruelest human rights violators.
History will surely hold all of us accountable. But will our generation find ways to hold the authors and implementers of these vicious acts accountable? At a bare minimum, let’s hold those who commit wicked deeds in our names and with our tax dollars accountable in the 2020 election. In addition, let’s find ways to ensure that these evildoers never get to comfortably reenter polite society again.
