By Michelle Goldberg
Over the last few days, stories of bureaucratic sadism have poured forth from America’s southern border. The Associated Press described a Texas warehouse where “hundreds of children wait in a series of cages” with up to 20 people inside. The New York Times reported on a mother deported to Guatemala without her 8-year-old son. In The Washington Post, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics described a shelter for toddlers where staffers aren’t allowed to hug or hold the bereft children. ProPublica obtained a recording of small children wailing for their parents in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, while a Border Patrol agent joked, “We’ve got an orchestra here.”
As outrage has built nationally, several people associated with the White House stepped forward to dissemble. Kirstjen Nielsen, head of the Department of Homeland Security, sent out a series of tweets denying that the administration’s policy was in fact the administration’s policy. “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period,” she lied.
Melania Trump’s spokeswoman put out a slippery statement distancing the first lady from the president’s actions and sowing confusion about their cause. “Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform,” the statement said, as if her husband were not responsible for the separations.
On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, claimed that “nobody” in the administration likes the policy. “You saw the president on camera, that he wants this to end,” she said.
It’s hard to tell if these women are engaged in deliberate gaslighting or frantic reputation maintenance. Perhaps Nielsen is worried about her post-White House prospects now that she’s best known for the systematic traumatization of children. Maybe Melania Trump realizes that being the trophy wife of a child-torturer is bad for her brand. (#BeBest!) Conway, whose husband has already staked out a position as a Trump critic, may think she has a road back into decent society when this Grand Guignol regime finally ends.
But no one should be able to squirm out of admitting that the evil practice of family separation is Donald Trump’s doing, abetted by everyone who abets him. Indeed, part of the madness of this moment is that while some Trump apologists — as well as Trump himself — deny their role in tearing families apart, others in the administration boldly own it. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry, period,” Trump’s senior policy adviser Stephen Miller told The Times.
Some of the president’s defenders insist he’s bound by a legal settlement mandating that children be held in the least restrictive setting possible. The only alternative to the current policy, they say, is what they call “catch and release,” a dehumanizing term borrowed from fishing to suggest that migrant families are simply being let go.
Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, dispatched this argument in a Facebook post on Monday. “The administration’s decision to separate families is a new, discretionary choice. Anyone saying that their hands are tied or that the only conceivable way to fix the problem of catch-and-release is to rip families apart is flat wrong,” he wrote. Some in the administration, he added, “have decided that this cruel policy increases their legislative leverage.”
The administration’s justifications and denials are meant to obscure that fact. Consider Nielsen’s suggestion, during a speech on Monday, that the administration is worried about child smuggling: “We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are, in fact, a family.”
The government has made this argument before, in one of the first family separation cases to go to court. Last November, a Congolese woman known in court filings as Ms. L and her then 6-year-old daughter arrived at a port of entry near San Diego, presented themselves to border agents and asked for asylum. Officers separated them — according to a lawsuit, Ms. L could hear her daughter in the next room, screaming — and the girl was sent to Chicago while her mother was held in California. When the A.C.L.U. sued on Ms. L’s behalf, officials claimed they’d taken the girl because Ms. L couldn’t prove she was her parent. The judge in the case ordered a DNA test, which quickly demonstrated Ms. L’s relationship to her daughter. (In March, they were finally reunited.)
“The truth is they’ve been doing this all along for deterrence purposes, as sometimes they boldly said in the press,” Lee Gelernt, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who argued the case, told me. “But when confronted in a federal lawsuit, they tried to retroactively justify it by saying they couldn’t figure out whether it was the mother.” It’s hard to know who’s worse — the sociopaths like Miller who glory in the administration’s cruelty, or those who are abashed enough to lie about the filthy thing they’re part of, but not to do anything else.
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