Opinion: Mother’s Day Nightmare – Trump again separates families at the border

If Donald Trump, during his first presidential campaign, had promised to tear children away from their parents to keep Mexican and Hispanic families from trying to move to the United States, people would probably laugh at it as an exaggeration.

Take him seriously, his fans said, don’t take him literally.

We know how it ended.

Opinion Explorer

Robin Abkarian

However, it was shocking to hear Trump say Caitlan Collins during Terrible CNN City Hall last week that, if he is re-elected, he would consider restoring this practice.

“When you have a policy like that, people don’t come,” Trump said. “If the family hears that they are going to be separated – they love their family – they don’t come. I know it sounds tough. … We must save our country.”

Not just harsh. This is cruel, inhuman and, in my opinion, criminal.

There is no moral justification for bullying children and their parents, inflicting lifelong emotional trauma on people who, for the most part, are fleeing violence and poverty and are trying to improve life for themselves and their children.

What is the American Dream, if not this?

Trump’s reckless willingness to emotionally torment families is just one of many reasons why we can’t let him get close to the White House again.

I really didn’t want to spend Mother’s Day thinking or writing about Trump.

I wanted to write about the extraordinary bond between mothers and children. This is not a blow to the fathers, trust me. But there’s a reason why fairy tales—stories that touch on our deepest fears of loss and abandonment—so often involve the absence of a mother. This is the primary wound. And it’s not just fairy tales. All the novels I’ve read lately deal with the resonant theme of the loss of a mother.

Two of them “School for Good Mothers” Jessamine Chan and “Our Lost Hearts” Celeste Ng, it takes place in dystopian American societies where children are used as clubs against their parents – in this case, mothers.

In Chan’s novel, a depressed, sleep-deprived single mother whose husband left her for his younger lover is sent to a sort of re-education camp for leaving her little one alone for a couple of hours. She is held to impossible standards and forced to take bizarre parenting tests with a robot baby, and her future as a state-approved mother does not look bright.

In Ng’s novel, a politically rebellious Chinese-American poet is forced to abandon her young son and leave him to be raised by her husband in order to thwart xenophobic authorities who can legally take children from parents who are not considered patriotic enough. Her son goes on a dangerous journey to find her.

The pain I felt while reading both of them was, I think, not only connected with the injustice of forcing children and mothers into painful separations without good reason, but also with the severe punishment of mothers for minor infractions.

Mothers are burdened with so many harsh expectations, perhaps most dangerously, because a good woman will sacrifice “everything” for her child.

I’m sure I bought into this trope as a young woman; otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have been so taken aback by the actions of the fictional Joanna Kramer, played by Meryl Streep in the hit 1979 film. Kramer vs. Kramer.

Instead of staying in a mind-numbing marriage to her workaholic husband, Ted, Joanna leaves him and their young son, Billy. She is so depressed that she convinces herself that it is in Billy’s best interest that she leave.

At the time, I found her decision appalling. I think on some level I still do it.

A year and a half later, Joanna returns and sues for custody. During this time, Ted, who at first did not even know what grade his child was in, learned to be a single parent. A prime example of how culture and courts so often underestimate fathers is when Joanna gets custody of a boy. To her credit, she decides to share it with Ted. A happy ending, more or less, and perhaps one of the few times a mother isn’t punished for abandoning her child.

It is one kind of sin when a parent abandons a child, and quite another when the government purposefully separates a child from parents, without the explicit intention or process of their reunification, for frankly cynical political reasons.

The other day I sat down to reread a book by Caitlin Dickerson. The Atlantic magazine’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation to the Trump administration’s policy of separating families.

It’s hard to believe we live in a country where federal officials deliberately plan to cut immigration by taking children away from their parents. Trump officials must have foreseen how the world would react because they were trying to hide the real purpose of the program.

As Dickerson writes, the administration “said that the separation of families was not a policy goal, but the unfortunate result of the prosecution of parents who illegally crossed the border with their children. However, a lot of evidence shows that this is clearly not true: the separation of children was not just a side effect, but an intention. Instead of working to reunite families after the parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep them separated longer.”

The family separation policy was in effect from January 2017 to January 2021. As of February Department of Homeland Security identified 3,924 separated children. Nearly 3,000 of them were reunited with their families. Six years after the policy went into effect, almost 1,000 people have not done so. This is eternity in a child’s life.

Can you imagine the trauma of living with a mother-sized hole in your heart and realizing that it is there because you were used as a pawn in a failed political game?

Trump was right about one thing last night. We do must save our country. But not from immigrants. From demagogues like him.

@robinkabkarian