curlicuecal:

reverseoppression:

I am extremely glad to hear that Trump has signed an executive order to end the separation of families, but please do not think that the battle for justice ends here.

I mean, this is literally what Trump was referring to when he said it was ‘democrats’ law’ that was ‘making’ him separate families.

The law is the one says it’s illegal to incarcerate children for crimes their parents committed for any extended length of time. This is the law Trump wants changed.

The law exists because we realized this prolonged internment of innocent children was sometimes happening (in extremely unsafe conditions no less) and we understood that this was a horrible, inhumane, inexcusable thing to do to a child.

The conflict arose when this was paired with the Trump adminstration’s new “zero tolerance” policy, which drastically increased the number of people being prosecuted (far beyond our capacity to handle with reasonable speed and due process), and meant that refugees seeking asylum (much, much more likely to be families fleeing with small children) must go through sometimes months of appeals trying to see if asylum might be permitted.

The former USA stance was that we must not attempt to intern more people than we could handle humanely. The stance Trump’s administration is pushing for is that we must sacrifice humane treatment of these families to protect our own.