Trump’s War on Children

Cruelty as policy

Trump's war on the rule of law has entered a dangerous new phase. Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan was arrested for trying to stop ICE officials from walking into her courtroom to arrest someone. It is a truly shocking attack on the judiciary.

However, there has been far less attention given to the daily abuse of children in "Kangaroo courts" created by the Trump administration.

In a recent hearing, the defendant was a four-year-old girl.

She had no lawyer. No parent.

She sat with her eight-year-old sister while Immigration Judge Ubaid ul-Haq laid out the case against her.

"The reason we're here is because the government of the United States wants you to leave the United States. It's my job to figure out if you have to leave. It's also my job to figure out if you should stay."

As the judge spoke to the children over a video conference screen, the 4-year-old, who spoke no English, played with a stuffed toy.

This scene was laid out in a recent edition of the Gothamist, a local New York City publication.

https://gothamist.com/news/4-year-old-migrant-girl-other-kids-go-to-court-in-nyc-with-no-lawyer-the-cruelty-is-apparent

The article reported that 96% of those appearing before the immigration court without legal representation are deported.

The little girl and her sister had no lawyer. There was no adult to advocate for them or to explain what was happening to them.

If legal aid had been in place, the child's family could be searched for, and guardians obtained to intervene.

But that's not possible since Donald Trump cut funding to the basic legal support for children facing the threat of deportation. Now, more and more undocumented children are facing the legal system on their own.

One observer at the hearing stated: "The cruelty is really apparent to all of us."

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The cruelty is the point.

This was the title of Adam Serwer's book on the first Trump administration. Trump built his success on the spectacle of cruelty and the relentless beating down of those who could not fight back.

And who is more defenceless than a child?

In 2016, Trump ran on the promise to build a giant wall on the border and make Mexico pay for it.

That promise went nowhere.

In 2017, his team announced a new strategy of "zero tolerance" that targeted the children of families trying to enter the United States.

The world was shocked by images of ICE guards pulling terrified children away from their parents at the border. They were put in cages and moved to detention centres in horrifyingly poor conditions.

In 2019, human rights campaigner Clara Long testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at a hearing titled “Kids in Cages: Inhumane Treatment at the Border.”

Long described children as young as two being left in cells with no one to look out for them. She met with children denied access to clean clothes, toothbrushes, showers, and adult protection. Some were forced to sleep on floors. Others in cages.

It was heartless. It was sickening. But it stoked the Trump base.

Cruelty and spectacle are the point.

The Biden administration believed that as many as 5,500 families were broken apart, and by the end of Biden's term, 1300 children were still not fully accounted for by their families. Some children had been put in foster care. Some were deported separately from their families.

Some… well, who knows?

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With Trump 2.0, the war on migrant children is back in full fury.

The media has reported stories of children as young as five facing down judges without anyone to defend them or explain what is happening.

Wendy Young, President of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), told CNN:

"This is a process that will just railroad kids through the system. They'll receive an order to be deported from the United States without any access to due process or fundamental fairness. We'll have toddlers running all over the place, and my staff is explaining to them, using toys, crayons, chalkboards, what their rights are in the immigration system."

This past week, a group of human rights lawyers launched a lawsuit against Costa Rica on behalf of 81 deported children, some as young as two, who had been left in a rural camp for two months. Many of the children were from Asian countries and couldn't even speak the language.

This is what cruelty as policy looks like.

But to carry out Trump's war on migrant families will require a nation willing to stomach revelations of such abuses against children.

Elon Musk has stated his worry that concern for the victims might slow the Trump agenda. He has claimed that the biggest threat facing Western civilization is empathy.

A lot has been written online about Musk's attack on empathy, but Musk is merely repeating ideas promoted by Canadian professor Dr. Gad Saad, who rallies against what he calls "suicidal empathy." In an essay for Northwood University on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, Saad warned:

"Suicidal empathy is killing the West."

Saad believes there are two catastrophic threats to our civilization. The first is from "a minuscule minority of trans women" who compete in sporting competitions. (A recent survey found that in middle and secondary schools across the United States, there weren't more than five such youth participating in sports.)

Saad's second threat to civilization was people showing empathy for the plight of "illegal migrants." He even claims that the migrants "end up receiving greater U.S. aid than American veterans."

So problematic have been these false claims in the United States that Military Times had to post a statement from Veterans Affairs that money going to vets is not being diverted to help refugees.

https://www.militarytimes.com/veterans/2024/01/12/va-disputes-gop-claim-that-money-for-vets-is-going-to-migrants-instead/

Saad further believes that the opportunity to save Western civilization came with the recent election of Donald Trump.

He says the Trump election "is an unequivocal repudiation of the ideological parasites that have wreaked havoc on our societies. However, it is crucial that we refrain from becoming complacent. This is no time to rest on our laurels. It took many decades of assiduous indoctrination for these parasitic ideas to flourish in every nook and cranny of our institutions."

I was struck by Saad's use of the word parasite.

The Nazis used the word parasite to dehumanize and then strip Jews of legal protections. Trump often invokes the phrase to denounce his perceived enemies.

No photograph so accurately captured the Nazi determination to dehumanize people than the heartbreaking photograph of a little boy with his hands in the air being marched through the streets of Warsaw with his terrified family.

There wasn't an ounce of empathy from the men with guns.

Hitler put it bluntly:

"Nature is cruel; therefore, we are entitled to be cruel."

The ideology of the survival of the "fittest" and the victory of the cruel was put on trial at Nuremberg and Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem.

Hannah Arendt, who covered the Eichmann trial, wrote:

"The death of human empathy is one of the most telling signs of a culture about to descend into barbarism."

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Which brings us back to the five-year-olds.

These trials are designed to show that Trump, Vance and Musk are tough on the border. But if such abuses can take place in a public court of law, much worse abuses become possible.

Photo credit: NPR

Call out the cruelty. Demand justice for the children.

One place to start: contact the judge presiding over these child deportation hearings. Let him know this cruelty is unacceptable — and the world is watching.

Immigration Judge Ubaid ul-Haq
Executive Office for Immigration Review
New York Varick Street Immigration Court
201 Varick St
New York, NY 10014-4811

📞 646-638-5700
✉️ ubaid.ul-haq@usdoj.gov

Keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

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