Ending “catch and release” is the only moral way to avoid traumatizing migrants’ children, says Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s top immigration aide.
Miller’s statement is intended to counter claims by pro-migration activists against the administration’s border security policies. The activists are trying to restore “catch and release” policies by telling a judge that any detention of migrants’ children is a psychological threat to the children’s mental health.
“The psychological damage is [caused by] being smuggled,” says Miller told Fox News August 25:
The psychological damage [to children] is being trafficked [by coyotes]. The psychological damage is [from parents] putting children in the hands of these [trafficking] organizations. Our President has the courage to stand up to those criminal organizations and to the Democrats who are aiding and abetting their business model by allowing that smuggling to continue.
Ending catch and release is the sole humane course of action.
The emotional claim of childhood trauma is being aimed at the California judge who will decide a lawsuit by pro-migration groups. The lawsuit is trying to block a new regulation which allows officials to end large-scale catch and release policies.
The regulation allows officials to end catch and release by ending the judge’s 2015 directive that migrants’ children be released after 20 days of detention in well-managed shelters. Ordinary migrants arbitrage this 20-day rule because they know they will get released and then get U.S. jobs if they bring their children up to the border, and they can delay their deportation proceedings longer than 20 days by asking for asylum.
Once released with the child, the migrant adults can get jobs to repay their smuggling debts and can place their children in schools used by ordinary Americans. In turn, the migrants use the jobs to pay smugglers to bring their wives and remaining children up to the border, so adding to the strains on Americans’ rental markets and schools.
The judge’s 20-day decision in 2015 has prompted 800,000 migrants to rush the U.S. border form late 2018 into late 2019. This vast migration splits families, ensures the rape of many migrants by coyotes, and enables the death of some children from disease, exposure, or drowning. Many adult migrants also die crossing the border.
The California judge, Dolly Gee, seems determined to dodge the blame for the trauma inflicted on children by her 2015 decision. “Any number of other factors could have caused the increase in illegal border crossings, including civil strife, economic degradation, and fear of death in the migrants’ home countries,” the judge claimed in July 2018.
Pro-migration advocates also reject any blame for the death, rapes, and trauma predictably enabled by their pro-migration policies.
Pro-migration activists are trying to help the judge restore the 20-day rule.
For example, the activists claim that migrants’ children and their parents must be quickly released because the children will be damaged by having to stay in a government-run shelter for roughly 50 days, which is the time needed to process the adults’ asylum claims.
This claim of traumatic family detention is decorated by a pro-migration advocacy group within the American Psychological Association. According to an August 21 statement by Jaime “Jim” Diaz-Granados, Ph.D., the deputy CEO of the American Psychological Association:
Allowing immigrant children to be detained longer than 20 days, even with their families, is a misguided attempt by this administration to stem the flow across the southern border … Research has shown higher rates of anxiety and depression among children held at detention centers. One study found children were up to 10 times more likely to develop a psychiatric disorder if they were detained.
The large majority of these children have already experienced trauma before arriving at immigration facilities, and the longer they are held in detention, the more likely their mental health will continue to suffer. Creating a new federal licensing system for facilities to detain families with children is not a solution. Numerous clinical studies have demonstrated that the mitigating factor of having parents present does not negate the deleterious impact of extended detention on children’s mental and physical health.
“The proof is there: the simple fact of detention puts children at risk, for any length of time,” also claimed Caryl M. Stern, the president of the U.S. division of the United Nations Children’s Fund. “@UNICEFUSA opposes child immigration detention in the U.S. and around the world.”
Pro-migration activists even argue that enforcement of deportation laws is causing psychological trauma to adult illegal migrants. USAToday reported August 25:
Gustavo Guerrero, 27, said there’s not a day that goes by when he’s not thinking of his immigration status. “It’s always in the back of your mind,” he said, “You’re driving, you’re working, you’re sleeping in your home, you’re picking up your kids from school, you’re constantly thinking about it.”
Guerrero, who is originally from Honduras, said he swam across the Rio Grande when he was 12 years old. Guerrero, who is a musician in Nashville, Tennessee, struggles with anxiety related to his undocumented legal status. He needs counseling, but without health insurance, he said he pays the $150 per session out of pocket. He can only afford to go once a month.
“The trauma for children will be ended if the loss of catch and release deters migrants from bringing their children to the United States,” said Miller. “Ending catch and release is the sole humane course of action,” he told Fox News.
“These housing facilities are extremely carefully appointed to make sure the rights of migrants are protected,” Miller told Fox News. “Everything you’ve heard from the media about this is totally 100 percent false.”
On August 23, media outlets were given a tour of the major family detention center by Matthew Albence, the acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The Washington Post reported:
Across the hall was a dental office, with a reclining chair and sterile instruments. The cafeteria was serving hot dogs, lime-cilantro chicken, tortillas and green salad — all you can eat. Kindergartners sat on a colorful mat in a schoolhouse trailer and learned to sing “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”
Albence’s PR pitch was aided by comments from migrants who had just been released from the family center.
…in interviews Thursday at a San Antonio bus station an hour north of Dilley, women recently released from the facility and heading to join friends and relatives in Miami, Dallas and other cities, said they were treated well. The food was tasty, they said, and they appreciated access to doctors and lawyers. Dilley was far better than the Border Patrol holding cells, they said, or the safe houses they stayed in during their trip through Mexico.
The Post looked for migrants to bolster the claim by advocates that detention “traumatizes children when their parents are not in charge.” But recently released migrants had little trauma to report, aside from their rational worry that they will be sent home:
Mirian, a 25-year-old mother of three children — 11, 7 and nearly 2 years old — said she struggled to sleep at Dilley. The Honduran native had to monitor each child constantly and worried about being deported or the children falling ill.
“I didn’t know if I’d ever get out,” she said, speaking on the condition that her last name not be used because of privacy concerns.
Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it transfers wages to investors and ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.