Educators Speak Up for Immigrant Children!

The Children Are Watching

My own professional organization, the American Educational Research Association, puts forth a firm statement against the US government’s separation of families and detention of children.  The statement is a strong affirmation of the need for us all to work for the well-being of children and to adamantly oppose those policies and practices that do harm – in this case lasting harm to the children’s development and well-being.

A statement from AERA won’t be surprising – this is our work.  On the other hand, this consensus transcends the individual and professional interests and political leanings of our more than 25,000 members in every state of the US and many other countries, and across such disparate fields as testing and measurement, educational administration, teaching and learning, educational history and policy, curriculum studies and the social contexts of schooling.   We are united in support of the children. I could not be prouder. 

Here is the full text of our stand for the children:

Statement by AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine on the
Trump Administration’s Detainment of Immigrant Children

June 22, 2018

We express our continuing concern for the thousands of children and their families who are living in trauma and experiencing the pernicious effects of “zero tolerance” and separation policies and practices that render irreparable harm.

We join with others in the scholarly and research communities and the groundswell of people in our country who are deeply concerned about the effects of the Trump administration’s policies and practices on the well-being of these children.

The Trump administration’s policy of separating detained immigrant children from their parents or caregivers is not only morally and ethically reprehensible but exposes these children to great risk of emotional and psychological trauma. The research evidence shows that forced separation and detainment of children in situations such as this can have long-lasting effects on their socio-emotional development and well-being, leading to years of behavioral and learning problems. 

For children removed from their parents, the trauma can have pervasive effects throughout their formative years, harming their emotional development and academic growth, with serious lifelong ramifications for individuals, their families, and their communities. The length of time and conditions in which these children are being held, without clear plans for speedy reunification, only compound the likelihood of harm to already vulnerable children. This is not what the United States stands for and cannot be part of our country’s legacy.

Members of the American Educational Research Association are dedicated to advancing knowledge that promotes the well-being of children, and substantial numbers of scholars in our community have long contributed to the evidence base in this area.

Although the Trump administration has rescinded its separation policy, it still falls on the administration to act immediately and forcefully to reunite the thousands of children who have been taken from their parents since May. It is the administration’s responsibility to ensure that, moving forward, its practices and policies support children and do not place them at further risk. For now, the clock is ticking for these children and their families.

I urge all my AERA colleagues to add action to our words:  share this statement widely with your colleagues, with your members of Congress, with your city officials who may be pressured to permit ICE “baby jails” in your town, with anyone you know who isn’t sure that this detention thing isn’t so bad.  It is and we can’t let it go on.

To share your thoughts, click on the “comments” pencil.

Deliberate Losses: Children at our Border

The Children Are Watching

     The white vans pull up to the shelter in a tight line.  The shelter workers bring their charges out to be loaded in, careful to document the identity of each one.   Having been examined and, if necessary, treated at the shelter’s clinic, then perhaps fostered by caring volunteers, the charges are healthy and well-prepared for the trip. The van driver meticulously confirms the information, matching the details of identity, route, and destination. Only after all documents are verified does the silent line of vans proceed down the highway to a faraway state.  Upon arrival, the same care for clear document check precedes the discharging of the passengers into the arms eagerly waiting to receive them.

No, I’m not describing our government’s treatment of immigrant children ripped from their parents’ arms at the US – Mexico border. No, I haven’t come across hidden evidence that in fact all is well with the more than 2000 children dispersed across what we now know is more than 17 states in places for the most past unknown to and unreachable by their parents.  And, no, I’m not reporting that stories of missing documentation, lost names and family connections, have suddenly been proven false.

The white vans I’m describing take rescue pets from shelters in Houston to rescue organizations in other states where stray, adoptable dogs are scarce, and where families are eager to adopt one of the thousands of abandoned animals in our city that would otherwise be euthanized.   One of the lead volunteers of this pet rescue organization recounts the professionalism and precision with which the Houston organization, and our local animal shelters, coordinate with their counterparts in states like Colorado, providing careful and detailed documentation on each animal.  And, yes, the organization does have its own clinic, assuring the animals are healthy before they are transported; those needing time to heal from neglect or injuries or illness are placed with knowledgeable and caring foster families before they begin their journey.

When I first heard that ICE, Homeland Security, the US Justice Department, and other federal agencies had together managed to “lose” more than 2000 children after taking them away from their parents who came here seeking asylum, I was appalled at the incompetence and lack of caring for these, “other people’s,” children.  When we further learned that many of these children were babies – infants and toddlers, even still nursing, and that many were not even old enough to speak, a collective horror arose across the nation. And that was before we found out that not only did their parents not know where they were, our government doesn’t either.   That’s when the mental image of the pet rescue vans came to me:  the pet rescue folks know where the pets are at any given time because they care.  Our government, with its high-tech surveillance systems and sophisticated communication networks, would know where the children are – and who their parents are – if they cared.  But as I wrote about in a recent post, these are “other people’s children,” not “our kids.” 

Given the capacities of the US government, its millions of employees and thousands of departments and agencies, one can only conclude that the disappearance of these children is deliberate.  Not the result of incompetence or bureaucratic snafus or poor planning:  deliberate.  

To even think such a thought evokes guilt: how could we accuse anyone of deliberately “losing” little children?   Then we began to listen more carefully to the words – the words of the president, of Jeff Sessions (why is he so afraid?), of the various Cabinet secretaries and spokespeople.  Really listen.  That’s when we knew the children are not taken away from the heat of the border for their own benefit: they are being held hostage as leverage to get their parents to sign away their rights to an asylum hearing, to just leave, regardless of the violence that forced them to flee their home countries.  

We know that losing track of this many children is not the result of a hasty policy pronouncement or poor planning: the government had plenty of time to award multimillion dollar contracts to the for-profit and (putatively) non-profit companies like Southwest Key  for the tents, and to the  computer and communication companies to set up the detention centers.  Plenty of time to install all those wire cages – and to line up the trucks and people to carry all these materials and equipment to remote places in the desert.  Plenty of time to coach border agents on standing on the border marker, not an inch behind it, to prevent asylum seekers from lawfully entering the US to be able to petition for a hearing. Plenty of time to commit taxpayer millions to bus tickets and airline tickets and “shelter” contracts and subcontractors.  Plenty of time to divide up the tasks among Homeland Security and Justice Department and HHS and numerous others agencies in a planned chaos of hidden machinations and distributed (and therefore non-existent) accountability.  Plenty of time to set up the apparatus of control.

The parents have been given a how-to-guide for reuniting with their children, complete with a 1-800 number to call to ask where to find them.  Sometimes no one answers. Sometimes the person who answers doesn’t speak the parents’ language. Sometimes the person knows where the child is but won’t say, or says the child is fine but gives no more information. 

As of June 27, only 6 of the more than 2000 children missing one week before have, according to official sources, been reunited with their families.   In the meantime, another caravan of white vans have left Houston with rescue pets that reached their intended destinations, cared for safely and attentively all along the way. None lost. 

To share your thoughts on ways we can provide a safe welcome to children migrants, click on the “comments” pencil.

Kiddie Cages and Baby Wall

The Children are Watching

I’m so proud that Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, has told ICE in no uncertain terms that he does not want a detention center for young children separated from their parents at the border to be in our city. Here's our mayor in his own words:

“I do not want to be an enabler in this process ”

“There comes a time when we must draw the line, and for me the line with our children”

“I don’t want our facilities and property owners to participate in this process”

“There comes a time when Americans, when Houstonians, when Texans, have to say to those higher than ourselves: This is wrong”

He is joined by Catholic nuns, rabbis, African American protestant ministers, parents with their young children, people representing the myriad nationalities and cultures that make up this, the nation’s most culturally diverse, city.  Many voices, one message:  No Baby Jail in Houston!   No “tender care facility.”  No facility is “tender” if the children have been taken away from their parents.  And it is definitely not “caring” if it exists to hold children hostage to force their parents to leave our country, no matter how strong their claims for refuge and asylum from the dangers they have so courageously fled.

Houstonians are not demonstrating to keep one baby jail out of our city.  We demonstrate to demand that families be united, that families crossing our border be granted just and lawful hearings, that parents not have to bargain their own safety away to get to hold their babies again.  Here are plans for this Saturday’s community protest: 

We do not want Donald Trump’s border wall paid for by the blood of Central American families:  No border wall! No baby wall!

And no cages!  The sight of very young children huddled under thin mylar “blankets” inside cages made of cyclone fencing has shocked the nation.   Tough reporters have been moved to tears and members of Congress rendered speechless at the sight—when they have been permitted to enter and see for themselves what it means for a powerful government to “detain” powerless children.

Ross D. Franklin/AP

The horrified and generous responses to the sight of those cages --from pro-bono lawyers, from ordinary families setting up go-fund-me sites to raise money for assistance in re-uniting families, from church groups and human rights activists -- has been immediate and inspiring.

But I fear another, less noticed, response: it is the impulse to see anyone incarcerated as probably guilty.  We know that defense attorneys don’t want the jury to see their clients in that orange prison jumpsuit – and definitely not in handcuffs or those clanking shackles.  A person accused of a crime who’s dressed in prisoner garb looks much more guilty than a guy who’s had a haircut and wears a crisply ironed shirt to the courtroom– maybe even a suit.  

My point here is that people in a cage, or being marched into a detention center’s maze of cages can look to an uninformed observer like a prisoner – like a guilty person – not like a person who is waiting for a legally required, Constitutional hearing on his reason for being in our country.    The sight of a woman in a big wire cage may prompt in an observer not a gut-punch of sympathy for the violence she left to protect her children from, but a twinge of suspicion of some terrible thing she must have done to warrant being so brutally locked up.

I hope I’m wrong.  But the anti-immigrant press (and shouters) don’t use the term “illegals” lightly. They mean the people themselves and the laws they (supposedly) break just by crossing the border.  The term allows them to ignore the very legal act of seeking asylum, of being afforded a legally required assessment of the danger and persecution they are fleeing. 

The sight of those cages and the exhausted, often terrified people being pushed along in lines by uniformed guards creates a powerful visual of criminals getting what they deserve.  A visual of tall wire enclosures keeping these “others” out of our neighborhoods, out of our country.

At a time when so much fear has been fomented, so much hate shouted from the White House as well as by traditionally whites-only, anti-immigrant groups, we can’t assume that everyone is seeing those cages, those faces, the same way.  That’s why smart, steady, sustained action is demanded by all who value the Constitution, who understand the need for children to be with their parents, who are grieving the terror and fears our officials – and these detention center profiteers – are exploiting.

The president claims to want a safe border and no crime. Right now the crime is in denying legal due process to asylum–seekers.  The crime is in “processing” people without a legally-required hearing to determine the validity of their claim.  And our borders won’t be safe until these families are re-united and the baby wall comes down.

To share your thoughts, click on the “comments” pencil.

Separating Families - Losing Children

"How Many Ways Are There to Hate a Kid?"
The Children Are Watching

Every time the state issued a ridiculous policy affecting our schools, like more and more tests in more and more  subjects and grades, or deep funding cuts, my colleague Ron Sass,  noted global climate change scientist and Rice professor, would ask "How many ways are there to hate a kid?"   During the almost 30 years we worked together in the Rice Center for Education, we saw lots of those ill-advised, harmful policies come and go, so I heard that question many times.  Ron is retired now, but I'm sure as he sees the news of the draconian ways the US immigration authorities -- backed by a rabidly anti-immigrant attorney general -- are treating the children who come to our borders seeking asylum, refugee status, or even just a safe place to be a child, he knows there are even more ways to hate a kid than we knew.

First, who are the migrant children coming to the US?

•    Children who arrive in the United States alone or who are required to appear in immigration court on their own often are referred to as unaccompanied children or unaccompanied minors. 
•    The vast majority of unaccompanied children and families arriving at the southwest border come from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, although unaccompanied children may arrive from any country.

Second, what is being done to them -- not by bandits or drug dealers or other predators, but by the US government?

•    Unaccompanied children are placed with a parent or guardian who acts as a sponsor while they undergo immigration hearings. The only follow up is a call after a few weeks or 30 days. However the agency that releases the children is not responsible for them after they are released.
•    As a result of this policy, between October and December 2017, 1,475 children are unaccounted for.
•    To calm a public outraged by this callous treatment of even very young children (one child was described as 53 weeks old,  just one week after the first birthday), the president's chief of staff assured the nation that "the children will be taken care of -- put into foster care or whatever."

Can this really be the US?  Can we take pride in being a "nation of immigrants" if the "acceptable" immigrants are only the ones with light skin (you know, those desirable Norwegians!)?  Do we really have official, legal ways to "hate a kid"?

Third, what can be done to help these children -- and to save the soul of American democracy? These separations of children from their parents -- separations that do not guarantee parents will know where their children are -- are so unimaginable, it's not unexpected that most of us didn't know this was happening.  But now we know.  So what can we do to make sure these policies end and that this never happens again?

For the larger questions, I'll be writing about this again. Most important, I'll be writing about what we can do individually and what organizations we can join with to end this cruel and embarrassing treatment of the most vulnerable among us:  displaced children.

As a start,  look into the lawsuit the ACLU has brought on behalf of immigrant children in the custody of US immigration authorities.  Make a contribution to the ACLU for this vital (and expensive) work.  Contact your member of Congress.   Insist Jeff Sessions, the nation's attorney, protect the rights of everyone within our borders, including the children.

To share your ideas about ways we can protect these children, click on the "comments" pencil.