It was a lie all along.
For over a month, President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the law required him to separate children from parents arrested at the border. He said that Democrats were to blame.
But there was no such law. On Wednesday, facing national outcry, Trump issued an executive order to keep the families together. It was a tacit admission that his prior claims of helplessness were bogus.
Moreover, it doesn’t address the bigger issue — the need for comprehensive immigration reform that balances border security with the reality that we now have generations of undocumented immigrants who have grown up here and are, for all intents and purposes, Americans.
We need reform with compassion that recognizes that people trying to cross our borders — legally or illegally — are often fleeing violence and gang activity in Central America or civil war in Syria, or simply seeking a way out of abject poverty.
For now, all the president has done is defuse, perhaps only temporarily, a political and human rights crisis of his own making.
This crisis was created because Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April chose to implement a “zero tolerance” policy that requires criminally charging anyone attempting illegal entry into the country.
The issue then became, and still is, what to do with the accompanying children. A 1997 consent decree prohibits the federal government from keeping them in custody for more than 20 days. That’s why more than 2,300 boys and girls have been separated from their parents since April.
Trump on Wednesday directed keeping the families together in custody and seeking relief from the consent decree. It’s a marginal improvement, but the notion of detaining children is in many ways as troubling as splitting them from their parents.
Especially when one considers the dangers at home that prompted many of those parents to take extraordinary risks to gain illegal entry. We as a nation should show compassion and find a way to help. Surely we remember, and learned the lessons from, turning away Jews fleeing the Nazi onslaught during World War II.
But lawmakers have consistently failed to pass immigration reform. And the president deserves much of the blame. His constantly changing positions make a congressional compromise nearly impossible.
Our representatives haven’t been able to agree on an updated immigration policy that recognizes the real danger many immigrants face today, and balances it with legitimate concerns about border security.
Trump has never been sympathetic to the former, but he’s been obsessive about the latter.
That’s why he used these innocent children as political pawns as he tried to blame Democrats and force Congress to fund his border wall. That’s why he separated children from parents and falsely claimed there were no legal options.
Sessions even cited a biblical passage as justification for separating parents from children at our borders. If one must turn to the Bible for guidance, consider Leviticus 19:33-34: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.”
We are a land of immigrants. It’s time for Congress and the president to embrace that rather than demonizing those who seek the same passage as those who came before us.
— The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
