Migrant Children and Family Separation in the United States

American nationalism, like all other nationalisms, is an imagined concept of belonging and community. In this regard, it is not exceptional in its history. However, something imagined is not necessarily fictional. Just as race continues as the living organism of racism, so does the cancer of white herrenvolk democracy remain at the fulcrum of current immigration policies.

As contemporary products and inheritors of this history, we often believe our hands are clean from past sins that are not of our making or within our control, fatal inventions that were not of our creation. Hence the constant appeal by politicians, critics, pundits and advocates across the political spectrum to an abstract “American Creed” that supposedly renders Trump’s policies un-American. In the search to understand the overt display of cruelty, the general misperception is that Trump’s policies are the nadir of American immigration history. They are not. Today’s indefensible separation of children from their parents or families at the southern border of the United States echoes some of the defining themes in American History: the specter of xenophobia, westward expansion, and the place of these phenomena in America’s political imagination.

For most of the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, African American migration was an involuntary movement. The second meeting of Congress in the early republic produced the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 to police the movement of the enslaved within the new nation. After Congress banned the importation of enslaved Africans in 1808, the internal trade of enslaved African Americans created a Second Middle Passage that threatened Black familial ties. This forced migration was a “uniquely cruel and brutally destructive” practice. According to historian Walter Johnson, it unfolded “In the seven decades between the ratification of the Constitution [in 1787] and the Civil War [in 1861],” when “approximately one million enslaved people were relocated from the upper South to the lower South.”

As Wilma King notes, “The emotional cost of family separations was high regardless of the reasons and the ages of those involved.” There was not a trauma faced by an adult slave that an enslaved child did not also encounter, with long-term effects that were far costlier. “Separation from families” she adds, as well as “friends along with the removal from one’s place of birth were not unusual in the slave trading milieu.” Most enslaved children became of age in slavery, which meant lack of medical care, high rate of child mortality, mental and sexual abuse, and a comparative death rate that was shockingly inhumane. White children in the nineteenth century comparably suffered a death rate of about 12.9 percent, while that number doubled for the enslaved child at 26 percent.

In the case of Black children, the first radical legislation ever enacted to protect formerly enslaved children, was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which the House passed by overriding President Andrew Johnson’s veto. Like Trump, Johnson was a champion of white supremacists who one contemporary denounced as a President who “unites in his character the seemingly opposite qualities of demagogue and autocrat, and converts the Presidential chair into a stump or a throne.” Thanks to the Radical Republicans, the Bill was a landmark for progressivism as it was the first time that Congress legislated on civil rights to mandate that “all persons born in the United States…[are] hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” Representative Henry Raymond of New York noted that the legislation was “one of the most important bills ever presented to this House for its action,” because it ensured that children would not face re-enslavement, separations, or kidnappings, as had been common before the Civil War. As a monumental law, the Civil Rights Bill helped begin a healing process for child victims of separations who remembered “the terrors of the scene return with painful vividness,” and parents who had once lamented that “My pen cannot Express the griffe I feel to be parted from you all.” For one enslaved mother, separation from her child was “the worst of all evils” the system had condoned.

Some instances in recent memory rarely discussed in the current public outcry are the cases that have been uncovered by researchers from the Guantánamo Public Memory Project. This research reveals that the gap between American ideals and its actions are a mirror to how American white supremacy is the self-serving logic behind the humanitarian crisis on the Mexican-American border. It is a logic that rests on the systematic forced separation and detention of “unwanted” families. In the early 1990s, under President Bill Clinton, more than 35,000 Haitian refugees who fled the political violence of a repressive military junta supported by President George Bush Sr. were ordered to be held in detention camps in Guantanamo, kept under military surveillance, and then repatriated back to Haiti. In the 1992 election, then presidential candidate Bill Clinton had criticized Bush’s practice  as “cruel” and “immoral.” Once in power, Clinton preserved the policy, and ordered the Coast Guard to intercept refugees at sea. Sometimes denied medical care, many of the children were orphans whose parents had been killed in their homeland. As the inhumane policy reached crisis levels, a federal judge admonished Clinton’s detainment of the refugees as “outrageous, callous and reprehensible” and as “the kind of indefinite detention usually reserved for spies and murderers.”

And now the US government is exercising similar treatment toward Central and South American children fleeing similar conditions to their Haitian predecessors. In the future, historians will have to note how the past and present converged in President Trump’s reconfiguring of twenty-first century immigration policies as watershed in resuscitating racial expulsion as national policy.

As the exemplary courage of the unaccompanied Haitian children showed, where there is oppression, follow the lead of the resisters. Before it became a permanent locale for terrorists’ cells and enemies of the state, Guantanamo Bay’s prison complex rehearsed the militarization of migrant camps on Haitian refugees and the 356 unaccompanied Haitian children held there in the 1990s. In 1995, Haitian youths led a Children’s Hunger Strike against the U.S government. They reported that the U.S military had verbally abused, handcuffed, stepped on, and disciplined them by segregation. While Washington granted asylum and humanitarian parole to some 20,000 Cubans in this period, the U.S was deporting Haitian children back to Haiti, where conditions had not stabilized politically. One child alluded to a racist double-standard: “Maybe if I shed my skin, I’ll be treated differently,” by the authorities. On May 8, the Haitian children refused to go to school while in camps. They resisted most orders and did not eat, leading many to become unconscious. By June’s end, the international embarrassment forced President Clinton to grant 111 Haitians, including 48 unaccompanied children, entry to the U.S.

As has always been true in American history, it has fallen on the marginalized to materialize “the American civil religion,” what the Swedish sociologist and economist Gunnar Myrdal called “the American Creed,” to its real and fullest potentials. Altogether, the ideals of this creed are enunciated in what may be called the American Bible of values: The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Reconstruction Amendments. After the atrocities of World War II, these, as well as a collective essence of human dignity, was summarized by The United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as: “the essential dignity of the individual human being, of the fundamental equality of all men, women, and of certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity.”

We must defend as the first and foremost principle that these values, in the case of children, are nonnegotiable no matter their political status or origins. In the effort to oppose the Trump administration’s inhumane treatment of migrant children, it is not enough to recast American values as the victim, however. We must repurpose the usable past by upholding the legacies of the men, women and children who prevailed in the face of similar struggles.