Trump Regime Contemplated Denying Refugee Children Their Right to Asylum Hearings

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse.]

A government whistleblower passed a December 2017 memo drafted by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, "Policy Options to Respond to Border Surge of Illegal Immigration," to Senator Jeff Merkley, who passed it on to NBC News. Julia Ainsley reports:

Trump administration officials weighed speeding up the deportation of migrant children by denying them their legal right to asylum hearings after separating them from their parents, according to comments on a late 2017 draft of what became the administration's family separation policy obtained by NBC News.

The draft also shows officials wanted to specifically target parents in migrant families for increased prosecutions, contradicting the administration's previous statements.

...The document was circulated between high level officials at DHS and the Justice Department, at least one of whom was instrumental in writing the first iteration of the administration's travel ban.

The plan, and the comments written in the margins, provide a window into the policy discussion thinking at the time, how far officials were willing to go to deter families seeking asylum and what they may still be considering.

And again: There was not a crisis at the border to which this unfettered cruelty was a response. Ainsley notes at the time of the memo's drafting, "the number of undocumented immigrants seeking to cross the southern border was near historic monthly lows."

It is and and always been an imagined crisis, invented by people who need to justify an authoritarian nightmare's desired monument to nativist white supremacy, because malice is the agenda.