It is important to condemn the anti-immigrant rhetoric of people like Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican clown car because such words can have a real impact on people—psychologically or physically (i.e., inspiring hate crimes).
But it is just as important, if not much more so, to condemn actions that harm the immigrant community.
Here, I’m thinking of the deportation raids currently done by the Obama administration, breaking people’s homes into the middle of the night and ripping families apart. 141 House Democrats and 22 Senate Democrats urged the administration to halt this inhumane policy, but the administration has only scoffed at such a suggestion. These raids are not happening because of Donald Trump. They are happening because of Barack Obama.
But the Obama administration’s problem is not just inhumane, misguided policy. It is also, according to a new Senate investigation, gross negligence and mismanagement:
The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations, according to a 56-page investigative report released Thursday.
And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.
Here are a few examples:
For example, one Guatemalan boy planned to live with his uncle in Virginia. But when the uncle refused to take the boy, he ended up with another sponsor, who forced him to work nearly 12 hours a day to repay a $6,500 smuggling debt, which the sponsor later increased to $10,900, the report said.
A boy from El Salvador was released to his father even though he told a caseworker that his father had a history of beating him, including hitting him with an electrical cord. In September, the boy alerted authorities that his father was forcing him to work for little or no pay, the report said; a post-release service worker later found the boy was being kept in a basement and given little food.
One defendant, Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, 33, used associates to file false applications with the government agency tasked with caring for the children, and bring them to Ohio, where he kept them in squalid conditions in a trailer park and forced them to work 12-hour days, at least six days a week, for little pay…..
In August 2014, a child-welfare caseworker attempted to visit one of the children, who had been approved for post-release services because of reported mental-health problems, according to the report.
The caseworker went to the address listed for the child, but the person who answered the door said the child didn’t live there, the report added. When the caseworker finally found the child’s sponsor, the sponsor blocked the caseworker from talking to the child.
Instead of investigating further, the caseworker closed the child’s case file, the report said, citing “ORR policy which states that the Post Release Services are voluntary and sponsor refused services.”
That child was found months later, living 50 miles away from the sponsor’s home and working at the egg farm, according to the report. The child’s sponsor was later indicted.
As you condemn the vile, anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed by the right, save some of your criticism for the violence and negligence that too often characterizes the Obama administration’s own treatment of immigrants.