Tacoma wants no part of migrant family separations

Based on President Trump’s history of insensitive rhetoric, unpredictable policy and just plain chaos on immigration, it would be naive to place faith in last week’s executive order that ostensibly stopped the forcible separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Skeptics suspect Trump was desperate for political cover. Now it’s becoming clear just how much of a fig leaf this order was.

Many of the 2,000-plus kids cleaved from their parents will remain indefinitely confined to shelters and foster homes around the country. White House plans for reuniting families are unknown, perhaps even to Trump. And members of Congress and local officials struggle to get answers or access to detainees who are quietly being held in U.S. communities.

That includes Pierce County.

Some parents caught in the dragnet have reportedly been moved to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Gig Harbor, was blocked from seeing them Saturday, though he says he’d been approved for a tour. He says he’ll try again Friday. 

Meantime, activists are hunkering down at the Tideflats to protest this humanitarian crisis. They could be there for the long haul, with immigration legislation stuck in limbo, Trump advising Republican lawmakers to wait out the midterm elections and the president newly emboldened by his Supreme Court travel ban victory Tuesday.

Local demonstrators know better than to trust an executive order from a president who doesn’t seem to recognize due process as a constitutional right.

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson also knows better. He announced a multistate lawsuit against the family separation policy — the day after Trump said he was suspending it.

Even viewed in its best possible light, the administration’s Plan B for implementing its zero-tolerance strategy is grievously flawed. To prosecute adult immigrants criminally and lock them up indefinitely, albeit with their children, for the sin of fleeing violence back home and seeking a better life in the U.S. is no solution.

President Obama learned that lesson in 2015 when a court ordered him to halt the long-term detention of migrant families; Obama shifted back to the imperfect, but at least humane, practice of releasing them until their asylum cases could be heard.

If only Trump would learn. He not only seems blind to basic human dignity — his tweet last week about undocumented hordes coming to “infest our country,” as if they’re vermin, was just one example — but he also scorns taking pragmatic steps to improve our long-broken system, such as appointing more immigration judges.

Into the chaos steps Ferguson, who now counts 27 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration. The Washington attorney general notes that detaining families together will require an undetermined sum of federal money, which Congress hasn’t authorized, as well as permission to hold kids with their parents for an uncertain number of weeks or months, which a judge probably won’t grant.

That makes Trump’s executive order about as substantive as his peace accord with North Korea.

Ferguson’s office says more than one third of the 174 immigrant women detained in Washington over the past several weeks are mothers forced to surrender their children at the border. In interviews with AG lawyers, they told of being barred from talking to their kids for weeks and not even being notified of their whereabouts.

Tacoma, already a reluctant host city for the Northwest Detention Center, wants no part in the ongoing separation of migrant families. Our elected leaders should spare no effort to make that known.

Last weekend, when Kilmer tried to meet with detainees at NWDC, the congressman was thwarted due to alleged safety concerns, including possible exposure to chicken pox.

We hope he’s more successful this week. Because if injustices are allowed to fester in our country and go unchecked in our communities, then the shame will extend beyond the White House, Congress and the board rooms of America’s for-profit prison industry.

It will be a pox on all our houses.

This story was originally published June 26, 2018 at 12:15 PM.