Remembering the Trauma: GOP 2025 – A Return to Trump’s Immigration Policies

By Joseph Carvalko | 8 October 2024
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

The 2025 GOP policy agenda, known as Project 2025, proposes several measures to detain and criminalize immigrants more aggressively than during President Trump’s first term of office. The agenda seeks to establish a national infrastructure for implementing these policies, a controversial plan that has sparked significant debate and concern among groups and organizations when viewed in light of the prior Trump administration’s inhumane actions regarding child separation.

Beginning in mid-2017, the Trump administration initiated a “pilot program,” where adults crossing the U.S. border without permission were detained, charged, and confined. Any of the detainee’s children were separated, but the government failed to establish a database where the parents and children could be reunited in the future. In April 2018, the government fully aware that no system to track children was in place, implemented a policy, known as “Zero Tolerance,” to deter undocumented immigrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. To the revulsion of all right-thinking people, it soon became clear that not tracking the children would result in permanently fracturing family bonds, reminiscent of fascist movements, as carried out by German and Italian regimes leading up to and during WWII.

Shortly after its 2018 policy implementation, the administration faced significant backlash, leading President Trump to order a halt to separations. Unfortunately, by then, thousands of families, whom were seeking asylum under U.S. treaties with the international community, had already been separated from their children. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 14), of which the U.S. is a signatory, states that everyone has the right to seek and enjoy asylum from persecution in other countries. These can be refugees, such as individuals who have fled their own country because they were at risk of serious human rights violations there. And, because their own governments cannot or will not protect them, they are forced to seek international protection. The 1951 UN Refugee Convention also protects refugees from being returned to countries where they risk being persecuted. Clearly, Trump violated the country’s international obligations to adjudicate the claims of people seeking asylum, many whom were children and legally protected from deportation and certainly from punishment.

Today over 1,000 children remain lost and separated from their parents. These are the facts. But facts don’t express the horror of what it must have felt like to a parent whose child was ripped from its arms by a border agent. Trump appears psychologically incapable of appreciating the magnitude of his immoral actions, all the more apparent when he rails over immigration and how he plans to deal with it if elected. Only a man vacant of compassion could order parents and children separated.

The Women’s Refugee Commission has interviewed parents who have lost children during Trump’s separation program. One victim shares how it’s changed her life: “I have this pain that lives inside my heart. It’s so hard to talk about this situation with anyone because years have passed and I feel the pain as if it was yesterday… It’s just burned into your mind, and then in your heart is something that, something that can never fill the void inside of you.” (Mother remained separated from her child at time of interview, Guatemala), (see, https://www.womensrefugeecommission.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Family-Separation-Their-Own-Words.pdf

The Buddha teaches that to achieve enlightenment, one must first attain wisdom and compassion. In acknowledging the suffering of others, we must feel their pain by putting our imagination to work to prevent its recurrence.

In interviews with parents who lost children at the hands of border police we discover a commonality in their collective nightmare. Let’s begin by imagining a mother drowning in the harsh glare of an approaching spotlight. She trembles clutching her child close. It’s a cold night, a night thick with uncertainty, a woman who braved a 2,000-mile trek to free herself from gangs, but now finds herself at the end of an absurd journey, where, as Boris Pasternak wrote: “Absurdity has no end; it will just break off at one of its absurd links when no one expects it to.” A few hours ago, she may have cradled her baby, whispering promises of shelter, freedom and love. Suddenly an armed agent appears out of nowhere.

“Ma’am, we need to take the child for processing,” he says, in a coldly official tone. In the next instant she feels her child wrenched from her body, its tiny fingers grasping at thin air, followed by ear-piercing screams, desperate and frantic, only to be met with an official impassive stare, where the man turns, babe-in-arms, and vanishes into darkness.

Minutes pass unnoticed, she stands alone, bewildered, surrounded by the sounds of children hysterically screaming. But here, in this barren patch of a bordered purgatory, the souls of lost children float in futility while being swept-up by the ghost of an egomaniacal politician, who plays puppeteer with people’s lives. It’s a haunting stage in a strange place where children are last seen, where strange men in uniform confess complicity over any pretense of innocence.

Minutes stretch into days that stretch into a sterile eternity. She cannot quiet her mind as it replays that final moment—the way her baby’s eyes widened in confusion, the soft coo that turned into a wail of despair, the agent’s pink hand as it groped, grasped and twisted the baby from her bosom.

During the day she recalls the way the sun had once shone on their faces, a promise of a new life. She daydreams about holding her child, and almost feels the warmth of a tiny figure against her breast.

And at the end of day, when the sun dips below the horizon, it paints the sky in hues of yellow sorrow. She kneels in the dirt, clutching a small rattle, silenced the instant it’d slipped from her baby’s hand. It is all she has, a fragile reminder of the life that could have been, that will never come again.

Comes the night, she awakens to an empty cradle bathed in a stillness that echoes louder than any agonizing screams. She sobs, “Where are you?” in a lament that fast fades into thin air.

The border, once a symbol of sanctuary, has become a cavern swallowing children, at bottom, a line on a map, symbolizing an abyss, an aching void. In the quiet moments, she listens and hears a faint laughter of child—but knows it’s only a sound that float in the past.

In December, 2023, a federal judge in San Diego signed-off on a settlement of a lawsuit against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and former President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy of separating children from their parents suspected of crossing the border illegally. But lawsuits to remediate the ongoing damage that the Trump policy set in motion do not bring all the babies back from being lost in oblivion. A report from Mother Jones in February 2024 states that about 1,000 children have yet to be returned to their parents or legal guardians despite a court order mandating reunification.

If Trump succeeds in regaining office, he will strike again, this time deporting millions of immigrants, which will inevitably separate family members, as some families consist of children who are U.S. citizens and parents who are undocumented. Trump has explicitly refused to rule out the possibility of reinstating the family separation policy in a CNN Town Hall event earlier this year. Based on the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that grants the president wide immunity for “official acts,” his predilection for cruelty in separating families will go uncontested. And, if he does carry out his plans to separate families, it is we citizens who will bear, until our dying days, the stigma, stain and shame of an American debacle, because we’ve been loudly warned.

Notes

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/project-2025-immigration-conservative-plan-110000761.html

[2] A Guide to Project 2025 – FactCheck.org

[3] Family Separation in Their Own Words: The Lasting Harm of the … https://reliefweb.int/report/united-states-america/family-separation-their-own-words-lasting-harm-trump-administrations-zero-tolerance-policy

[4] Family separation – a timeline | Southern Poverty Law Center https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/03/23/family-separation-timeline

[5] Trump administration family separation policy – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_separation_policy

[6] Trump’s Family Separation Immigration Policy: How History Could … https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2024/08/11/trumps-family-separation-immigration-policy-how-history-could-repeat/

[7] Why did the Trump administration separate asylum-seekers from … https://www.texastribune.org/2018/10/02/why-did-trump-administration-separate-asylum-seekers-their-kids/

[8] How a Trump-era policy that separated thousands of migrant … – PBS https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-a-trump-era-policy-that-separated-thousands-of-migrant-families-came-to-pass

[9] The Trump Administration’s Family Separation Policy Is Over https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trump-administrations-family-separation-policy/

[10] How the Trump White House misled the world about its family … – NPR https://www.npr.org/2022/08/11/1116917364/how-the-trump-white-house-misled-the-world-about-its-family-separation-policy

Joseph Carvalko is an American lawyer, who for over four decades has represented numerous organizations and individuals, from billionaires to indigents. He has been actively engaged in organizations such as Amnesty International, as its Legislative Coordinator for the State of New Mexico; the Sioux City American Indian Center, board member/activist; and Chairman, Technology and Ethics Working Research Group, Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Yale University, and Adjunct Professor of Law at Quinnipiac University, School of Law, teaching Law, Science and Technology. He has also worked as a technologist, where he’s been awarded 18 patents in various fields. Carvalko has authored over twelve books which include novels, poetry, law, science and the humanities. His articles appear regularly in a variety of publications and blogs. He lives on the U.S. east coast and in the New Mexico mountains.

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