Kirstjen Nielsen, US Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security resigned last week, reportedly because President Trump wanted to implement even harsher policies at the US-Mexico border. Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade lamented her departure claiming that Nielsen had faced an “impossible situation” since “The signal to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala is ‘come now’ because the crackdown is going to happen.” He added:. “I don’t know what [she] could have done differently. She could not go out in a restaurant with her family, she worked 50 hours a day for the longest time, she got blasted in Congress when she went there. She took a lot of the pummelling from the press as well as Democrats. I think it was a thankless job.”
Whether you believe Ms Nielsen deserves sympathy for working such extraordinary hours during her 16-month tenure at DHS will largely depend on your views of the family separation policy which she so vigorously enforced – while, somehow, blaming it all on the previous administration. In turn, your opinion of that policy will likely depend on where you get your news. As Kilmeade’s remarks suggest, Fox News – which provides more than 2 million primetime US television viewers with their news – supports a hardline stance on immigration. (In a moment of inadvertent self-parody the Fox News chyron recently stated: “Trump cuts aid to three Mexican countries”.) On the other hand, coverage from less jingoistic sources, like the New York Times, points towards rather different conclusions.
The Times recently asked Sonia Nazario, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, to profile some of the Honduran women who might seek asylum in the US. ‘Someone Is Always Trying to Kill You’, Nazario’s account of her month-long research visit, shows the importance of investigative journalism in a democracy. Through a series of harrowing vignettes, she shows that, contrary to Trump’s fear-mongering rhetoric, many asylum seekers are simply ordinary people who are desperate to escape from a society controlled by criminals.
Even though its murder rate has dropped sharply in recent years, Honduras remains one of the five deadliest places on earth for women. Last year there were 280 homicides in New York City; in Honduras, which has roughly the same population, 380 women were killed. Furthermore, as Nazario notes: “Unlike in much of the world, where most murdered women are killed by their husbands, partners or family members, half in Honduras are killed by drug cartels and gangs. And the ways they are being killed — shot in the vagina, cut to bits with their parts distributed among various public places, strangled in front of their children, skinned alive — have women running for the border.”
The explosion of drug-related violence in Central America is hardly a new phenomenon. According to the LA Times: between 2011 and 2014, the number of Hondurans “detained by the US Border Patrol each year increased from 11,270 to 90,968. Many were children traveling on their own who said they were fleeing gangs.” The Obama administration did not handle that crisis humanely either, not by a long chalk, but president Trump campaigned on an explicitly xenophobic immigration policy, so his administration can hardly shy away from the consequences of the child separation policy. Especially when – and this cannot be overemphasized – the brunt of Trump’s crackdown had been borne by legitimate refugee claimants who have often endured appalling mistreatment while escaping to the US.
The unnecessary suffering which has resulted from Trump’s obsession with an impermeable border has been compounded by his decision to cancel key humanitarian aid to Central America. This will strand thousands of women and children in hopeless situations, and actively make those situations considerably worse. That is the real crisis at the border, not the manufactured one Trump has used to blackmail Congress into supporting his wall. US immigration policy certainly needs an overhaul if it is to balance national security with humane treatment of genuine refugees, but this has never been a priority for Trump and he has carefully chosen senior officials who share his disdain for helpless migrants from poor countries.
For most of the last century, in spite of its many flaws, the United States has remained a global symbol of freedom and democracy. It was, and is, a country built by immigrants, many of whom can quote the inscription on the statue of Liberty. (“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”) Kirstjen Nielsen, Jeff Sessions, and other enablers of President Trump’s immigration policies ought to be seen for what they really are: a temporary aberration in American history, self-righteous ethno-nationalists who have broadcast Trump’s contempt for the wretched of the world. Amoral bureaucrats who have demeaned the compassionate message at the heart of the country they claim to defend.
