The easiest battle to win is one that you’ve already won before. The hardest war to finish is one that is never meant to end.
In 2017, the Department of Homeland Security made a policy change. It mandated that any child found crossing the border with their family, requesting asylum, would be classified an “unaccompanied minor.” This relatively innocuous-sounding change means that these children were moved from DHS to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. The database for the ORR does not track the parents of “unaccompanied minors.” Transferring them thusly severed their connections to their parents.
This program was commonly referred to as “Family Separation,” and it was child torture. It was an act of unrepentant, unforgivable barbarism. It was the a domestic humanitarian crisis, the worst that had ever been intentionally induced in our lifetimes.
Although it did ruin lives, traumatized scores of children, this program was quickly ended. It was undermined by the right people in the right place. It was exposed by people with a platform and a voice. It was resisted by a public that was disgusted. It was reversed and, to the extent possible, the children reunited when a better man was given the power to do so.
Not satisfied with terrorizing immigrant children, the fledgling Trump administration later turned its ire against American foster children. The original iteration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (which successfully passed the House) repealed the Adoption Tax Credit, a rebate for the parents who adopt children from foster care, thus increasing the barriers to permanent placements in an already struggling system.
My fellow adoptive parents got loud. The Senate threw the provision out. Resistance worked then. It will work again.
We know how to fight this, because we’ve done it before. We’ve won it before. We have been vaccinated against cruelty, inoculated with empathy. We have practice putting ourselves between vulnerable people and the monsters who would harm them for material gain and prejudicial gratification.
Sadly, we will have to do so. Days back in power, Trump filed an executive order freezing all federal grants. This grant money includes Medicaid payments that fund the state-provided health care that foster and adopted children in Massachusetts depend on. Across the state, foster and adoptive parents had to scramble to find out if their children had just lost their health care. Again, vulnerable children found themselves at the at the front lines of somebody else’s war.
Marginalized groups are easy targets for a reason. Orphans and trans teens don’t have a lobbying arm. Adoptive parents struggling to get through the day aren’t looking to mount a primary challenge. Refugees and immigrant children aren’t contributing to a SuperPAC. There is a very good reason the waters are being tested this way. Fascism requires the establishment and violent enforcement of hierarchy, and cruelty trickles up.
We can have a long conversation about overreach, the Overton window, whether or not this moment constitutes a mandate, and how political calculus must be used to move forward. We will, in fact, have some of those conversations here on this blog over the course of this year. What I won’t entertain is a conversation about turning our backs on innocents human being, just because of the way the winds are blowing on fateful day last November. Yes, we’re going to have to stand up for people who are unpopular and unheard, not because it is the most politically expedient thing to do right now, but because it is right.
I hate that we’re back here. We all hate that we’re doing this again. It’s problematic to call this chapter a war; wars are meant to end, but democracy is not. Democratic society is a treasure that we seek to hand down for another seven generations. Occasional regression is the cost of keeping an unstable, unpredictable, and vulnerable system like ours operational. Each of us can lock arms to become the shield we need to outlast the storm. Let’s get to work.