Forgive me if I don’t get the big fuss around Laura Bush lambasting Donald Trump.The former first lady wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, castigating the U.S. President’s newly enforced zero-tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that in the past several weeks has officially seen more than 2,300 children separated from their parents. The parents are detained in federal facilities, and because children can’t be held there, they are being warehoused in cages.There are no regulations around properly identifying children, no plan towards reuniting them. Some parents are being deported without their children.This is heinous. There is no way around it. There can be no justification for this morally repugnant policy. There should be no tolerance of it. Trump’s America has worn a veneer of civilization and stretched it so thin that it has torn beyond repair. Then again, this is a continent where history repeats itself with the regularity of a child’s tears. Like Canada, America wrenched Indigenous children from families and put them into schools to “assimilate” them. It auctioned off children of enslaved mothers to highest bidders, and more recently after the Second World War, imprisoned children separately from their families of Japanese ancestries.The latest violation didn’t happen overnight, either — officials admitted they “lost track” of some 1,500 undocumented children last year — but immorality functions on a spectrum. Bush calling the policy “cruel” and “immoral” shows Trump is finally crossing a line even for the architects of draconian immigrant policies. Read more: Analysis | Daniel Dale: Facing broad backlash for separating children, Trump digs in — and liesCanada detains migrant kids, too, and it needs to stop, experts sayHundreds of children wait in large metal cages with foil blankets at Texas Border Patrol facilityBush may have written that “o ...
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