For the past few months, images of distressed migrant childrenhave populated American newsfeeds and television screens. Many of the children are the victims of “family separation,” their parents deported from the U.S. without them; while detained without their parents, some of them have been forbidden from being hugged. The Trump administration has defended family separation, then backtracked on the policy, then started to reunite families at the order of a federal judge.
Administration—which has mandated that all adult migrants crossing the border without papers be criminally prosecuted—has sharpened focus on the border and the detention centers migrants have been held in. For the first time in the short history of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), says Lilia Soto, a professor of American studies at the University of Wyoming, national audiences saw images of ICE officials separating children from their parents and incarcerating them—and heard audio recordings of children sobbing after being separated from their parents. “It’s not something that’s happening clandestinely,” Soto says.
A lot of what’s happening is unprecedented. However, those who study the border, like Soto, know that parents and their children have been separated by American immigration policies for decades, if not longer. As Soto points out, this has often happened out of view from most Americans and photographers’ cameras, starting from the first migrations from Latin America to the United States.
[For more on this story by NATALIE ESCOBAR, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/fa...ly-100-years/567479/]
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