CENTRAL NEWS
American democracy has torn apart yet more ethnic minority families, as over a third of the children who were separated from their families by Trump’s Zero-Tolerance policy, cannot be found.
In efforts to deter migrant families from crossing to the United States from Mexico, the Trump Administration disguised its fascist nature under a ‘Zero-Tolerance’ policy in 2017. The administration started to criminally prosecute all suspected illegal border-crossers on the border for illegal entry, even those who crossed for the first time.
Families who had been caught were kept in concentration camps and were separated from their children, should their adult relatives be charged with unlawful entry.
That so-called “zero tolerance” policy ended in 2018 and had largely faded from the headlines after sparking nationwide protests that year. But a revelation in court documents this week is shining fresh public attention on the policy and its aftermath. Lawyers say they haven’t been able to reach the parents of 545 of the 1,5000 children who were separated from their families — and that hundreds of those parents were likely deported without their children.
Though, the inhuman policy is not the first of its kind. The US has a long and brutal legacy of separating children from their families in attempts of punishment or assimilation.
Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the US snatched thousands of Native American children from their families and enrolled them in off-reservation boarding schools, stripping them of their cultures and languages. By the 1970s, one in four Native children nationwide were living in non-Native foster care, adoptive homes, or boarding schools. Many children experienced devastating emotional and physical harm by adults who mistreated them and tried to erase their cultural identity.
For centuries, the US colonized Native American lands and committed genocides against local populations. The Native American population continued to increase in numbers, so in 1881 the United States government developed softer, assimilation-focused policies to break the power of the ancient peoples. Seeing Native Americans as a threat to its narratives of white superiority, the United States tore apart thousands of families, and taught Native American children how to become “civilized”. The measure of “civilized-ness” was in fact Whiteness, Richard Henry Pratt revealed in his experiment in 1879: the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School project was started per an experiment proposed by US soldier Richard Henry Pratt who had taught Native American prisoners of war English; a move which supposedly proved that even Native Americans can become “civilized.” His motto was to “Kill the Indian, and save the man.”
Here, thousands of Native American children were placed in the school, thousands of miles away from their homes. The children were given new names and outfits, and were forbidden to speak their native language or to dress according to the culture of their tribes. Many of the children who were taken to these schools encountered mental, physical, sexual abuse, neglection, starvation, forced manual labour, and death. Though, the project had won the support of millions of people after being propagandised as a success story through ‘before and after’ photos.
In fact, the propaganda became so effective that 350 other “boarding schools” like Carlisle were opened around the country.
In one of the videos, a white man is seen pointing at a badly-dressed Native American child, saying “few of these children have ever seen a white man” to highlight how uncivilized the children were. He refers to their state, as a state of “savagery” and “barbarism.”
By 1900, the number of children in these assimilation centres rose to 20,000 and tripled to 60,000 in only 25 years. Families who refused to send their children faced incarceration at Alcatraz prison or the decreasing of food rations. Though some families camped outside schools to be closer to their children, a majority of the children were unable to communicate with their parents by the time they had finished “school”.
The mass-scale experiment started to lose support in 1928 after information was leaked about the brutality of these assimilation centres. But in 1958 another assimilation project had begun: adoption. The goal of this project was to “stimulate the adoption of American Indian children” to “non-Indian” families. This policy was cheaper than running assimilation centres, or ‘boarding schools’.
Again, a propaganda campaign was launched to make White people pity Native American children. The government promoted a campaign to make white readers feel like heroes who saved the lives of orphans who would have spent “bleak lives in reservations, being passed on from family to family, left to run lose.” The propaganda promoted the idea that the adoption would give the children a chance at new lives. The media campaign worked, but many of these children were not orphans. So, the government forged documents of “unfit parenting” as an excuse to rip apart children from their families.
By the 1960’s, one in four native children were living apart from their families. A majority of these children endured verbal, physical and sexual violence by their foster parents. The government never apologised other than changing its laws so that no more children were ripped away from Native American families. The ones who had already been snatched were left to face their fate.
