Foster Care, Or Whatever

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News that our government plans to separate immigrant children from their families at the border has provoked widespread revulsion among people with the capacity to feel.  Separating families is an age old tool of social control that never seems to go away.
But while family defense practitioners look on this new policy with familiar sadness, it seems important to mark the ways in which this development is new.  Since the Progressive Era, family separation has been cast in terms of aid to children – saving them from their troubled or backward families of origin – whether that was the “dirty” Italian families of Boston or all of the Native American children placed in Indian Boarding Schools.  The good people were just trying to help.
What is striking about the current rhetoric about removal (“foster care or whatever”) is that it is no longer cloaked in a noble purpose.  This policy is purposely violent and purposely callous.  Our government knows that it is hurting children to achieve a goal of reduced immigration – and that, apparently, is the point.  That seems new, or at least a return to less subtle times.


Comments

  1. The WatcherMay 30, 2018 at 2:36 PM

    My children we're removed because of a workers documented lies and inaccurate information presented to the court. I represent myself and there is no reason for 5 siblings to be separated and placed in dangerous conditions. It is sad when you have been removed from the child abuse registry more than once for the same case. But yet your children remain in restrictive abusive foster home and residential facilities. 18 months in care for funding. I am from Detroit, Michigan and no matter the income, there is no oversight for liars.

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