Trump is set to separate more than 200,000 U.S.-born children from their parents [View all]

By Mark L. Schneider
July 6 at 12:08 PM

Mark L. Schneider is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former director of the U.S. Peace Corps, and former head of Latin America and the Caribbean at USAID.

If you think the last few weeks of separating 2,300 children from their migrant parents along the southern border were heart-wrenching, imagine if 273,000 American-born children are separated from parents whose temporary protected status (TPS) is terminated. That is what could happen if the Trump administration’s decision to revoke TPS for Haitians, Salvadorans and Hondurans is allowed to take effect.

Despite President Trump’s executive order reversing his policy of separating migrant families, most of those 2,300 children have not been returned to their parents. That is truly unconscionable.

More than 100 times that number of children — all U.S. citizens — will be placed in similar jeopardy if the Department of Homeland Security begins programs to deport more than 58,000 Haitians on July 22, 2019, more than 262,000 Salvadorans on Sept. 9, 2019, and 86,000 Hondurans on Jan. 5, 2020. Parents will be faced with the decision of whether to take their children — most of whom speak mainly English and know only life in this country — back to countries deemed by the State Department as not safe for travel, some with the highest homicide rates in the hemisphere.

Otherwise, parents will have to leave their children alone in the United States or, if they’re lucky, with relatives, or foster parents who they may or may not know, or some with “adult sponsors” chosen by federal agencies. The only other choice available to those parents would be to hide in the shadows as undocumented aliens. And that is what the ambassadors to the United States from El Salvador and Honduras, during an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), predicted that most families would attempt. And DHS would undoubtedly begin a massive hunt for them.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/07/06/trump-is-set-to-separate-more-than-200000-u-s-born-children-from-their-parents/