It’s important for sure. I don’t think a child should be taken away from their family provided the family is able to provide for the child’s needs and they don’t abuse the child. That said, this issue is heavily politicized right now. The politicians on the right want strict obedience to the law, which entails deporting those who illegally enter the country. The politicians on the left want illegal immigrants to be given some legal status within the country. That’s why you have people like Kamala Harris saying
“the administration should end the zero-tolerance policy”, calling on the president to do something, now saying, once the president has done something to keep children from being taken away from their parents, that it
“didn’t fix the crisis.” And this flies in the face of the Flores settlement that came out of the 9th Circuit Court (a left-leaning circuit) which said that accompanied and unaccompanied children cannot be detained for more than 20 days. Nobody is going to win (politically) in this situation. The left doesn’t want them
detained together, they want them
released together. It’ll be interesting to see if someone challenges the legality of Trump’s EO here. If they do, Trump will then have to either go back to separating them, or letting them in wholesale as Obama did, which would be political suicide given Trump’s hardline platform on immigration.
I don’t know where the USCCB stands on the issue now, if children are going to be detained
with their parents. It’s better, but I imagine they, too, will still be dissatisfied.
