Global Watch

TRUMPH Issues Order Against Separating Children From Their Immigrant Parents

BOWING to public pressure, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to end separation of immigrant families on the US-Mexico border. Trump signed the executive order following widespread protests against the move of his administration to separate children from their parents who illegally enter the country from the neighbouring under developed country for better quality of life and employment opportunities. As per pro- immigrant lobby, more than 2,500 children were separated from their parents.”We’re keeping families together, and this will solve that problem. At the same time, we are keeping a very powerful border and it continues to be a zero-tolerance. We have zero tolerance for people that enter our country illegally,” Trump told reporters at the White House.In the executive order Trump direct the Department of Homeland Security to keep families together while people await trial for illegal border crossing. But cases where there is a concern that parents “would pose a risk to the child’s welfare” have been exempted from the executive order. Trump said the executive order is about keeping families together while at the same time making sure that they have a very powerful and strong border. “And border security will be equal, if not greater than previously. We are going to have very strong borders, but we’re going to keep the families together,” he said.Trump said he didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated. “It’s a problem that’s gone on for many years, as you know, through many administrations. We are working very hard on immigration. It’s been left out in the cold. People haven’t dealt with it, and we are dealing with it,” he said.Trump’s political opponents including media , however, were not satisfied with the executive order, asserting that this was not enough.”The President’s Executive Order seeks to replace one form of child abuse with another. Instead of protecting traumatised children, the President has directed his Attorney General to pave the way for the long-term incarceration of families in prison-like conditions,” said Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.”It is particularly galling that President Trump seeks to continue violating children’s human rights to justify and gin up support for the anti-family language included in Speaker Ryan’s anti-immigrant bill,” she said. Pelosi said using terrified small children as “leverage” to push the President’s anti-immigrant agenda represents an “unspeakably appalling moral low-point for our nation”.Top Democratic leader Congressman Joe Crowley said while this order stops the separation of children from their parents, it does not end the administration’s despicable policy of unreasonably detaining asylum seekers and families fleeing violence.”Instead of pushing legislation that endorses the Trump administration’s policy of detaining families, House Republicans should join Democrats in calling for an end to the policy and in making sure we reunite the families that have been ripped apart,” he said.”The thousands of children who have spent days, weeks, and months without the love and support of their parents deserve nothing less,” Crowley added. Republican Senator Marco Rubio welcomed the executive order. “But Congress still needs to act because what they’re doing, while very humane, violates something called the ‘Flores Settlement’, which means someone’s going to take this to court and they’re going to get it thrown out,” he said.Meanwhile, reports The New York Times When the first lady, Melania Trump, on a surprise humanitarian visit to a children’s shelter in Texas, strode onto her airplane in an olive green Zara army jacket with those words scrawled in faux white graffiti on the back, it sent the watching world into what might be called, with some understatement, a meltdown.“Insensitive,” “heartless” and “unthinking” were some of the words hurled through the dig sphere about the choice.“It’s a jacket,” her communications director, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement to reporters. “There was no hidden message.”She reportedly asked POTUS to ensure children are not separated from their immigrant parents.(image courtesy : Washington Post)

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