Jophiel wrote:
The US has an established program of taking unaccompanied minors at the border and putting them in sponsor families. This is where the 20% "We dunno" rate came from. If you look it up, you'll see photos of shelters from the Obama era and probably earlier doing the same thing. While you certainly couldn't defend it as a stellar example of effectiveness, you could at least argue that placing unaccompanied minors with sponsor families is better than keeping them permanently in a detainment facility.
So what Trump is doing is better than what Obama was doing? Just checking to see if I read that right.
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However, if you were a minor and with your parents who were detained, you remained with your family through the process.
At the risk of repeating a point that was already made, then where were all those unaccompanied minors coming from during the Obama administration? You kinda can't have it both ways. Either there were/are a largish number of minors actually showing up at the border with no adult family members (as you claimed earlier) or there are not. If there were not, then Obama was separating them, just as you're arguing Trump is. If there were, then your earlier point about this not happening very often is wrong (at least to some degree).
Which again, puts us in the "we don't really have enough specifics from the article to make a good decision about this" followed by "this sure seems like a lot of fact manipulation to create fear rather than actually informing the public about something".
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Trump has implemented a new policy of separating children from their parents and moving them in with the unaccompanied children where they will be entering the same program.
I'm not sure what you mean here. So he's separating the children from the parents (apparently in some way that Obama wasn't, or maybe was, depending on <something>. But then he's "moving them (them referring to the parents?) in with the unaccompanied children where they'll be entering the same program (so they're "together" for the entire immigration hearing process and for whatever happens next?)". Um...How is that "worse". If the complain is about separating families, your statement seems to indicate that Trump is keeping them together as much as possible and at least as much (if not more) than occurred under the Obama administration.
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There is no real reason for this besides "haha, fuck you illegals" but it means that significantly more children will be in the 20% "Eh, we made a phone call so we're done" group.
I'm not following you there. So separating them is bad. But putting them back together is somehow "more bad"? Now I'm not even sure what that 20% represents. Is that the number that aren't answering the phone because we lost track of them
and their parents, you know, since they're in this together now. Were you actually trying to argue that Trumps policy is bad because by putting them back together it increases the risk that the entire family will just disappear in the US? Or something else?
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Quite possibly, it could grow larger -- many unaccompanied minors were sent north with the expectation that Auntie Maria or whoever would take possession of them in the US. But there's no reason to assume that a child who was with their family just has more family in the US to act as a sponsor. These children would be more likely to wind up with strangers. That's why the "Once they're in the sponsor family, they're not our problem any more" statement is troubling and why intentionally flooding the program with more children purely as a "deterrent" to their families is damn near monstrous.
Again though, I'm seeing a lot of spin, and a lot of "OMG! We should be upset" and "Trump is BAD!" in this whole thing, but not really seeing the facts that support that. Is the rate of children "missing" higher or lower now than it was during Obama's administration? Is the rate of children separated or kept together (or rejoined later) higher or lower? What exactly are we crying about? From what I've seen it looks a lot like media folks suddenly "discovering" a problem about our immigration process with regards to children and parents that they've decided is a huge thing we all need to care about A LOT!, but which seems to have existed previously and they decided to ignore it then. I guess? Dunno. I can't tell from the data being provided.