Forced Family Separation

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about the President's Executive order about the separation of family policy and about the incarceration of family policy that has now replaced it. There are details that are unknown at this point about how this program will be working as we go forward, but we know enough right now to have the most serious and significant concerns about the President's Executive order.

Every great nation--even the greatest Nation in the history of the world like the United States of America--has moments of extraordinary shame, times when it loses its moral compass, and it simply takes the wrong direction. We can remember a number of them in our own Nation's history. One of them was the internment of Japanese children who were thrown into World War II-era detention camps and imprisoned, in effect, with their parents. Almost every lawyer in the United States of America and most citizens know the name Korematsu, and that is because it was a moment of shame for this country.

Ending family separation--the process of tearing children away from their moms and dads--is a welcomed and humane step, but the solution should not be the indiscriminate and indefinite detention of children. Family separation should not be replaced by family imprisonment. There is no moral advantage to incarcerating children as opposed to tearing them away from their parents. In fact, it is not only immoral, it is illegal. The courts have said so on a number of occasions--in 1997, in the Flores case, which is now well-known to everyone, but more recently, in fact, as recently as 2016. The reason goes to the core of our constitutional principle about how and when and whom we imprison, how we take liberty away from people.

Indefinitely imprisoning children and families is still inhumane and ineffective law enforcement. President Trump's current policies will put children behind bars indefinitely and indiscriminately. Children will experience many of the same enduring of trauma, pain, and harm. The world will continue to watch the United States of America lock up innocent children and throw away the key.

Much like the policy of family separation, this new policy of indefinite and indiscriminate family detention harkens back to those dark days, to those moments of shame in this country during World War II. History will judge us as harshly if we fail to speak out and stand up at this moment of testing. The gaze of history is upon us now. It is upon the President. It is upon every Member of the U.S. Senate.

There are immense costs to this policy--$775 a day, per individual, at these detention camps. Yet the costs are way beyond dollars and cents; they are to the moral image and authority of this country and to our self-image--the accountability to ourselves, to our own sense of morality and humanity.

The world was outraged when it saw children being torn away from parents, and now the President has acknowledged that his heart responded as well. Yet soon--and I would predict very soon--we will see images as striking, as stunning, and as repugnant as those images of taking children away from their parents when we see those images of the detention facilities, cages, and of children--young people behind bars and packed beyond capacity--on military bases and other places that were never designed to be holding facilities. The world will be outraged by those images as well--of the sights and sounds of those children.

We owe this new policy a special scrutiny and a strong sense of outrage if it is what it seems like right now. We cannot remain silent about the children who have been already separated from their parents. Nothing in this Executive order--not a word--provides for the reunification of the thousands of children who have already been separated from their parents. What will happen to them? Where are they? Where are their parents? How will they be reunited? What trauma will they continue to endure? This policy remains as inhumane and cruel for them as it was earlier today or this week.

All of us bear a responsibility in this moment. I urge my colleagues to take this day--World Refugee Day--to commemorate the great work done by brave individuals in this country who help to resettle refugees and the refugees themselves who had the courage and strength to come here after having made the journeys from shores far away and after having overcome obstacles most of us have never confronted.

There are solutions other than putting children into detention camps. There are release programs that involve oversight and supervision. There is also a case management program that has been working, along with other cities' efforts, that has been used for releasing them. We should choose the least restrictive alternative, the least burdensome one that best serves the purposes of law enforcement. Make no mistake, we have that obligation not only as a matter of heart and morality but also of law.

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