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Following from @Quantumfreakonomic's post yesterday on the judge who was arrested for trying to sneak an illegal migrant out of a courthouse to avoid ICE, that media storm may be prompting a counterstory on the latest Trump immigration outrage to be outraged about.
Reuters: Two-year-old US citizen appears to have been deported 'with no meaningful process'
New York Times: 2-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Deported ‘With No Meaningful Process,’ Judge Suspects
CBS News: Judge demands answers on whether 2-year-old U.S. citizen was deported to Honduras
Washington Post: Three U.S. citizens, ages 2, 4 and 7, swiftly deported from Louisiana
Rolling Stone: Trump Has Now Deported Multiple U.S. Citizen Children With Cancer
CNN: Federal judge says 2-year-old US citizen was deported with mother to Honduras
Yes, the new scandal for the new week, just in time to replace coverage of the somewhat embarrassing judge from last week, now presents a heroic judge objecting to the deportation of US children. While multiple cases are there, the focus of the current not-at-all coordinate push focuses on the 2-year old from Louisana.
Admittedly, the CNN article did make the mistake of letting the headline reveal some of the possible nuance as to 'why'. Being the only headline to mention 'mother' was what started this little media dive.
The key sequence of events from the CBS article include-
Some of the potentially relevant context, not all of which was in the CBS article, and which different organizations provide different framings for.
On some differences in filings and timings-
CBS
CNN
Washington Post
CBS
CNN and the Washington Post did not raise the legal custody issue raised on Tuesday, which frames later decisions. The Post in particular removes the child from the context of the mother in the plane to Honduras, treating the 2-year-old citizen as the only relevant individual on the plane as opposed to the mother and older sibling.
CBS did raise the custody case, but does not raise the Thursday petition for immediate release that could be understood in the custody decision.
Only CBS raises that the court session sought Thursday afternoon occurs on Friday afternoon. The Washington Post emphasizes the time of the departure flight as before court could open, insinuating without explicitly claiming a motive for the timing of the flight. No context is provided by anyone on what time the flight actually was, what time the court was, or the other normal times of possible flights to Honduras from the local airport are.
Additionally, no media actually characterizes the relationships between mother, father, and sister-in-law. There's no claim that the father and mother are married. Therefore, there is only an insinuation that the 'sister-in-law' is meaningfully related to the mother in a sense that would normally sway custody fights.
On the basis of the child's removal, for sources that did so-
CBS
Washington Post
CNN
Different sources provide different strengths of agency to the mother. CBS only attribute a mother motive via government statement after the fact, and makes no claim of the mother herself expressing an interest. CNN reports that the government claims the mother wrote a note, but does not mention the note itself was included in court submissions. Washington Post notes that there was an actual note attached, but disassociates veracity via 'they say' to open door for doubt.
Only CNN directly addresses a claimed government policy of asking the migrant parent their preference.
On the status of the father-
Washington Post
CNN
CBS News
The Washington Post makes no reference to the legal custody attempt by the father, and thus why ICE might request he present himself to them regardless of immigration status. CNN and CBS do acknowledge the custody shift to the sister-in-law, but do not elaborate why the father could not request custody for himself. CBS alludes that the father's status is 'unclear,' while CNN establishes a threat (custody) but not basis for the threat (possible immigrant status himself).
No media covers the implication of an unverified man requesting custody of a child be revoked from the undisputed mother to another woman of unclear relation.
On the Judge's Comments-
CBS
Washington Post
CNN
Only CNN quotes the opening section of the Judge's sentence and interest. Both CBS and the Washington Post begins their quote after removing the opening clause, creating a stronger statement.
Trump First Term Child Separation Scandal
Human Rights Watch: Trump’s Cruel Separation Policy Has Not Ended
...I kid, that one is from 2018.
No media references, raises, or otherwise brings attention to the criticisms to the first term policy of detaining or deporting adult illegal migrants without their children.
In summary, if it this starts permutating on the interwebs next week-
The two-year-old american citizen case involves
A larger family(?) of non-citizens migrants with a singular birthright-citizenship daughter
The American citizen is/was an archetypical 'anchor baby' context without being called such
More broadly, the headline/surface narratives conflate child deportation with child-custody considerations
Finally- Is there basis for legitimate concern in this scandal?
Yes.
If you thought the lead-up was a the media is totally lying about everything trope, that was deliberate. It was to make a point about why I expect this scandal to hook some and be dismissed by others.
For people who are hawkish on illegal immigration, this case is not your friend. There is a lot of red meat here that could be uncovered- potentially unmarried family unit, a concerned father of uncertain status who in the first minute of establishing contact tries to convey a litigation strategy, child-custody defaults being reversed- but there is a hook that can work against you. And that hook is the disruption of what most people would consider a due process right, even if deportation legalism is different from a criminal court process.
For people upset about ICE and due process, this coverage is also not your friend. The framings- and the not-very-deep undercurrents that go against the framing- will give a basis to dismiss concern as motivated. The children-in-cage's and child-separation critiques are not going to be forgotten. The fact that not separating children from their deported parents is now a basis of criticism is going to undercut criticims of both. The media's rush to present a concerned father is going to run into discrediting disappointing revelations.
But the propaganda doesn't mean there is only propaganda. Even if it's not what the coverage generators wants you to be concerned about, because- again- you need to piece together relevant events not tied together in any single framing.
CBS
Why was Doughty asking for a phone call with the mother?
Washington Post
Why did the Tuesday night phone call with the mother (allegedly) get stopped by ICE after only a minute?
CNN
This is a claim. It is a claim made by someone with an interest in claiming it regardless of whether it is true or not. It is also a valid basis for concern, independent of deportation of the mother or custody decisions of her child.
If true, this would indicate that communication between the woman and potential legal representation was deliberately disrupted. How long it was disrupted is a relevant interest, particularly if other legal advice might have changed her mind of letting her newborn stay with someone else.
This brings relevant questions that may or may not have been precluded.
Is there any legal barrier preventing the 2-year-old US citizen from returning to the US, beyond 'typical' international legal custody issues?
It is not claimed. But then, no major media coverage has expressed interest in that paradigm either.
Frustration.
The reporting is mostly based on court documents, which are worth reading yourself if you are interested enough in the case to read multiple news articles on it.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69940863/v-m-l-v-harper/
With regard to your first question, the sister-in-law has a Provisional Custody by Mandate document signed by the father, which allows her to exercise most of the parental rights of the father.
With regard to your other questions, the key key point is that their is nothing in the record saying whether the mother would prefer (1) her citizen daughter to come with her to Honduras, or (2) have her citizen daughter remain in the United States in the custody of the father. ICE doesn’t claim to have asked her that question. Petitioner claims that ICE refused to allow the father’s lawyer to talk to the mother (see Memorandum in Support of Emergency TRO, page 4). The judge says that when he tried to talk to the mother, ICE told him that the mother had already been released in Honduras (see Order docket number 8).
If indeed he has any.
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I disagree. George Floyd wasn't Rosa Parks. The closer the case is to being 50.000001% in favor of ICE the better, because if this deportation is ruled lawful, then this will establish the broadest possible precedent for subsequent deportations. The same applies to popular support/acceptance.
Dangerous gamble because that cuts both ways.
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This sounds like a real tangle. If the news reports are saying the two year old is a US citizen, but nothing about her 11 year old sister, that makes it sound like only the 2 year old was born in the USA. If the mother has been attending ICE meetings for four years, that makes it sound like mother, father and first daughter arrived in the US about four to five years ago (or maybe longer, but after the elder girl was born since she's not, by the sounds of it, a US citizen).
It's unclear if the parents are married, married then divorced, or never married. Or who the sister-in-law with citizenship is; she could be the mother's sister, or she could be married to a brother of the father. That would be an even more remote relationship so no wonder the transfer of custody was held up.
Yeah, the reporting does make it sound like "they put a 2 year old all alone on a plane back to Honduras even though she's a US citizen by birth". For all the complaining about separating parents and children, at least both daughters and the mother were sent back all together. The father's status is also unclear so he could be on the next flight out.
The aim of the reporting here does seem to be "the 2 year old has a right to be here by virtue of her citizenship, you can't break up a family, you can't leave a 2 year old on her own, so you have to permit the sister and father and mother to remain as well".
It's a genuine problem: a citizen can't be deported, but what if the citizen is a minor (a very young minor as in this case)? With no closer legal family members than a possible aunt by marriage?
They can be assigned a guardian ad litem to advocate for their best interests in family court, the same as any other minor in the USA - citizen or not - with thorny custody problems. The best solution will vary case-by-case, but that's what courts are for.
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I would assume in that case the foster system is the place to put them
Foster system is not great. I genuinely think "being with mom and sister back in mom's native country" is better than that.
Well, of course it's better to be with your biological parents in the mayority of cases. But the point I was making is that if it isn't possible for the child to be with them, there are other options.
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This is why you have to do mass deportation as fast and as bombastically as possible. It’s like the Gaza thing, it was the trickle of deaths that killed them. If you’re an ‘authoritarian democrat’ in a country that still had freedom of the press and you want to disappear you enemies, do it all on the same day rather than over a couple of months. Shock and awe.
There are some of us, certainly, for whom no amount of these stories will change our opinion. I know that because I am one. But any conservative who thinks enough sob stories won’t affect enough public opinion to make a difference is kidding themselves. A thousand sad deportations over a thousand days is a thousand chances at public sympathy. A thousand sad deportations on the same day is one or two.
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Of course. This is the intended effect of those who failed to enforce immigration law for long periods of time. Generating sob stories to prevent immigration enforcement from being effective has long been an implicit and obvious goal. Its also a problem, in this case, with the dubious interpretation of the 14th Amendment we currently live under the rule of (which, I admit, despite its weakness, we will likely have for the foreseeable future).
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Can the father or SIL not go pick the 2 year old up from Honduras at a later date if that's what the mother and father decide they want to do? The 2 year old has citizenship - while an unnecessary flight to Honduras with a 2 year old is obnoxious it's not exactly an irreparable harm - there are flights from Honduras to the US every day of the week, and I'm sure a gofundme could finance a few hundred dollars of plane tickets given this level of publicity.
Of course, ICE trying to interfere with the mother's ability to contact legal counsel is, if true, super concerning.
By the sounds of it, the father may not have legal status to be in the USA himself, and the sister-in-law who is a US citizen may be a remote family member, so is it better to put the child in the care of someone not a blood relative, rather than let her remain with her mother and sister? If the father was legal, the problem would be a lot simpler, but on the face of it nobody in the immediate family (except the child herself) has any legal right to be in the country.
Of course, we have to wait for more details to come out before we can decide on that.
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The fact that a kid has US citizenship does not mean that the the legal system of Honduras will refer to the US courts in any custody decision. So of the parents can not agree on what should happen with the child, the child will be deprived of the right of an US custody court deciding its fate. That would be irreparable harm -- unless Trump is willing to send SEAL team to repatriate the child.
Now, it could well be that the custody battle between father and mother is just a charade meant to delay the deportation of the mother. But presumably the Federal government can expedite that custody process. Unless the mother is due to have another baby (which Trump would prefer not to be a US citizen), I don't exactly see the urgency.
Also, no matter how you spin it, deporting two kids aged 2 and 11 along with their mother is terrible optics. The executive has some leeway in whom to deport, so Trump can not hide behind "just following the law" here. Presumably, Trump has already gotten rid of all the gang members, and the men with random tattoos and the people accused of a crime and "mothers of US citizens who went to their ICE check-ins" are the only ones left?
Please elaborate how you think the federal government can expedite state court judicial proceedings.
I have never seen this happen. I mean, I've only practiced law for 12 years so maybe I will see this in the future. But we live in a world of dual sovereignty, particularly with the courts.
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I think that this sort of irreparable harm is somewhat unavoidable in such circumstances. Janet Reno was willing to send tactical border patrol agents to return a toddler from extended family in the US to his father in Cuba -- there is an iconic photo of a federal agent pointing an MP-5 at a screaming toddler in his family's arms. Or that time the Carter administration allowed a Ukrainian teenager living in Chicago to claim asylum when his parents decided to move back to the Soviet Union. All of those cases are, in some ways "irreparable harm". But so is the reverse, and I'm not really sure how you'd consistently manage to avoid all such classes. I'm open to suggestions.
Both international and US law say that children subject to active custody disputes should not be removed from the jurisdiction of the child's habitual residence without the permission of the (family) court having jurisdiction, and should be returned quickly if they are removed - the big difference with the Eilan Gonzales case is that Eilan was habitually resident in Cuba (so the claim to keep him in the US was on best interest grounds) whereas the child here is habitually resident in the US (and the reason for removing them is to conveniently deport the mother). It isn't obvious how this interacts with immigration law if the child is an illegal immigrant (although I suspect an English or American domestic court would rule, contra the international law textbooks, that a child could not be habitually resident in a country where their presence was illegal), but this is a case where the child is a citizen.
Even if you disagree with the policy, the amount of process that is due before deporting a US citizen child with relatives in the US who claim to be able and willing to care for them is greater than zero. Based on both the press coverage and the general direction of Trump administration immigration process, it looks like ICE made no attempt to understand the family law position before deporting the mother and child - it looks like they went further and deliberately frustrated the parents' attempt to do so in order to get mum out of the country before a court could intervene.
Agreed that the most likely fact pattern is that the whole family (except for the US-born kid) including Dad were in the country with permission under one of the various Biden-era programmes, and can be legally deported now that Trump has revoked that permission.
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Presumably, to stay in the US as a minor, you require both (1) being allowed to stay in the US by the US gov (e.g. having asylum, citizenship or being tolerated) and (2) your legal custodian living in the US. In both of these cases, the subject of the custody battle was not a US citizen, so the federal administration had a lot more discretion. WP is not clear on how the custodial case for Walter Polovchak turned out and how federal courts became involved. The general vibe I get from both of these cases was that there was a lot more judicial oversight than in the present case.
Irreparable harm is unavoidable in custodial battles, sure, but I would argue that the proper place to decide how to minimize that harm is family court (which is supposed to take the child's best interests into account), not the whim of some ICE bigwig who is likely happy to fill another seat in the plane, citizen or not.
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Not only that, the practice of sending people away at the ICE checkin, as opposed to using that visit in to serve them with notice of termination of status so that they can get their shit and depart in an orderly fashion creates the an awful selection effect.
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If the father were legally in the United States, sure. It seems likely he is not, so if he leaves the country he will find it difficult to come back.
It sounds like the SIL is legally in the united states. With notarized parental consent letters on both sides and the 2 year old's passport I'd be surprised if there was any major issue in having the SIL pick up the kid and bring her back to the US to dad.
I doubt the notarized consent would be easy to get from mom, but that's because this sounds to me like a custody battle.
That depends on the Sister-in-Law's actual relationship to the mother, not the father.
The SIL and the mother do not necessarily have any legally relevant relationship. This is where the implication of the mother and father never being characterized as married potentially matters.
If the father's SIL is in fact the mother's sister, then as you say it could be legally simple to reverse if the parties are in agreement. That is not the same as administratively simple- I'd be surprised if the child has a passport- but
If the sister-in-law is a SIL due to the father marrying someone else- a currently undisclosed woman who would be unsympathetic to the narrative- then the analogy would be more akin to an adoption than familial custody.
The SIL's job in this case is "accompany the kid on the plane ride from mom to dad after both of them write consent letters and get them notarized". As long as both parents do that I expect the airline will be fine with it, and once the kid lands in the US she can't be denied entry into the US.
I don't expect the mom to agree to that, to be clear.
I think what is complicating this is that it's not the usual "who gets custody of the children after a divorce" or "who gets custody when the children are removed because of neglect or abuse" type case.
If the parents aren't married and the kids are living with the mother, and the mother and older sister and the father are not US citizens/have no legal right to be in the country, then handing over custody (temporary or longer) to the citizen sister-in-law is a different kettle of fish.
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Not quite. Remember- the father was not asking for custody for himself. The father was asking for custody to be transferred to his sister-in-law. And this sister-in-law who is supposed to be taking both escort and legal custody has no established relationship to the mother, only the father.
A notary might be able to help the plane ride in abstract, but a notary cannot transfer formal or de facto legal custody from a mother to a potentially unrelated citizen of another country. Since the purpose of the plane flight is to remove the mother's custody of the child, after she (reportedly) indicated to the US government she wanted to retain custody...
Then the mother will probably not sign a notarized consent letter, yes.
My point was that if both parents decided they wanted the kid to grow up in the US with the SIL that is still something they could arrange. Emphasis on the word "if".
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I agree, but what am I to do with that? Based on the "child separation", the "Dreamers", this case's publicity, and the general zeitgeist, it really does seem that the only policy that will actually be accepted by opponents on this is that if you have a child in the United States, you cannot be removed. There is no actual set of proceedings that could satisfy the demand that parents not be separated from their children but also that children cannot be deported with their parents. Any attempt to come up with some narrowly satisfactory resolution that would meet the due process standard that someone came up with approximately 15 minutes ago will slam into some new bad-faith litigation about why of course some deportations are fine, but not this one.
It is increasingly clear to me that getting any resembling what I would consider an appropriate level of deportations will actually just require deciding to be mean in a way that will alienate a significant number of people. My options are not between making a strong legal argument for position or just letting everyone stay, they're between deciding to look mean or just letting everyone stay. If meanness is going to be the actual deciding factor, that's what the decision-making from my side is going to have to be centered on, and I'm perfectly fine with just being mean at this point.
If you want to hold sustained political, you'll have to find a formulation that meets as much of your goals as possible without alienating lots of voters. Probably won't be all of it, but it's awful politics to decide that you're just gonna speedrun it rather than figure out a durable policy.
There is another way, of course.
The people who make labyrinths in the way of sane government policy should understand themselves as building monuments to the necessity of violence. Because that is what they are doing.
It can be reasonable and necessary to do so, in a Cold Liberal sense, but this is not what this is. This is the immigration equivalent of Locke saying "we'll just ban Atheism" as if that's a solution.
Labyrinths are one thing, but /u/walterodim was pretty clear he felt like the opposition was coming directly from the people being alienated.
I don't believe in public opinion.
You’re entitled to that, but you can’t then be shocked if you lose elections.
What possessed you to think that I, an avowed critic of democracy, would be surprised that good government is unpopular?
My point is precisely that, though it is, we live in reality, not in whims. Which you can only ignore for a time before despotism grows in its allure. Brainwashing your population to make sure sensible rule is impossible has consequences.
I encourage you to read Federalist No. 10 again.
The problem with getting despotism via populism is clear.
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OK, you've decided to be mean. ICE agents are screaming at crying toddlers and dragging them kicking and screaming away from their parents, who are put in concentration camps until they can be deported to a country that may jail or execute them.
Problem: Normies hate seeing things like this. They balk and the other party wins the next election. All of Trump's policies are written in chalk that can just be erased when a new POTUS is in town. Now there's talk about going back to the defacto open borders of Biden's times.
What's step 2 in your master plan then?
That's why you can't have massive deportations without authoritarianism, even if they are supported by the majority. People go to the US for the better life that's just too of a empathetic reason for the public to not be sympathetic to them. Yes, this line of thinking logically leads to de facto open borders and hundreds of millions Africans and latinos going to US but that too second order for common folk.
Either that or public stops being empathetic to anybody but their tribe, but I don't think that's very likely in America.
I'm sure the public would be perfectly fine believing that nothing untoward is happening if the media was on the side of the ruling administration and either not talking about it or dutifully framing it and reminding normies that these are people who broke the law and are getting their comeuppance (however fitting that is to the facts).
That's unlikely to happen under a Republican administration for political reasons, but the idea that it's impossible to convince your run of the mill American to be indifferent to the fate of people with interests that conflict with theirs is farcical. Wars were begun and ended on much flimsier pretenses.
The question is whether you'd call that media manipulation authoritarianism or not. I think any serious analysis is past such qualifiers. Effecting unpopular causes with popular consequences is like the entire purpose of government. And people really want to be lied to about these things.
They want to think of themselves as empathetic whilst they launder the violence necessary to maintain society to the State. So the banality of evil has to happen, but off camera.
Kind of tangential, but whenever I hear people complaining that the media is reporting unfairly on Trump (which, to be fair, you are not saying), I want to play a very sad song for that guy on the world's tiniest violin. Trump made his first baby steps into politics by condemning the Central Park Five, and not surprising to anyone with the benefit of hindsight, he was full of shit when he did so. Decades later, he elected the fringe conspiracy theory of birtherism to make a foray into politics in earnest, followed notably by the denial of the 2020 election result. Even his White House press releases look like the ramblings of someone who has long lost contact with anything resembling objective truth. So if his political demise comes at a totally fabricated yellow press story of him fucking a male underage porcupine, I would call that poetic justice.
Now, I am a lot more sympathetic to both deontological and consequentialist arguments against twisting the truth to foil him. The deontological argument is basically that by adopting a Trumpian nihilist irreverence for what is true, the press is basically throwing overboard the most important quality which separated them from him. (Or at least part of it -- see SA on Bounded Distrust.) The consequentialist argument is that you can not out-bullshit the master bullshitter, and that the way to prevail against him is not to get dragged down to his level. (Not that I would call the spinning the MSM did on this story Trump level dishonesty, sure, they did spin it and selectively reported the facts to suit their agenda, but if this was instead a WH press release I would be fully prepared to later learn that Honduras is not a country and people do not have mothers because humans multiply through fission.)
And sure, from some cosmic perspective, Trump probably does not deserve to have lies told about him, in the same way that Billy the fucking Kid did not deserve to have his life snuffed out by a piece of lead.
Live by the media controversy, die by the media controversy?
I'm sure the man himself actually loves it. You never see him smirk as much as when he can call some journo "fake news". I find that whilst the most ridiculous lies are told about the man and he constantly complains about it, the way he frames the complaints tells another story. Trump is constantly doing "a little trolling (it's called [...] a little trolling)".
The far more legitimate complaint here is that the MSM should be, on their own terms, above falling for it. And yet since 2016 they've gleefully shoveled their credibility into a fire trying to claim the "Trump bump" to anchor their dying viewerships.
Not that I am making the complaint, I'm now securely convinced that journalists have always been dishonorable sellswords and should be treated as such. But that's what I imagine the frustration from people sentimental about the Cronkite era looks like.
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"It is not that 'cruelty is the point'- it is that the accusation of cruelty is no longer sufficiently deterring." - was a quality contribution nominee in the last quality post roundup, for what it's worth.
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You absolutely can.
Step 1 would be to have competent and diligent people in charge, making decently intelligent decisions about prioritization and being dedicated to followthrough.
Like, this lady was voluntarily showing up to periodic checkins with ICE. Seems like they could have easily given her 10 days to figure out what to do.
She had a removal order and was removed. She requested her child accompany her. That was granted.
ICE was as nice as is realistically possible to he aside from not deporting her. The "mean" part is to the child who is 2 years old and doesn't even know what being a citizen is. Also said child can come back to the US when they want to. Obviously that will be in the distant future because she probably can't articulate anything on that level at the moment.
Regarding these immigration stories that keep coming out, I feel like we are at, "Just let the terrorists win" levels at this point. That is the argument coming out of the media.
I dont want the terrorists to win. How do you propose to do so?
In this case tell her that we’re terminating the ISAP and she’s got till next week to depart.
She’s been showing up diligently to check-ins, she’s not the problem.
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People tried that. The ones calling themselves diligent and competent refuse to implement the policies they campaign on, and proceed to invest their political capital into foreign wars that aren't ran diligently or competently.
And if diligence and competence gets us Biden's border crisis, perhaps these words don't mean that much to begin with.
I don't suspect that it will go much better when substituting retarded and short-attention-spanned.
Why? The border crisis was solved overnight.
Indeed. What makes you think it's a durable solution?
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Is there any evidence that this wouldn't just happen anyway?
Sure, eventually there will be another left wing President. The key outcome you'd want is to maximize your guy's time in office before that happens.
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Forget about the deportation for a minute and assume the mother decided to move to Honduras with the child. Unless the father's parental rights were completely terminated, he would have grounds to contest the decision in Louisiana family court. The fact that ICE is now involved doesn't magically supersede state law and allow the mother to make a unilateral decision, and ICE shouldn't have sent away the child absent a determination by the family court.
I am not a family law lawyer, but it seems like the father may not have any rights under LA since the parents weren’t married when the kid was born.
Ouch, that is fucked up.
Presumably, this means that that the father also does not owe any alimony, since giving someone the duties of parenthood without the rights of parenthood would be plainly absurd?
I jest.
Nah, hé fucked around(like actually literally) and found out. He could’ve married her to fix it(it’s unlikely to me that a woman would turn down a marriage offer from a man she’s already having a kid with- the exceptions are probably AWFLs, not illegals).
I'm assuming the 11 year old is the daughter of this man, but what if she's not? What if Mom moved herself and her kid to the US (illegally), met a new guy, had a kid with him outside of marriage and that kid is the 2 year old citizen here. Then the father of the 2 year old has no relationship to the 11 year old, which may be why he's not seeking custody of her.
Letting both daughters go back with Mom may not be the meanest decision here, if the primary family is Mom and daughters with Dad (of 2 year old) not living with them.
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That's perfectly compatible with @quiet_NaN's point, though. If we're going to force the moron in question to take on the duties of parenthood, he should take on ALL of them, and the rights and privileges thereby.* Which is pretty similar to the old remedy of the shotgun wedding. It's the non-reciprocity of it that repels.
*Unless he's clearly unsuited, which would presumably be decided by social services.
At a certain level, there are things we make people do. ‘Providing for your kids’ is one of them. It’s beyond civilizational capacity to make him do it well, so we don’t- send x amount of money is a perfectly reasonable amount of state coercion.
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I can't take claims that the Trump admin is trying to decrease the population of illegal immigrants in the US seriously in the absence of any attempts to expand the scope of e-verify.
But focusing on employers through an already-existing program wouldn't let Trump grandstand and vice signal.
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Should be
These people aren't upset about the anchor baby. They're upset that illegals aren't being allowed to stay. There are no grounds for a special exception to US immigration laws that they won't accept. If an illegal crossed the border and claimed asylum in the US from the nth-dimensional lizards who gangstalk them in the old country, the people upset by this removal would gladly say that he has the right under international law to stay.
This is wildly uncharitable.
But is it untrue? We are seeing people who, outside of illegal migration context, are considered lowest of the low - child molesters, drug dealers, domestic abusers, violent gangsters, robbers, rapists, etc. - are protected and defended by the establishment figures as soon as the removal is concerned. Up to personally obstructing immigration officials, sometimes. Where is the bar where they'd say "no, that's enough, we agree this person needs to be removed from our country"? I don't know, but certainly it is so low that at least anybody who is not engaged in active combat against the Americans at this particular moment seems to be easily clearing it.
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No, I wouldn't.
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The best execution of the policy would likely have been to let the call happen for some period longer than 5 minutes, and document thoroughly discussions and decisions about the custody of the 2-year-old, but with the same result (assuming that the mother did in fact want to keep the daughter with her, and the father did not have some legal right to contest that.
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