“When you see Democrats saying, ‘Don’t separate kids from their parents,’ what they’re really saying is don’t arrest illegal aliens,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said last week when the policy of separating children from parents charged with illegally entering the country began to be used by Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media.
While the media has portrayed this separation of children from parents as something unique to the Trump administration, the truth is that this has already been the law. Obviously, since children are not ordinarily jailed for criminal activity, the only way to completely terminate a policy of parent-child separation in arrests for criminal activity is to throw the kids into the jail cell with their parents.
But since more than 2,300 minor children have been separated from their families at the border since May 5 up to June 9, the policy has come under intense criticism. Former National Security Administration and former Central Intelligence Agency head Michael Hayden even compared the policy to Nazi Germany. Using a tweet that included a photograph of the Birkenau concentration and death camp in Poland, Hayden wrote, “Other governments have separated mothers and children.”
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This is amazing demagoguery, coming from a man who oversaw warrantless surveillance of American citizens during his tenure, and even supported the efficacy of torture of CIA detainees. But such over-the-top rhetoric is not likely to be condemned by the liberal media. All of the liberal critics of this type of action are being completely hypocritical unless they advocate emptying American jails and prisons: American parents are separated from their children every day, often for non-violent and even victimless crimes, by state and federal law enforcement and these people care not a whit. The whole issue is political chicanery.
While Cruz has been among the strongest congressional supporters of President Trump, particularly on the issue of immigration, he is an astute enough politician to realize that the issue has the potential of damaging Republican electoral prospects in November. Cruz is himself in a potentially tough contest for reelection in his own Senate campaign.
Matt Mackowiak, a Republican political strategist in Texas, explained what Cruz is trying to accomplish with a bill that the senator has introduced: “The needle that Cruz is trying to thread is he wants to end separation but also maintain rule of law.” Mackowiak noted that while being tough on immigration is ordinarily a winning issue for Republicans in Texas, separating children from their parents “is very uncomfortable for a lot of us. Separating families is dicier. Even here.”
“We can stop this,” Cruz said, arguing that his bill “would prohibit separating families, would mandate that kids should stay with their parents.” His bill would double the number of federal immigration judges so asylum cases can be heard within a two-week period.
“If the claim is not valid, and many of those coming here illegally don’t have valid claims for asylum, then within 14 days that claim should be processed and they should be returned to their home country,” Cruz said, in explaining his proposal. “During that expedited process, we can and should keep families together, keep children with their moms and dads and we need to stand up temporary shelters.”
The problem for Cruz’s bill is that it is likely that the anti-Trump Democrats in Congress may very well prefer to keep the issue for the mid-term elections. For example, Cruz’s own Democrat opponent, Representative Beto O’Rourke, is roundly condemning the Trump administration on this issue, and attempting to tie Cruz to the policy. While no Democrat has won a statewide office in Texas since 1994, O’Rourke has been able to raise large amounts of money from liberals across the country hoping to defeat Cruz.
“There’s an open question right now about who we are and what we stand for and what we’re going to do in the face of this injustice and this inhumanity,” O’Rourke declared recently. “President Trump made the decision to take their children from them, inflicting horrific trauma on those kids and on those parents alike and absolutely undermining our values and our idea of who we are as a country. But, at this point, it is now the United States of America that is doing this. It is now on all of us to change it.”
While it is unlikely that Cruz will be defeated by O’Rourke using this or any other issue, Republicans can expect that this and other types of emotional issues will be used by anti-Trump Democrats and their media allies in the next few months in other contests. After all, as the allegations of “Russian collusion” are degenerating quickly into a “nothing burger,” we can anticipate Democrats will be dusting off their commercials accusing Republicans of racism or wanting to push grandma off the cliff.
