Also read my buddy, J.E.Dyer’s piece: Trump order on family separations is NOT a reversal of policy, but it does punt a key issue
By J.E. Dyer June 20, 2018:
Democrats are not as interested in the fate of children as they are in making sure the adults accompanying them in illegal border crossings are released into the U.S. population without their cases decided. The purpose of structuring law to create untenable situations is to make unprotected borders seem like the only option. This is why Schumer was adamant that fixing the law — which Republicans have two viable bills in progress to do — is not the right solution.
It turns out, however, that Trump has not ended the zero-tolerance policy, nor will the administration end all separations. According to his executive order, the zero-tolerance policy will continue.
Both writers offer a historical and present day accounting of the issue.
THE REAL CHILD ABUSERS OF BORDER INSECURITY
The zombie lawsuit causing family separation that never dies.
What the media has been falsely calling President Trump’s family separation policy began with Hollywood actor Ed Asner’s housekeeper and a lawsuit by the ACLU during the Reagan administration.
The issue was child trafficking.
Teenage girls were being smuggled into the United States. Some were being sent on to their illegal alien family members in the United States. Others were being sent to the United States as cheap labor or being trafficked for prostitution. People purporting to be family members might show up asking for them to be released into their custody. And immigration authorities were faced with a horrible situation.
The ACLU was less interested in the teens than in Attorney General Edwin Meese. Reagan’s AG was the Sessions of the day. A man whose name so enraged the left-wing group that at one point it circulated petitions demanding that Reagan fire Meese and called him the most dangerous official since Nixon.
Flores v. Meese, the case that led to the family separation policy, was born with Ed Asner’s housekeeper and the ACLU’s obsession with Meese. But the case, with various AGs replacing Meese, dragged on. And the ACLU went on insisting that refusing to release teenage illegal aliens violated the Constitution.
In ’93, when Jenny Lisette Flores, the girl at the center of the original case, was 23, the Supreme Court finally ruled 7-2 against the ACLU and rejected its bizarre claim that illegal teens had a right to be released. The verdict was brutal and made a hash of the ACLU’s opportunistic misreading of the Constitution.
And that should have been it. But by then it wasn’t Flores v. Meese, but Flores v. Reno.
The Clinton administration then threw the case with what is known as the Flores Settlement in 1997. By then the titular Flores was 27 years old. The settlement required releasing underage illegal aliens into the least restrictive setting. And that meant that they couldn’t be detained alongside illegal alien adults.
The Flores Settlement was the ACLU’s big victory. And the partisan lefty group went on using it to batter successive administrations into loosening conditions on underage detainees. And then, a few weeks ago, the narrative flipped. The “least restrictive conditions” that the left had been fighting for since the eighties suddenly became the worst atrocity since slavery, Japanese internment and the Holocaust.
Holding underage migrants in “least restrictive conditions” meant separating them from their parents.
