Here's some information on the
Flores Settlement that stands at the center of Trump's current anti-immigrant kids atrocities. As long as it stands, detention (with their parents) is limited to 20 days. If the parents are being detained longer, it mandates that children leave, hence they are being separated. That is also why Trump's EO is basically meaningless, since he himself caused the atrocity with his "zero tolerance" policy, which he could end with a phone call. Also, the kids currently separated are also not addressed, and will not be reunited with their parents, provided they can find them.
Here's
information on immigrant arrivals during the surge of "unaccompanied alien children" during the surge 2014 - 2016. Turns out the overwhelming majority of UACs arriving at U.S. shores came from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
As it happens, these are also
the three countries the U.S., pursuant its War on Drugs, turned into battlegrounds, actually among the most murderous, dangerous countries that are not actually at war.
The three countries in Central America that comprise the “Northern Triangle” – Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras – are the transshipment route for 80 percent of the illegal cocaine entering the U.S. It is no accident that the three countries are also the starting point each year for tens of thousands of migrants to the country.
The U.S. considers both the drugs and the immigration threats to national security. Washington sees the area as a geopolitical unit and has militarized its response to the drug trade in the form of the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI).
The trouble with this policy is that these countries’ populations consider the military part of the problem. Along with poverty, violence and a lack of accountability among the military and police are the principal drivers of mass migration to the U.S. The Obama administration has attempted to deal with the economic and social drivers of migration through an initiative called the Alliance for Prosperity, but Congress has been slow to fund the project.
What happened and still happens there is that gangs and drug smuggling cartels, flush with (mostly) American drug money and guns, are vying with nation states for power, that is, in case they aren't buying relevant portions thereof outright. While they are battling among themselves and state efforts, such as they are, to reign them in, the populations, already in dire straits after decades of U.S. Cold War meddling, economic stagnation and mismanagement and corruption, see their youth forcibly recruited into gangs, or kidnapped, and often sold as sex slaves. That, by and large, is the reason why parents were so desperate to get their kids, even unaccompanied, to safety through Mexico into the U.S.
So, the War on Drugs, largely funded by the U.S., against drug lords, also largely funded by the U.S., creates a refugee crisis. Of course, nativists demand these countries pay up for it.
So, What should we do? End the War on Drugs would be a fine first step. At least, wage it somewhat intelligently so that it doesn't generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues for the cartels, with attendant consequences we get to observe in Central America, and a tiny portion thereof arriving at U.S. shores.
