The real issue is that the leader of ICE / Military / etc. etc. change power roughly... every 4 years. Police is a local issue, and may change closer to every 2 years (although local municipalities may have a Sheriff, or a Commission, or may rely upon a Mayor to make those decisions).
We already have a mechanism for choosing the leader of these various institutions. And whatever powers we give to these institutions, we have to recognize that they will change leadership as quickly as a single election.
Ultimately, it should be a political issue... first and foremost. We may not have the best political system possible, but its the best that we all can agree to. As such, we should rely upon the culture of this country to provide us the leaders who we would be proud to give these powers to.
So people have been separated from their children should just wait for the American people to maaaaaaybe kick out the jackboots in two to four years?
Naw, dawg, when things get ugly, you have to resist where you can. I'm guessing you can't agree, but there's a fair number of people who think we're in a Germany 1937 situation. We have a president who in all likelihood enlisted Russian interference in the election, who shares plenty of rhetorical similarity to actual fascists. We have a Congress that is moving as fast as it can to stack the judiciary, which in turn will hear future election cases. Things are getting grim. I've lived and worked in places where these processes have played out - like Hungary - and anyone who says it can't happen here is kidding themselves.
Speeding tickets are also people who were caught committing a crime.
Regardless, it is a new policy to put Adults who cross with children (even though many of these Adults are the parents of those children) into jail.
I for one, believe that there are more humane ways to treat boarder-crossers who are crossing with their family. Sure, maybe put the lone crossers into jail, but if they're coming over with kids, then I'd hope that the judges / immigration agents / etc. etc. have power to show compassion in those cases.
So yeah, put some of them in jail, and put others into other forms of detention that don't necessarily involve separating kids from their parents. And yes, I recognize that Coyotes exist (professional illegal boarder crossers who specialize in trafficking children into America), so I recognize that ICE has a hard job here. But a repeat-offender like a Coyote could be caught on the 2nd or 3rd attempt. I recognize that ICE needs a plan to deal with Coyotes appropriately, and that not every adult-with-children is necessarily the parent.
There's a lot of ways to deal with the problem, and its sad that the current administration thinks that separating families is the best way forward.
If separations are to happen, I want it to happen only to Coyotes and the children they're smuggling. We need to be careful to keep the real parents together with their real children.
It's not as black and white as you make it seem. Being in the country unlawfully is not a crime, it's a civil infraction. Entering unlawfully (through something other than a border) is a crime, when it happens, but the subsequent stay is once again a civil infraction.
Most unlawful residents did not enter unlawfully, they overstayed on visas or in some other way went from a legal stay to an unlawful one. These people would not be committing a crime.
Interestingly, andun is a new account and seems to be a holocaust denier, based on at least one of their other comments ("purported holocaust death camps").
Being in the country without authorization is a civil infraction, not a criminal one, and people aren't sent to prison for civil infractions.
You're also allowed to be here if you're seeking asylum.
But, at the end of the day, if your basis for the family border separation policy is to defend it with "well, criminals also have their families broken up," then I'm not sure how to convince you it's right to care about and have empathy for families and other human beings.
if your basis for the family border separation policy is to defend it with "well, criminals also have their families broken up,"
Not at all. I just find it curious that this one particular application of what is actually a common policy has suddenly become protest-worthy. By all means protest it in its entirety (if you think it’s appropriate for children to serve sentences alongside their parents in the same cells) but anything else just looks politically motivated.
a) It's a new policy. Separating migrants from their kids started under Trump.
b) The effects are actually even worse than they are in the jail/prison situation. The kids themselves are incarcerated, as they don't have family that they can be placed with. We know that there are many migrants who have been deported after being separated from their children, who are now still in custody.
"At the moment, the government’s rolls include hundreds of children in shelters and temporary foster care programs who were taken from an adult at the border, whether a parent, grandparent or some other companion. About 13,000 children who came to the United States on their own were being held in federally contracted shelters this month, more than five times the number in May 2017."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/migrant-children-famil...
Changing the putative elected "leader" of a large organization isn't guaranteed to change the organization. Often the new elected public servant finds she/he is powerless without kowtowing to those in the organization (or externally who pull the strings).
I also disagree that we should limit this discussion to political. Companies (esp the size of Amazon) are hardly affected by politics, they are often judged more harshly by the court of public opinion.
Folks who want to prevent what they see as disaster should use all the legal mechanisms possible to enable discourse and change the course of events.
We already have a mechanism for choosing the leader of these various institutions. And whatever powers we give to these institutions, we have to recognize that they will change leadership as quickly as a single election.
Ultimately, it should be a political issue... first and foremost. We may not have the best political system possible, but its the best that we all can agree to. As such, we should rely upon the culture of this country to provide us the leaders who we would be proud to give these powers to.