USA Today reports that First Lady Jill Biden's first initiative is to "reunite children taken from their parents at the border under former President Donald Trump's roundly condemned family separation policy."
There are plenty of tangents to go off on with respect to the role of the first lady, such as "Who elected her?" but what a first lady does is nonetheless part of our American culture. Mainly, the actions of the first lady appear symbolic to broader aspirations of the spouse's administration, with some exceptions. So the first lady's symbolic gestures are somewhat important.
While it is an admirable goal to keep families together, the symbolic gesture of making this priority #1 is to be looked at. In explaining the first lady's priorities, Joe Biden has called the Trump family separation policy a "moral failing" and has vowed to form a task force to help reunite the more than 600 parents and children who remain separated. Further, Joe Biden claims that Trump has "waged an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants."
What Biden's simplistic worldview of "Orange Man Bad" fails to account for is that we are a nation of laws as well as a nation of immigrants. When faced with the tough choice of how to handle families and minors attempting to enter the country without authorization, the Trump administration was bound by many hard realities and laws. Under the 1997 (Clinton-era) Flores Settlement, children cannot be detained for over 20 days. The options were to release an entire family unit into the interior of the United States or to place the children in a shelter (separate from the "parents"). For brevity concerns, not analyzed in this article is what role the U.S. should have in discouraging the notoriously dangerous journey for migrants seeking access to the United States.
read more:
Replies