Nowadays Democrats and decent people strongly object to Trump’s cruelty in breaking up immigrant families and deporting many family members. Actually, Obama did that too — in record numbers much higher than George W. Bush had done — but Democrats did not object when a Democratic president did.
People nowadays are right to criticize the Trump regime for its extreme cruelty. In order to be credible, we must also criticize Obama and the Democrats for their cruelty too. Let’s stand firm on the principles of human rights, and let the partisan chips fall where they may.
Pages 48-49 of the August 2018 article of the excellent progressive magazine In These Times featured an article titled, “Locking Up Immigrant Kids, Again.” See the print version or www.inthesetimes.com
The article begins by reporting that “in 2011, under President Barack Obama, a record 46,000 parents of U.S. citizen children had been deported.”
Obama was called the “deporter in chief.” The article said this “was part of his centrist compromise strategy: Appease the Right with a deportation crackdown… and hope Republicans will help pass bipartisan immigration reform (they didn’t).”
Although the article merely mentioned “triangulation” without explaining it, I need to explain it here: Obama did what Bill Clinton had done — “triangulate” — in order to appropriate Republicans’ policy ideas and curry favor with Republicans for his own political advantage. Clinton and Obama sought political advantage, but all they did was support Republicans’ cruelty and bless it with a Democratic President’s support. It is obvious that neither Clinton nor Obama won any friendship from Republicans. All they did was cave in to the cruelty — and antagonize decent people.
The article addressed the severe mental health damage caused by taking children away from parents and imprisoning them for years. This seriously hurts children and parents alike.
Trump has escalated Obama’s cruelty into deliberate attempts toward “ethnic cleansing.”
The article urges demanding and working for significant reforms, rather than setting a “low bar” such as allowing children to continue being jailed, so long as their parents are jailed with them. The article says we must immediately stop Trump’s atrocities and also push for long-term significant changes when Democrats take power back from the Republicans.