The new US policy of separating immigrant children from their parents has chilling historical echoes

Related Link The Long History of Child-Snatching By Tera W. Hunter

... The US government has never held families — nonwhite families, anyway — to be sacrosanct. In the late 19th century, for instance, at a moment of particular anxiety about American national identity, the government intervened to separate immigrant and American-Indian children from their parents to mold them into a particular kind of citizen. 

The difference, though, is that such policies have almost always been rooted in misguided ideas of social uplift and national good. The new moral rot added by the Trump administration is that its policy is entirely punitive.

Forced separation of families was, of course, central to the American regime of slavery. In a system that allowed for hereditary enslavement, children were transformed into property at birth.

As the system of human trafficking grew over the early 19th century, children were regularly sold away from their families for both economic and punitive reasons. Supporters of slavery dismissed moral arguments against this separation, asserting that black people lacked the emotional capacity to truly feel the pain of losing a child or parent. 

“Their griefs are transient,” Thomas Jefferson wrote of the enslaved black people who lived and worked with him. “Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether Heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them.”

There was no pretense that the separation of slaves was for their benefit. In other cases, though, politicians and reformers excused family separation as part of a broader “civilizing” project. Take the case of American Indians. In the last third of the 19th century, as the US laid claim to the full stretch of the continent, new anxieties emerged about the character of the American people, hemmed in on one side by the closed frontier and on the other by mass immigration from Europe. 

In the midst of these growing anxieties, the federal government began to shift its relationship to American Indians; only an aggressive program of forced assimilation to American norms and educational practices could make this problematic population truly “American.”

In an attempt to break up tribal culture and unity, the Dawes Act of 1887 forced American Indians to abandon communal property for individual family-based farms. At the same time, tens of thousands of Indian children were taken from their families and put into government-funded boarding schools, where they were forced to change their names, learn English, dress in Western-style clothing, and (often) convert to Christianity — all in the name of a civilizing mission, which Richard Henry Pratt, head of the first boarding school, summarized in this way: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” ...