The enduring and often lifelong health and mental health
consequences of traumatic parent-child separation have been established by
decades of child welfare research, led by some of the nation’s top social work
scholars and health scientists. Much of this research has been funded through
the National Institutes of Health and its National Institute of Mental Health,
spurred by the humanitarian ethos that defines the highest purposes of our
democracy.
During the past several months, the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) has expanded the enforcement of our national
immigration policy, including prosecuting all individuals crossing over our
nation’s Southwestern border and referring all adults to the Department of
Justice for adjudication. The result is that border enforcement officials are
forcibly separating children from their parents, who are then arrested and
incarcerated for suspected unlawful entry into the country.
These children are turned over to the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services for an indefinite and typically prolonged period in
nonparental custodial care—often in homes of complete strangers. This dire
new national policy brings with it a range of extraordinarily detrimental
consequences that will most likely be borne by the children of immigrants and
refugees traumatized by forced removal from their parents.
As social workers who have a mission of serving all
members of our community, we are taking a stand against this draconian policy
that is a sharp departure from the nation’s previous immigration
enforcement policy. That policy allowed detained parents—many of them refugees
fleeing from violence in their home countries—to stay with and care for their
children pending the outcome of their immigration cases.
To ignore well-established, federally sponsored research,
in favor of the dubious gains of a national policy that regards the willingness
to inflict lifelong trauma on the children of immigrant families as a
legitimate tool of border enforcement, is both unconscionable and a profound
betrayal of the very values that define us as a nation. We believe this policy
should be reversed immediately to avoid further trauma to hundreds, and potentially
thousands, of innocent children and their families.
Read the statement from the National Association of Social Workers.
#FamiliesBelongTogether, #FreeTheChildren,
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