Family Separation at the Border: Cruelty is the Point
In 2021, The Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer published a book of essays titled The Cruelty is the Point. The book’s titular essay, originally written in the heart of Former President Donald Trump’s first term, soon gained traction as a popular catchphrase and searing indictment of the cruelties of Trump’s presidency. Serwer makes a simple but salient point – in Trump’s America, the exercise of cruelty, especially toward America’s most vulnerable groups, was not a mere byproduct of policy but the central motivation of nativist narratives that gripped the nation.
Cruelty is referenced often in policy discourse, yet a relatively overlooked area of political thought. With lived experience of exile from European totalitarianism, American political theorist Judith Shklar was distinct from her post-Cold War contemporaries in her focus on negative liberties. Shklar characterised cruelty as the infliction of deliberate and unnecessary harm on others to cause anguish and fear, believing it to be a vice that ‘repels instantly’ and mars human character – something that society should defend against at all costs.
Her ideas served as prescient warnings for contemporary discourse surrounding immigration policy. The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” approach to immigration strategy, including practices of family separation and deportation, exemplify Shklar’s repulsion of overtly harsh policies that foster horror and cruelty.
With the highest immigration population in the world, the United States, regarding its immigration, has been the subject of heated debate. Legislators play a delicate balancing act in weighing economic, security, and humanitarian priorities, and policy has been subjected to rapid and extensive reform in recent decades. Anti-immigrant sentiment was a hallmark of Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign platform, proposing reforms including a border wall to expand the Mexico-United States barrier, limiting legal immigration routes by restricting visas and green cards and travel bans on several predominantly Muslim states.
Family separation at the border
An apex of Trump’s hard-line policies was the separation of children from their families when found illegally crossing borders into US territory. Adopted across the entire US-Mexico border from 2017 t0 2018, the policy even encompassed some families that had followed legal process to qualify for asylum at official border crossings. While adults were held in federal prisons or deported, over 5,000 children were separated from their families and placed under the supervision of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Prior to their transfer to HHS, children reportedly spent weeks in overcrowded border detention centres with minimal food, access to bathing facilities and no adult guardians. In 2018, it became evident that there were no measures within the policy for family reunification. Today, it remains unclear whether many children were eventually reunited with their guardians.
While previous administrations relied on family detention facilities, officially separating migrant children from their parents was never constituent of US immigration policy until the Trump administration. Medical and scientific experts have compared the impacts of detention of children by the US government to concentration camps, citing that the policy causes ‘irreparable harm’ to children, with long-term trauma and disruption to infant and child development. Following widespread domestic and international criticism, Trump signed an executive order to end the practice in June 2018, however reports estimate that the practice continued for at least eighteen months after the policy’s official termination.
Trump’s family separation policy is an illustration of the wanton infliction of cruelty that Shklar abhorred. In her renowned work Putting Cruelty First, Shklar proposed cruelty to be the summum malum – ‘the most evil of all evils’. The cruelty condemned here involves taking the pain and suffering of victims as a sort of spectacle, with a positive emotion elicited from the action, rather than a necessary but regrettable cost. In an audio obtained by ProPublica from within the US Customs and Border protection facility, border patrol agents can be heard laughing while Central American children separated from their parents by immigration authorities are crying inconsolably. In reference to the intensity of the separated children’s pleas, an agent jokes that they have ‘an orchestra here…what’s missing is a conductor’.
Amidst aggressive criticism, the Trump administration defended the policy’s objective of deterrence. Deterrence policies function on the logic that threats instil fear so profound that it effectively dissuades people from taking actions they would otherwise take, underscoring the administration's active awareness of the policy's cruelty and calculated use of punitive measures.
While the ethics of Trump’s family separation policy are clearly contested, it may perhaps retain some justification should the policy have effectively decreased illegal border crossings. However, data from the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) indicated the policy’s low efficacy, resulting in only a short-term drop in illegal crossings. In fact, data showed an increase in families attempting to cross in 2018 and 2019. Drivers of migration that inspire migrants to cross borders, such as violence, poverty and political instability in their home countries, continue to serve as stronger threats to migrants’ livelihood than any deterrence measures can present.
Shklar was aware that all policies may incorporate some degree of harm to certain communities but was precisely opposed to such nativist-driven cruelty intended to entrench fear over the powerless. Elizabeth Warren accused Trump of having ‘advanced a policy of cruelty and division that demonizes immigrants’, while the United Nations condemned that the policy ‘may amount to torture’.
Immigration under Trump 2.0
Trump’s 2024 electoral victory paves the road ahead for harsh crackdowns on immigration. Mass deportations formed a large mandate of Trump’s re-election campaign, proposing a drastic and sweeping policy aimed at the removal of all undocumented immigrants residing in the country, an estimated population of around 11 million people. Other campaign promises include the reinstation of the Muslim travel ban, eliminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and banning visas of international students who participate in pro-Palestinian protests. Inflammatory, divisive rhetoric on migrants persisted through the campaign, including falsely accusing the Haitian population of Springfield, Ohio of eating household pets - fanning the flames of entrenched racial stereotypes. Thomas Homan, former acting director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been tapped by Trump as ‘border czar’ for his second term, pledging to carry out Trump’s deportation promises with expediency. Deportations can be seen as a continuation of the tradition of separating families, now extended beyond the border and permeating into country interiors. Homan has alternatively recommended that families could be deported together – even if children are American citizens.
Experts have warned that a multitude of political, legal and vast operational challenges will likely contest the viability of Trump’s deportation plans, while economists point to severe devastation on the US economy if deportations are performed. Immigrants, including large populations of undocumented residents, contribute significantly to labour-intensive industries such as agriculture, construction and household services. The mass removal of immigrants, even if feasible, would lead to labour shortages, reduce productivity and exacerbate inflation – drastically damaging local economies and bringing harm to both immigrants and US citizens. Deportations, akin to many other anti-immigration policies, are popular as political rhetoric, but in implementation often resemble a problem-solution mismatch.
Looking ahead, the resurgence and intensification of hardline immigration policies under Trump's second presidency signals a continued embrace of punitive, fear-driven strategies. Serwer’s observations of the pitfalls of cruel policies remain critical in reframing the way we grapple with the consequences of border enforcement. It is crucial that we reflect on the lessons of the past and the cost of practices that may lead us further down a slippery slope of cruelty.
Image courtesy of Vince Reinhart via Flickr, ©2018. Some rights reserved.
Cover image courtesy of Thomas Hawk via Flickr, ©2006. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
