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Just a few weeks ago I arrived in India from the U.S. with my mother. I remember my time in the air to have been quite restful; many movies were watched and much sleep was had. Perhaps there is nothing more to do when on two consecutive 10-plus-hour flights. Yet, despite my pleasant languor upon exiting the aircraft, any semblance of relaxation was cracked when my mother piped up with what turned out to be a major wrench thrown into our travel plans.
My OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India), the important documentation that allows me to tread Indian soil as a now-American resident, was gone without a trace. Missing from the back-pocket. Not in the wallet. Absent from the jacket. Gone. We found ourselves at an impasse. I recall that all solutions managed to elude the both of us, and that sort of perplexed chagrin terrified me. Writing retrospectively with the knowledge that everything ended up turning out fine for me that day, I can confess that I was completely petrified.
Despite American residence, I am a man as brown as they come whose lineage is comprised of individuals born and raised up from humble Indian beginnings. As a result, my story is naturally bound to those of immigration and emigration. My forefathers, at one point or another, all felt the soaring uncertainty of voyaging to America’s doorstep in the hopes of being taken into the outstretched arms of Lady Liberty.
With the family separation policy, Trump added another layer onto the strategies open to be used to deter prospective illegal immigrants — one with more insidious consequences.
Perhaps this is me finding absurd meaning in my experiences, but I like to think I felt a small piece of that deep unease in that moment at the Chennai airport. Yes, I understand in the back of my mind that the emotions engendered by my sort of quasi-immigration fright (if you can even call it that) pale in comparison to those of the real thing. But still, if nothing else, let my three-minute-long scare of being denied entry into a country upon arrival be taken as a microcosm of the plight endured by the immigrants of the past and, more pressingly, the present.
Immigration to the United States has long been the ultimate ambition for those who have bought into the fanfare of the “American Dream.” And, as with any leader who seizes the gravitas intrinsic to the presidential seat of the White House, Trump has been entrusted with handling the logistics of these people’s desires and the immigration “problem” faced by the United States. Almost a sort of bizarre presidential heirloom passed down from generation to generation of heads of state, the topic is no stranger to the vanguard of American — and global — policymaking and media. Yet, with this task and the authority inherent to the appellation of POTUS comes the opportunity to address the topic for better or for worse. Recently, Trump would seem to have trod down the path of the latter, further concretising American inveterate xenophobia.
The term “internment camps” takes me back to my primary and early secondary school days and history classes. There, lines of text in textbooks detailing the wicked perversion of elemental rights braved by hordes of Japanese-Americans during the World War II era in America were complemented by photographs of huddled men, women and children in circumscribed campgrounds. Now fast-forward. In an apparent throwlback to those fraught American times, Trump launched an internment policy eerily comparable to that of Franklin Roosevelt, which left some 2,000 children caged (literally) in camps across America as their parents underwent periods of detention.
An examination of these camps in comparison to their 20 th -Century counterparts reveals striking similarities in intention and practice: they were and are camps designed to detain without trial a specific subset of people. So, we could by all means use the term “internment camps” to describe what has unfolded at the southern American border and what continues to unfold in centers across the nation. But to do so would only be half right, because — truth is — that term is merely an umbrella term that fails to do the actuality of the current state of affairs justice. In the worst way possible, the sort of internment camps American higher-ups look to still be sanctioning are of a totally different strain those seen before on American soil.
In the annals of American History, the period of Japanese internment during World War II goes down as one of the most shameful chapters; a blemish that manages to stand out in an era in America where flawed policymaking was as routine as the Pompadour hairstyle was common. But it is worth a revisit as it provides a much-needed context to help shed light on how Trump’s camps manage to be worse.
To begin, we must force ourselves to remember why and how Japanese-Americans were incarcerated. As a result of the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese and out of fear of betrayal by any stray Japanese-American souls, Roosevelt ordered families of Japanese-Americans into internment camps peppering the west coast of America. I make sure to note that whole families were ordered into camps because that is a crucial distinction that must be made between the past and present. By some wayward stroke of humanitarian rationality, Roosevelt did not break up families of Japanese-Americans by policy, even though they held little suspicion of the children and every suspicion of their parents. Yes, the traditional dynamic of the family was smashed as canteens displaced dinner tables and barracks covered in tar paper replaced the warmth of the home, but children still were able to hold their guardians tight as everything else went awry. If nothing else, in his slapdash decision-making and sectarian course of action, Roosevelt at least managed to very partially honour the old adage that blood is thicker than water. And even that is much more than Mr. Trump can say.
Trump would seem to have realised — rather, been made to realise — this. A June 20 executive order reversed the family separation policy and many children are supposed to be returned to their parents eventually in a happy ending to the debacle. However, the ends fail to justify the means here, and worse, the Trump administration does not look to be in much of a hurry — at least not the sort of hurry that the ensuing procedural nightmare would demand.
In fact, a federal judge of California recently ordered that all children be reunited with their parents within a month. That was a week ago, yet 2,000 children, the original figure, still remain in detention centres across 17 states while their parents remain elsewhere. Notice an incongruity? Formal legislation and perfunctory compliance mask latent hesitancy to make amends. Yes, there are logistical issues posed by the Herculean task of reuniting so many families. But the job cannot be realistically considered insurmountable for the American government which possesses such tremendous amount of funds. If anything, these court rulings would seem to have redefined the enduring issue as being less one of humanitarianism and more one of prioritisation.
And so, despite turmoil in the courts and efforts of progressive politicians, the original dilemma persists. Juxtaposed with the marginally more accommodating (and I use this term incredibly lightly) camps of the 20 th Century, what is one to make of Trump’s aberrative creations? Well, what I’ve been getting at is that they would not represent such a departure from America’s history of incarcerating ethnic groups if they did not fragment the families they held. In doing so, Trump added another layer onto the strategies open to be used to deter prospective illegal immigrants — one with more insidious consequences. For a child, prolonged exposure to the deluge of stress hormones generated by separation from their parents can manifest in apathy, dissolution and disengagement in the world, and a host of other undesirables. Consider that these traumas can manifest later in life in the form of PTSD and depression and suddenly a not-so-nice image of Mr. Trump emerges. Even if they manage to find their way back to the nest, the damage may already have been done.
My heart breaks for each child held in captivity in America. That being said, there is a bigger picture to be seen here. America’s tactics of detention are evolving in the most vicious way possible and straying away from precedents set by the past. As a result of such a deviation, Americans are essentially floating through life as history is being made right in their backyards and American history books are being written in actual time. And those history books are crying out for their parents.
