(WASHINGTON, D.C., 6/22/18) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), lauds the American people for their righteous outrage against un-American and inhuman treatment of immigrants and for forcing the Administration to walk back its egregious policy of family separation at the US-Mexico border. USCMO cautions Americans:
- Not to be fooled by words uttered but to look at the language of the order and its glaring gaps.
- To sustain pressure to end migrant family detention altogether.
- To insist that Congress bring about fair and wise immigration reform for this nation.
President Donald Trump’s Executive Order to end family separation will only worsen the migrant family crisis:
- It does not end the Administration’s thoughtless, improvised, disaster-creating “zero-tolerance policy.”
- It does not address the horror of more than 2,300 children still separated from their parents, as to when the Administration will reunite them with their parents, nor the deep psychological trauma these children have likely permanently sustained.
- It does not remedy the bureaucratic nightmare of separate filings and authorities for children and parents, making coordinated legal follow up almost impossible.
- It goes from detaining parents and children separately to detaining them together, in effect creating family prisons, which is a widely established threat to the physical safety and well-being of children.
- It goes against and may ultimately undermine the 1997 Flores settlement, which does not allow for the detention of children for longer than 20 days, which will lead either to indefinite child detention or re-separation of children from families.
- It does not address currently detained children in the U.S. whose parents ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has already deported.
USCMO remains in condemnation, in the strongest possible terms, of the Trump Administration’s heartless use of family separation at the US – Mexico border as a political bludgeon separating babies from mothers and young children from their parents. This unmasks a cynical and uncivilized expression of its “zero-tolerance policy” for migrants.
USCMO also condemns Attorney General Jeffery Sessions’ recent decision to potentially strip asylum from immigrant women fleeing domestic abuse, dooming them to life-threatening violence.
With regard to family separation, it is insufficient to characterize the Administration’s policy of separating young children by the thousands from their parents and holding them captive en masse in detention centers as un-American, though it surely is this. This is a positively savage and barbaric policy, inhuman at the most fundamental level, and certain to have already caused these innocent children irreparable psychological damage and emotional trauma, to say nothing of other as yet unknown harms.
Family is no mere social construct. It is the divine foundation upon which God created and organized the human community. Family is sacred and, therefore, in every sense and among all peoples, inviolable. This deeply misanthropic and benighted policy puts America, as a society, in the position of breaking humanity’s universally solemn covenant with God to “keep joined all the relations and obligations that God has commanded to be joined,” (Surat Al-Ra‘d, 13:20), as stated in the Quran and echoed in all the Heavenly Books.
The government surely has at its disposal myriad ways of preserving its laws of residence and safeguarding society without barbarizing the entire nation and punishing children for ends that smack of base racism, of questionable value to begin with.
As to women asylees from domestic violence, ‘asylum’ literally means an inviolable refuge “without right of seizure,” which America has offered for decades as a basic human right to women escaping such abuse in their home countries.
It is unconscionable for the principal legal officer of the United States, a country of that holds itself one of laws and rights, to unilaterally abrogate this legal and human right of vulnerable women, knowing he is, in effect, sentencing them to the extreme dangers of physical torment and perhaps death in expelling them to their home countries.
Who will enforce their safety at the hands of private parties from whose violence they fled to begin with? How will we guarantee their protection if we banish them from our shelter?
This misguided decision will undermine, if not empty, U.S. asylum law of its purpose of providing the vulnerable refuge if we allow an individual with long questioned motivations to reduce the asylum system to a personal tool of preference depending on his favor or disfavor for the color, creed, or country of origin of its seekers.
USCMO and Muslim Americans urge Congress to end migrant detention in this session. It calls on Congress to enact legislation in the behalf of the human family that immediately bars the Administration from continuing to commit the universal and original immorality of separating children from their parents or guardians.
USCMO and Muslim Americans further entreat the courts and policymaking officials to preserve the lives and right of asylum of victimized women, which has for decades stood as enlightened and inalienable law in this country.
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