Migrant childrenChildren have been separated from their families for generations – why Trump’s policy was different

By Gordon Lynch

Published 10 July 2018

The Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their families was officially ended on 20 June – but putting this policy into a wider historical context of state-sanctioned policies of child separation helps to understand why some aspects of it were remarkably distinctive – and caused such international outrage. Compared to historical welfare interventions, the Trump child-separation policy was distinct because of its sheer scale, and because the policy lacked any moral claim that the separations were for the good of the child. Judged in the historical context of previous child-separation policies, the administration’s policy proved short-lived because its exceptional scale and brutality lacked sufficient moral legitimacy in American public opinion to outweigh the powerful images of children’s suffering circulated in the media. For those children who have already been separated from parents – uncertain how they will be reunified – this will come as little consolation.

After weeks of mounting pressure, Donald Trump signed an executive order on 20 June to stop his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border of the United States. Putting the policy into a wider historical context of state-sanctioned policies of child separation helps to understand why some aspects of it were remarkably distinctive – and caused such international outrage.

From the closing decades of the nineteenth century, an array of policies emerged across the Anglophone world which challenged assumptions about parents’ inalienable rights to their children. A transnational child protection movement led to the formation of child protection societies, beginning with the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1875. New legislation followed in the U.K., Canada and Australia allowing the removal of children from parents on grounds of cruelty or neglect.

Alongside this, various forms of welfare intervention developed which removed children from their families, with varying degrees of parental consent. This was done on the basis that children would be placed in new environments better suited to their moral, religious and civic development.

These included policies that sought to place children from indigenous communities in institutions in which they could be “Christianized and civilized.” This led to “Indian” residential schools in Canada and the United States. It also sparked programs which moved unaccompanied children around within their own country, such as the American “orphan trains”, or to other countries, such as the U.K. child migration schemes where children were sent to Canada or Australia. Other forms of residential incarceration were also introduced, such as the industrial school system in Ireland.