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

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.