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Ivanka Trump slammed for posting family snap amid lost immigrant children scandal

IT WAS supposed to be the least controversial thing imaginable — a cute photo of a child. But Ivanka Trump got it all wrong.

Emma Reynolds in New York
5 min read
May 29, 2018 - 12:27PM
Controversy in the US surrounds missing immigrant children. Picture: iStock
Controversy in the US surrounds missing immigrant children. Picture: iStock

THIS cute family snap should be totally uncontroversial. But instead, a photo of the US President’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, with her son has sparked rage online.

The problem with the softly lit photo, posted to Twitter and Instagram on Sunday with the caption “My ♥! #SundayMorning”, was all about timing. It appeared right when outrage was peaking over President Donald Trump’s policy to separate the children of undocumented migrants from their parents.

Ivanka’s tweet rapidly generated nearly 25,000 comments, many of which slammed her for her “tone deaf” sentiment.

“Isn’t it the just the best to snuggle your little one — knowing exactly where they are, safe in your arms? It’s the best. The BEST. Right, Ivanka? Right?” tweeted comedian Patton Oswalt.

“This is so unbelievably tone deaf, given that public outrage is growing over young kids being forcibly ripped from the arms of their parents at the border — a barbaric policy that Ivanka Trump is complicit in supporting,” said Brian Klaas, a political scientist at the London School of Economics.

The photo was posted as a chilling online movement had begun circulating in the US. The #Wherearethechildren hashtag refers to nearly 1500 children that the US government has quite simply lost.

The news broke last month, but it is only now, as the story slowly spreads across social media, that Americans are voicing their fury en masse.

Celebrities including Jim Carrey, Jessica Chastain and Mia Farrow have shared their disgust at the news of the huge number of missing kids, some as young as two years old.

Donald Trump recently described his allegation the Federal Bureau of Investigation planted a spy in his election campaign as America’s “biggest political scandal” — but the story of these vanished children points to a far greater horror.

HOW THEY WERE LOST

The 1475 children crossed the Mexican border into the US alone and were placed with adult “sponsors” by the Department of Health and Human Services. But in follow-up calls, the children were found to be missing, the agency admitted to a Senate committee. It is feared they have been sold to human traffickers and sexually or physically abused.

And there are likely to be far more than 1500 children lost. Since border crossings spiked in 2013, the US government has placed more than 180,000 unaccompanied minors with adult foster carers while their cases go through court.

HHS said it has limited budget to track their welfare, but it did reveal the status of 7635 it called for follow-up between October and December 2017.

Acting assistant secretary Steven Wagner said the agency found 6075 of the children were still living with their sponsors, 52 were living with someone else, 28 had run away, five had been deported — and the rest were missing.

HHS says it is not responsible for finding these children after they are released from the care of its Office of Refugee Resettlement. It has also been noted that some of the sponsors are relatives of the children, who may be deliberately ignoring attempts at contact.

But politicians are demanding accountability for the vulnerable children who have vanished somewhere in the US.

THE SEPARATION SCANDAL

The crisis of the missing children is linked to a second scandal of parents being forcibly separated from their children at the border as part of Mr Trump’s immigration crackdown.

While the issues are related, the lost kids arrived unaccompanied, so it is incorrect to conflate the two, as some have done.

“Just last week, we saw a 53-week-old infant in court without a parent,” Laura St John, legal director at the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes this weekend. “I’ve seen months where a parent had no idea where their child was after the US government took their child away.”

Immigrant rights worker Lee Gelernt said the number of separations was “unprecedented”.

“This is the worst thing I’ve seen in 25-plus years of doing this civil rights work,” he said. “I am talking to these mothers and they are describing their kids screaming, ‘Mummy, Mummy, don’t let them take me away!’ … The medical evidence is overwhelming that we may be doing permanent trauma to these kids, and yet the government is finding every way they can to try and justify it.”

US President Donald Trump tried to deflect responsibility for the family separations on to the Democrats, demanding in a tweet that they take action on a “horrible law”. But there is no law dictating that separations should happen, and it is his administration’s policies that necessitate it.

He suggested that he will make compromises if he gets support for his immigration policies, such as building a border wall.

The White House said in a statement on Sunday that the separations were down to the Democrats’ refusal to close “loopholes” in immigration policy, and that closing them would allow families to be deported together.

The separations are set to get worse, after it was announced earlier this month that every immigrant crossing the border would be prosecuted, and therefore have their children taken away.

Attorney-General Jeff Sessions said on May 7: “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told the Senate: “If you’re a parent, or you’re a single person, or you happen to have a family, if you cross between the ports of entry, we will refer you for prosecution. You’ve broken US law.”

Asked by NPR whether taking kids away from their parents was “cruel and heartless”, White House chief of staff John Kelly said: “I wouldn’t put it quite that way. The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.

“But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.”

‘WE ARE FAILING’

This issue is not new. Government agencies came under fire two years ago after rolling back child protection policies aimed at helping those fleeing violence in Central America, the Washington Post reported.

On Thursday, senators said agencies such as HHS had failed to take responsibility for these children and had delayed reforms needed to protect them from traffickers.

Almost 1500 migrant children from Central America have vanished after the US government placed them in foster care. Picture: AFP Photo/Guillermo Arias
Almost 1500 migrant children from Central America have vanished after the US government placed them in foster care. Picture: AFP Photo/Guillermo Arias

The Senate committee’s chair, Rob Portman, became involved after a case in his home state of Ohio, in which eight Guatemalan teens were sent to traffickers and forced to work on egg farms under threat of death. Six people were convicted and imprisoned over the racket, which began in 2013.

“These kids, regardless of their immigration status, deserve to be treated properly, not abused or trafficked,” he told the panel. “This is all about accountability.

“For us to just, you know, assume someone else is going to take care of them and throw them to the wolves, which is what HHS was doing, is flat-out wrong.”

In 2016, an AP investigation found that more than two dozen unaccompanied children had been sent to homes where they were sexually assaulted, starved or forced into child labour. Many sponsors at the time did not face thorough background checks and officials rarely visited them.

The Health and Human Services department is accused of failing to adequately look after the children, who arrived in the US accompanied.
The Health and Human Services department is accused of failing to adequately look after the children, who arrived in the US accompanied.

Democrat Tom Carper told the panel: “Given all that we learned in 2015 and 2016, it’s unacceptable that we can still be this bad at keeping track of these children.”

His colleague Heidi Heitkamp said: “We are failing. I don’t think there is any doubt about it. And when we fail kids that makes me angry.”

The HHS said it had increased support for children thought to need extra protection and offered support to around a third of unaccompanied minors. But some vanish before anyone knows just how vulnerable they really are.

The question remains: Where are the children?

— With AP

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