Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The forceful separation of children from their families distresses us all. Having one's children removed in what is quite often already a traumatic situation is every parent's nightmare. What I find deeply objectionable is the nauseating political opportunism and virtue signalling that this motion represents. Let us not kid ourselves. If the policy was still being pursued by President Barack Obama, we would not hear a word about it. I say that because the policy that the current United States Government is enforcing has been in place since at least 2010 when the US Office of Refugee Resettlement's, ORR, division of unaccompanied children's services requested public applications to provide temporary shelter, care and related services to the children in the ORR's custody. What outcry was there then? Instead we had deafening silence.

It has been reported that, according to the non-profit immigrant advocacy group, the American Immigration Council, the trend in growing deportation numbers is a policy that has been pursued by the US federal Government for nearly two decades. It also notes that while the policy campaign precedes the Obama Administration by many years, it grew intensely during his tenure in the White House. Where was the outrage then? This motion, while speaking to a genuine human rights tragedy, is nothing short of political points scoring at its worst.

When hundreds of thousands of Christians and Muslim minorities were forcibly separated from their families, as Deputies Wallace and Clare Daly referred to, through rape, murder, slavery and genocide, I could not get a debate in this House to agree to spend time condemning it in a cross-party motion despite four years of attempts to do so. The genocide got a triple Topical Issue matter from the Ceann Comhairle on Holy Thursday evening, which was very appropriate. It could not get a debate here. No side would agree to it.

As we speak, countries that we continue to trade with such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar are engaged in blatant and violent human rights violations. As Human Rights Watch observed in its 2018 report, Saudi Arabia is the leader of the nine-nation coalition that began military operations in Yemen on 26 March 2015. It has committed numerous violations of international humanitarian law. Where has been the outcry? As of November this year, at least 5,295 civilians have been killed and 8,873 wounded, according to the UN human rights office, although the actual civilian casualty count is likely to be much higher. In 2017, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that airstrikes remained the single largest cause of civilian casualties. Where was our motion on that issue and what happened to us in here that we sat silent, did not open our mouths and did not make any efforts to raise this anywhere? The fact is that this Dáil is being asked to support this motion while it stays silent on the atrocious human rights crimes being committed by people it considers its partners.

The US Department of Homeland Security, DHS, has issued clarifications in the past two days on a number of myths that have been doing the rounds. The first myth is that the DHS has a policy to separate families at the border. The fact is that the DHS does not have a blanket policy of separating families at the border. It has a responsibility to protect all minors in its custody. This means the DHS will separate adults and minors under certain circumstances. These circumstances include when the DHS is unable to determine the family relationship. If there is a reason to question the claimed familial relationship between an adult and child, it is not appropriate to detain adults and children together, for obvious reasons.

If there is reason to suspect the purported or alleged parent or legal guardian of human trafficking or smuggling, the DHS detains the adult in an appropriate, secure detection facility, separate from the minor. The DHS continues to see instances and intelligence reports indicating minors are trafficked by unrelated adults posing as a family in an effort to avoid detention. Are we going to allow that?

If there is reason to suspect the purported parent or legal guardian poses a safety risk to the child, for example, suspected child abuse, it is not appropriate to maintain the adult and child together. If an adult is referred for criminal prosecution, the adult will be transferred to the custody of US Marshals Service and any children will be classified as an unaccompanied alien child and transferred to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. The DHS also notes that in recent months there has been a staggering increase in the number of illegal aliens using children to pose as family units to gain entry into the United States. From October 2017 to February 2018, there was a 315% increase in the number of cases of adults with minors fraudulently posing as family units to gain entry. Do we want to support or condone that? Will any of those facts be heard in the current anti-Trump frenzy? I fear not.

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