Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Due to President Donald Trump’s Administration’s zero tolerance border policy, all people crossing the US-Mexico border illegally, even those seeking asylum, face criminal prosecution. The US Department of Homeland Security claims that between mid-April and May of this year it has separated nearly 2,000 children from their parents after they crossed the Mexico border into the US. That equates to 65 children being split from their parents each day for the past six weeks. More than 100 of these children were under the age of four. Parents were told that their children were being taken for a bath or being taken away briefly for questioning. It took hours for parents to realise their children had been taken away indefinitely. One father died by suicide in a detention cell the night after his three year old child was physically ripped out of his arms. One mother had her child taken from her while she was nursing and she was placed in handcuffs when she tried to protest. Children are being held for weeks and months in cages and there are reports that parents who choose to return across the border cannot find their children.

None of these children in Trump’s America will have a parent with them to protect them from the sickening reality of being caged en masse, alone and terrified, sleeping under foil blankets in a foreign land for months, if not years, on end. The only crime their parents committed was to try to escape from persecution and poverty and make a better life for their children. We have all heard the audio clip of children in a US Customs and Border Protection facility obtained by ProPublica. We have heard the children crying, in terrible distress, calling out for their parents and we have heard border patrol agents joking and laughing at them. The cries I heard on that clip, the young cries of "Mama" and "Papa", will haunt me as they will haunt us all. As a mother, it is haunting and truly frightening to hear these cries, the cries of frightened children, some no more than four years old, calling for their parents, aunts or relatives, alone, abandoned, surrounded by unfriendly faces in an unfriendly country and treated without dignity, respect, compassion or the most basic forms of human decency.

There are no words strong enough to condemn the despicable actions of an Administration that would be willing to do this. This is coming from an Administration whose defence of these actions has been one of wild and fanciful evasion. President Trump has declared that the US is withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, calling it a “hypocritical and self-serving” body that “makes a mockery of human rights”and “a cesspool of political bias”. There is absolutely no remorse from this President and no regret for the pain inflicted. The most basic and fundamental aspects of what we term human rights are being eroded in word and deed by an Administration full of hate, bile and vicious anger towards the most vulnerable of human beings.

The EU is not blameless or innocent either. We cannot pretend that the EU does not have its own deterrence policies. The EU, including Ireland, is spending €180 million in Libya to deter migrants from making a journey that has drowned thousands in the Mediterranean Sea, including 784 people so far this year alone. The US treats people like cattle, while we in Europe treat them like cargo. Let the US be a warning to us. Let us end direct provision and use our influence here in Ireland to prevent the EU from following further the same poisonous route which comes only to one known end - children in cages and sinking boats labelled as “infestation” by demagogues like Trump.

See this speech in context