Separating families not a first in US history
ALBUQUERQUE: Throughout American history authorities have cited various reasons and laws to take children away from their parents.
SLAVERY
Before abolition, children of black slaves were born into slavery and could be sold by owners at will.
Black women could do little to stop the sale of children and often never saw them again.
Owners also split apart parents who had no legal rights to prevent their sale. To resist, slave families regularly ran away together but faced harsh physical punishment, even death, if caught by slave hunters.
IMMIGRATION
During the Great Depression, local authorities in California and Texas participated in a mass deportation of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans whom they blamed for the economic downturn.
Between 500,000 and one million people were pushed out of the country during the 1930s repatriation, as the removal is sometimes called.
Some families hid children away from relatives in the US to prevent them from being sent to a foreign country they had never visited, according to Francisco Balderrama, a Chicano studies professor at California State University-Los Angeles.
Many families felt they were being forced to separate from their children, who were US citizens. “And many children,” Balderrama said, “never saw their parents again.” JAPANESE INTERNMENT CAMPS
Starting in 1942, when the US was at war with Japan, around 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were ordered by the US government into prison camps around the country. An estimated 30,000 were children.
The 1999 documentary Children of the Camps highlighted the trauma children faced while being detained with their grief-stricken parents. Some older children waited to turn 18 so they could volunteer to fight for the US to prove their families’ loyalty despite not wanting to be separated from their parents. Diaries show many of those who went into the military did so reluctantly.
POVERTY
During the early 1900s, states sometimes pulled children from poor families and placed them in orphanages.
But reformers in the 1920s and 1930s began promoting the idea that children should not be separated from their families.
However, local and state authorities still used poverty as a reason to take children away from Native American and black families, McClain said.
Malcolm X in his autobiography recalled welfare workers coming to take him and his siblings away as children from his struggling single mother after their preacher father, who was mysteriously murdered. The future civil rights leader lived in foster homes and boarding houses. His mother, without her children, had a breakdown and was sent to a mental institution.