Family Separation: The Legacy Behind the Policies
Today, the US government sanctions family separation under the premise of social or family welfare. When we look at the families that are disproportionately separated, we find Black, Indigenous, undocumented, and/or unhoused families are not only the ones most impacted, but they are also the communities in which the US has a legacy of attempting to control and surveil. In examining the US’s legacy of family separation, we can see that all its various iterations seek state control of bodies of color.
Family Separation in the US Historical Context
Separation of Enslaved Families
For over 250 years, forming a legally recognized family was impossible for enslaved African Americans when policy deemed them chattel property without legal standing. Their marital vows were said with a caveat, historian Tea Hunter recorded as,
“Do you take this woman or this man to be your spouse—until death or distance do you part?”
Knowing that their family’s separation was imminent, forming families was inherently an act of resistance by enslaved Africans. It was an assertion of their humanity and agency to form self-determined bonds and a legacy within bondage. Structurally, slaveholders had full autonomy over their bodies, including who, how, where, and when their bodies engaged in labor, intercourse, and matriomony.
Slaveholders forcibly bred and sexually assaulted enslaved couples regardless of marital status. Couples moved to distant plantations at the whim of slaveholders’ mood, financial standing, and, overall, their family feuds. When enslaved mothers managed to survive pregnancy to deliver viable children, the threat of those children being ripped from their arms at any moment after weaning them was constant. Even freed Black people were not free from the threats of family separation, often forced to relocate far away from their enslaved family members or risk return to bondage.
Enslaved families resisted their separation, developing intricate runaway plans or attempting to work for years to afford the purchase of enslaved family members and the ultimate reunification of their family. The US government criminalized enslaved African Americans for running away and created economies around keeping families separated and torturing those who tried to reunite. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793 and amended it in 1850, creating an interstate network of ‘Fugitive Slaves’ ads and brutal slave catchers to hunt down runaways, administering sadistic, often deadly torture tactics to punish enslaved people.
Despite all this, enslaved families resisted from the 1830s to the 1930s; formerly enslaved people placed ‘Last Seen Ads’ in newspapers to try to reunite with their families. After Emancipation, the ads increased in frequency, as families no longer had to navigate the legal status of their enslaved family members. One of the critical components of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s work was aiding in family reunification efforts during Reconstruction.
Separation of Indigenous Families
The US systematically facilitated the separation and disintegration of indigenous families under the guise of education and relocation during the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1819, the U.S. Congress implemented the Civilization Fund Act, which gave the president the power to finance individuals to go to Indigenous communities to provide exposure and teach them the “arts of civilization.” This act opened the doors for missionaries to establish schools within indigenous territories.
In 1824, the US codified this policy with the establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to manage the funds and overall collective efforts to replace and erase the cultural practices of Indigenous communities. As Indigenous Tribes were expelled from their traditional lands to areas West of the Mississippi River, their children were forcibly placed in boarding schools to enact strict assimilationist visions.
During the ‘Boarding School Era’ from 1880 to 1930, indigenous children were kidnapped and sent to off-reservation boarding schools far removed from their families and communities. These institutions were places of abuse and forced re-education. It subjected children to physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, and even death, within the Indian boarding school system. They forbade them from expressing their cultural practices, like speaking the Native language and practicing their traditional religions. As some of the boarding schools began being closed, the government implemented the Indian Adoption Act between 1957 and 1968 to forcibly take young indigenous children from their biological parents and place them with white adoptive families to force assimilation.
As a result of multi-generational separation by 1978, studies showed 25 to 35 percent of indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities, even when 85% had available family members or tribal members available to take them into their care. The Dept of the Interior identified the burial sites of over 500 children at least 53 schools, with potentially tens of thousands of children buried in unmarked graves at these institutions.
Family Separation Through Policy
Once the Chattel Slavery and boarding schools were no longer available instruments to separate Black and Indigenous families, the US began implementing criminalization policies for poverty-associated factors that aided in separating families of color.
The War on Drugs
In 1971, President Nixon officially declared the ‘War on Drugs, ’ which jump-started four decades of polices targeting low-income communities. From harshly sentencing those struggling with addiction and mental health to increasing the number of children in the foster care system and juvenile detention, the War on Drugs was a massive pipeline to family separation.
It was a multifront propaganda campaign that included the creation of the myth of the ‘Crack Baby,’ the ‘Welfare Queen,’ to problematize Black mothers, heavily surveil them, and find ways to remove their children from their care. States adopted strict policies and disproportionately drug tested mothers of color and deemed any drug use as child maltreatment. The War on Drugs implemented policies like the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which incentivized family separation and did not decrease child abuse. Impacts of the overall criminalization of struggling parents cut through every social issue in the country.
Criminalization of Homelessness
When families are at their most vulnerable, experiencing homelessness, facing housing insecurity, and seeking resources and social support, the state abuses their vulnerability. Within shelters and emergency housing, families were surveilled for justifications for family separation. Studies show,
“One-third of children in families who experienced homelessness were separated from the family at the time of the shelter stay or had been separated at some time in the past.”
These separations are often for extended periods of time, over 18 months, and have significant detrimental impacts on children’s development and health. Additionally, states like Georgia are spending millions to separate unhoused children from their parents and place them in more expensive foster care and temporary placements. Many of these children were unhoused due to the inaccessibility of affordable housing. The ACLU found,
“Child welfare systems punish families experiencing poverty by removing children and charging parents with ‘neglect.’”
The US Child Welfare System penalizes impoverished families by enacting policies that separate families. Researchers highlight that these polices disproportionately investigate Black and Indigenous families, roots are in racialized biases held since the nation’s inception.
Criminalization of Undocumented Families
The US legal system made a coordinated effort to prioritize prosecuting immigration status crimes. According to a report from the ACLU, entry and re-entry prosecutions increased 130% between 2007 and 2012. One of the policies that contributed to this increase was Operation Streamline. Implemented in 2005, this policy prosecuted undocumented people who crossed the border unlawfully in groups, instead of individual hearings, which the due process would usually entail. This policy sought maximum penalties for illegal entry and re-entry while deeming many undocumented defendants to misdemeanor and felony status, therefore condemning them to future deportation and inability to seek legal immigration status.
In 2018, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions implemented a “zero-tolerance policy” for undocumented people who entered the US or attempted to enter the US without legal authorization—policies like these increased family separations in various ways. Families with mixed immigration status lived in fear of a parent being detained and deported by ICE. It also meant DACA recipients, children who entered the country undocumented, no longer had pathways to obtain legal status in adulthood. Furthermore, it created chaos at the border, detaining families for attempting to enter the US illegally, and children were separated and detained. ICE detention centers subject children to inhumane treatment and abuse. Like the Boarding School Era, the federal government doesn’t even ensure the safety of the children they separate. In 2018, the Health and Human Services Department disclosed they ‘lost’ 1,488 children in their custody.
Conclusion
The common thread between these examples of family separation is their dehumanization of bodies of color, hyper-surveillance, and ultimate disposability within capitalism. Within the present administration, where increased surveillance and criminalization are impacting marginalized communities, family separation will continue to be weaponized to suppress communities.
About the Author
Kathleen Anaza
Kathleen ‘Kat’ Anaza is a multi-genre storyteller, organizer, and entrepreneur whose works center on narratives and experiences of the Black Diaspora. She has been featured in Vogue Magazine, Lonely Planet, Viator, and more. Connect with her work at https://linktr.ee/Kat_Anaza.
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