The last time I was in Washington I spent an hour sitting on a bench outside the White House. It was three days before the inauguration of Donald Trump, and a group of school students on a field trip from Chicago had gathered in Lafayette Park to give speeches. As secret service officers moved in to remove them, a 15-year-old boy stood on a box and pierced the eerie calm, shouting at the top of his voice: “My name is Mario Espinoza and I am the child of undocumented immigrants!” – an underdog against the might of the state showing raw courage without an ounce of fear.

It’s heartbreaking to return here in the very week that the president seeks to mercilessly crush that very spirit of resistance, survival and defiance with such unspeakable wickedness. Children seeking safety from conflict and violence have been ripped from the arms of their parents and locked in cages, families turned into bargaining chips by a president who rules through chaos and fear. This is a move calculated to fire up Trump’s base ahead of the midterms while forcing both Democrats and moderate Republicans to make an impossible choice: either let these children rot alone in cages, or deport them with their families to places where many face certain death. A shocking new low at a time when very little surprises us anymore.



But as a British citizen I cannot, in good faith, reassure myself with that time-old mantra that we are somehow more civilised and less cruel or brutal than our cousins across the pond. Nor do I think that condemnation from our government can carry any real currency. Since long before anybody had heard the words “Make America great again”, splitting up families has been official policy in Theresa May’s Home Office – and it has been carried out with a brutality and on a scale that would make even President Trump blush.



The Children’s Commissioner has found that at least 15,000 children growing up in the UK live without a parent because the right of British citizens to reunite with a foreign spouse is limited by an unreasonable income threshold, an impossibly complicated application system fraught with Home Office errors, and no legal aid for families to challenge incorrect decisions. Parents and children alike suffer mental trauma, with symptoms including nightmares, eating disorders and aggression, while relationships are severely strained, often to the point at which children no longer recognise their parents. Children like Elijah, whose father was unable even to be present for Elijah’s birth. Families just like yours and mine. May’s government has repeatedly advised families that they are free to use Skype, and therefore this enforced separation does not constitute a violation of their right to a family life, while pledging to tighten these restrictions in its manifesto last year.

Elsewhere in the system, unaccompanied young refugees are unable to be safely reunited with their families, despite calls from the Red Cross and the United Nations to open channels. Three unaccompanied teenagers seeking asylum in the UK and facing indefinite separation from their familieskilled themselves in the six months from last November. A private member’s bill seeking to allow family reunion in limited circumstances was introduced by the SNP’s Angus MacNeil in 2017. Yet despite cross-party support, a parliamentary debate in March saw the government refusing to support a very limited measure of relief, with the Conservative MP Ranil Jayawardena going out of his way to use the words “refugee” and “migrant” interchangeably, and invoking the threat of terrorism as a reason to prevent the reunion of a few hundred rigorously screened children with their parents.

Unaccompanied children are routinely detained on arrival in the UK, with more than a thousand, including babies, detained at Heathrow airport last year. And in a chilling parallel to the horrors unfolding in the US, the charity Bail for Immigration Detainees has documented hundreds of cases involving families forcibly separated by immigration detention, with children often put into unstable care arrangements or placed at serious risk of harm. These cases often involve the shameful practice of indefinite detention, with the UK the only country in Europe that still locks vulnerable people up for administrative convenience, without a time limit or a clear plan. In most of these cases, parents are ultimately released, their detention having served no real purpose save the permanent damage done to their families.

The prime minister is right to condemn the actions of the Trump administration. For her words to mean anything, however, she must look closer to home and rethink her own decisions that have driven a wedge between families while denying them the ability to challenge their separation. Regardless of our opinions on immigration, there are surely very few among us who can point to any policy goal that justifies the enforced separation of families by the state. The government must commit to ending enforced separation and indefinite detention and to reinstating legal aid for families. Wherever we came from, we are above all else a nation of 20 million families, and all our families belong together.