By Tim Canova — Candidate for Florida’s 23rd Congressional District

Two young girls watch television in a holding area where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children were being processed and held at the US Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center in Nogales, Arizona, June 18, 2014. Credit: Ross D. Franklin/Reuters

Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order that’s supposed to reverse his previous policy of separating refugee children from their families. Now his plan is to detain parents and children together at the border, but for indefinite durations. It remains to be seen whether the draconian U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is even capable of carrying out the president’s executive order.

I applaud all who protested the inhumane separation policy. President Trump’s reversal shows what can happen when we the people stand up for what’s right. But as discussed below, there’s still much to be done to fix our broken immigration system.

It’s unacceptable that in the past year ICE has lost track of some 1500 child refugees who were separated from their families. Even before making it to the U.S. border, these children have often experienced terrible physical and psychological trauma along the way. According to psychologists, early trauma often has severe adverse effects on the child’s emotional development and well-being.

We as a people should be providing a refuge and haven for those seeking asylum. We have a special responsibility to these people who are fleeing countries where the U.S. has interfered in their politics and elections to impede democracy and stifle progressive reforms.

Whether or not these children have crossed our borders illegally, whether or not they were smuggled by traffickers or traveling with their parents, America is a wealthy enough country to treat them with compassion and respect. We need detention centers that accommodate families, rather than break them up. That should now be our priority number one: reuniting children with their families, providing them with a safe haven from danger, and if confinement is needed, then keeping them together in humane conditions and not for unreasonably long and indefinite periods of time.

For years, ICE has regularly broken up families and separately detained the children. Donald Trump has done us an ugly service in making the practice suddenly visible by pursuing it more aggressively as official government policy. In 2011, a Senate investigation found that the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency in the Department of Health and Human Services, regularly placed children in homes of sponsors without visiting the locations or conducting background checks on the adults who claimed the children. In some cases, the children were placed with human traffickers and ICE lost track of about 4000 child refugees even before President Trump took office.

And things have gone downhill since. Under President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, there’s been a marked increase of children in these immigration detention centers. And the concentration camp and prison conditions are dangerous. These children will be experiencing Adverse Childhood Effects (ACES) for years, and in many cases for their entire lives.

ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which was created after the September 11th terrorist attacks. In its relatively brief existence, ICE has expanded its powers and violated individual rights on a vast scale, including surveillance, arrests, imprisonment and “Speed Deportation” without due process, targeting political opponents, defying court orders, illegally detaining American citizens, and subjecting prisoners to dangerous conditions, resulting in the sexual abuse of thousands of men and women, often at the hands of private security contractors.

It’s time to retire ICE and build a different kind of immigration enforcement agency with a much different culture — one that sees refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and others who pass through the system as human beings, and not just as opportunities for profit and abuse.

Not only should we put an end to ICE, we should also put an end to using for-profit privately-owned and operated prisons and immigration detention centers. There are credible allegations that children in U.S. custody in private immigration detention in Texas have been forcibly injected with psychotropic drugs. One child was reportedly forced to take 10 different shots and pills, including three antipsychotic drugs and separate medication for seizures, depression, pain, cognition, and even Parkinson’s disease. One wonders if private prison contractors are making big profits on such treatments. There should never be a private financial incentive to lock up a human being.

The for-profit prison industry has contributed significantly to Republicans and Democrats alike. My opponent, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has taken donations from the giant Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), now called CoreCivic, while pushing for CCA’s proposed immigration detention center in the community of Southwest Ranches in her own district. It was only thanks to the active opposition of the Southwest Ranches community that the project was killed, although at a high financial cost to the taxpayers.

Wasserman Schultz’s recent grandstanding outside the private, for-profit Krome Detention Center in Miami — after years of silence on the treatment of imprisoned child refugees — shows her political opportunism and hypocrisy. One wonders, if her Southwest Ranches private prison project had not been stopped, would Schultz have been protesting outside that CCA facility.

Let us remember, we as Americans have a moral obligation to acknowledge and change the foreign policies of our government that have been creating the terrible suffering and dangerous conditions that refugees and asylum seekers are fleeing from all over the world. There needs to be Congressional hearings about the utter failures in our foreign policies — much like the hearings that helped bring the Vietnam War to an end.

Since September 11th, the U.S. has chosen to pursue wars of regime change — often by terrorist proxies — in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, thereby creating the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. And as a result, we’ve seen the rise of xenophobic right-wing political parties across western Europe.

South of our border, the U.S. has propped up brutal oligarchies that have prevented peaceful democratic change, blocked social progress, and inflicted widespread economic hardship on the people of the Americas. This has fueled our present refugee crisis. We should instead return to the approach of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy and John Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress.”

Finally, let’s not forget that we need comprehensive immigration reform that includes a quick path to citizenship for DREAMers and the millions of our undocumented friends and neighbors, cutting back on the H1-B visa program while providing vastly more technical training to qualify our own citizens in specialty jobs, and improving border security, including at ports of entry.

Let us not forget that America was built on the backs of slaves, immigrants, low wage workers, and on the graves of patriots and victims of genocide alike. We must regain our humanity and treat the most vulnerable among us with the compassion and dignity that all people deserve.

It will take a great deal of courage and political independence to pursue this agenda in Congress. I hope you will join our campaign by clicking here and supporting us financially with small donations, by phone banking and canvassing for us when possible, and by sharing on social media and spreading the word in your daily interactions. There’s still much to be done to fix our broken immigration system, but with your help, we will continue fighting for the most vulnerable among us.