By Separating Families at the Border, the Trump Administration Enforces the "Rule by Nobody"
In depersonalizing the separation of asylum seekers and their children at the southern border, Trump Administration officials are signalling that no one will account for the violence.
Photograph by John Moore / Getty
Donald Trump said that the Democrats made him do it. Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, said it was the Bible. Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said it was the law. They all said it wasn't them. In their unified defense of the policy of separating children from their families at the border, Administration officials have adopted a technique of deflection that renders victims and critics powerless: they have depersonalized the violence.
This is how violence works in the world's most cruel and terrifying societies. The victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass deportations, mass incarceration, man-made famines, and other disasters that humans intentionally visit on the "other" are always anonymous. The perpetrators portray their victims as a mass—the "animals" of Trump's imagination, or the enemies and criminals that Sessions and Nielsen conjure up when they talk about asylum seekers. But in the Administration's telling, it's not only the victims who are anonymous—it is also the perpetrators. When Trump blames the cruelty at the border on the Democrats; when Sessions says that God made him enforce the law indiscriminately; or when Nielsen claims, in effect, to be just following orders, the nation's top officials are not merely lying; they are de-personifying the perpetrators. They are not merely refusing to be held accountable but are saying that no one will account for the violence.
A Crisis at the Border
More coverage of the Trump Administration's immigration policy from The New Yorker.
The Trump Administration didn't invent this tactic. The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has perfected it over the years. He has denied knowledge of arrests, trials, or even people of whom he was doubtless aware. He has shrugged his shoulders and spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness while claiming that the Russian judiciary is independent from the executive branch—a blatant, intentional lie that communicates that no one will be held accountable for political prosecutions. But, of course, Putin didn't invent this deflection technique, either.
Writing about the relationship between violence and bureaucracy, Hannah Arendt said, "In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted." She called bureaucracy the "rule by Nobody."
There is something peculiar and, perhaps, novel about the way that Trump and his top bureaucrats are denying responsibility for the tyranny at the border. After all, cruelty, mass violence, and the separation of families are not new practices in the United States—nor is violence perpetrated by a blind, flesh-eating bureaucratic machine. What may be new, however, is a Presidency that explicitly cedes authority to that bureaucracy. Faced with widespread criticism of the family separations, the Administration is not exactly doubling down in defense of it. It is not trying to bring voters, journalists, or politicians around to supporting its policies. Writing in The Atlantic, McKay Coppins suggests that one can observe "if not shame, then at least chagrin." But I don't think it's chagrin that's causing officials to shift the responsibility onto anonymous others. The kind of state that Trump would like to run—and apparently the kind of state of which Sessions would like to be Attorney General and Kirstjen Nielsen would like to be Secretary of Homeland Security—is one that can subject its enemies to what Arendt called "administrative massacres." The logic of such a state demands an all-powerful bureaucratic machine; it demands the terrifying spectre of the rule by Nobody. So they are retrofitting the United States with such a bureaucracy—cruel, senseless, and accountable to no one.
Border Crisis
The Haunting Cries of Immigrant Children
ProPublica obtained an audio recording reportedly of crying children who had been separated from their parents and detained in a Customs and Border Protection facility in Texas. In the past two months, the government has separated almost two thousand immigrant children from their parents.
Juneteenth and the Detention of Children in Texas
A common refrain is that such actions are "un-American" and run counter to the nation's values. Yet the separation of families has deep roots in the American past.
By Jelani Cobb
An Immigration Attorney on What It's Like to Represent Small Children Taken from Their Parents
"We have had to change our strategies as we increasingly work with younger children," Pamela Florian, an attorney for immigrants who have been detained in Arizona, said. "It takes a really long time to build trust."
By Alexandra Schwartz
In America, Naturalized Citizens No Longer Have an Assumption of Permanence
A new task force is built on the premise that the United States is under attack by malevolent immigrants.
The Government Has No Plan for Reuniting the Immigrant Families It Is Tearing Apart
No protocols have been put in place for keeping track of parents and children concurrently, for keeping parents and children in contact with each other while they are separated, or for eventually reuniting them.
By Jonathan Blitzer