If there’s one thing that really, really upsets America’s
child welfare establishment, it’s pointing out the close resemblance between
the Trump administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy that separated
children from their parents at the Mexican border and the American foster care
system.
So, every few weeks, it seems, there is another desperate
attempt at hair-splitting to try to convince us that when American child
protective services agencies tear apart families nearly 270,000 times every
year, it’s nothing like those roughly 2,600 cases that occurred on the border.
Of course the two systems are not identical. Although the
percentage is small, some of the children taken by U.S. agencies really did
need to be removed for their own safety. And unlike Donald J. Trump, most
people in the U.S. child welfare system have good intentions.
But even the good intentions can have a downside. They are
likely to shield needless removal of children into U.S. foster care system from
the kind of intensive scrutiny the Trump family separation policy is likely to
get when Democrats take control of the House of Representatives in January.
That’s unfortunate, because good intentions is pretty much
where the differences end. As this
handy chart makes clear, everything else amounts to distinctions without
differences. And the efforts of foster care apologists to draw those
distinctions actually illustrate the extent to which the two systems are
similar.
