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AOC Is Right: We Need Accountability for the Family Separation Crisis
The freshman lawmaker’s call for a ‘9/11-style commission’ to investigate family separation gives the atrocity the moral weight it deserves
The family separation crisis has been going on in the United States for over a year now. Children have been traumatized, physically endangered, or separated from parents who were then deported without them, and the psychological toll of this cruelty is likely to be generational. Though the process officially ended in June 2018, reports indicate it is still ongoing. We know all this. What we don’t know is what we do to come to terms with this reality afterward, and what — if any — reparations the United States will be making to its many victims.
The clearest call for accountability yet came this week when, at an immigration town hall in her home district, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a “9/11-style commission” for the family separation crisis.
“The 9/11 commission [was] charged with investigating and making sure they dug out every nook and cranny of what happened and how it happened in our system,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And I think that kind of study is what’s going to be required in order to reunite as many children with their parents as possible.”
The commission to which Ocasio-Cortez refers was established in 2002, and interviewed well over a thousand sources, in order to provide a full picture of the 9/11 attacks. Its final report ultimately placed responsibility on the FBI and the CIA for failing to stop the attacks, citing multiple intelligence gaffes under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush: “[The presidents] were not well served by those agencies, and they did not, in my opinion, have the information they needed to make the decisions they had to make,” said commission chair Thomas Kean after the report was published.
This is one way to frame family separation: As an institutional failure, a matter of systemic rot. But Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a public accounting also calls to mind the Nuremberg trials after the Holocaust, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up after the end of apartheid in South Africa; public reckonings that came about…
