So, what's the difference between policy and law, anyway?

There seems to be a systemic confusion between these two terms, specifically in regard to the latest immigration debacle being played out on our Southern borders. Most people understand that if something is a law, then one must (typically) abide by its decree. A policy, however, is merely a set of rules put in place by an administration, whether it be governmental or organizational, that outlines what that particular administration plans to achieve and how they plan to achieve it. These rules can be unconditionally tossed out or ultimately reused, depending upon the whims of the administration in power. Policies can even be enacted by an administration to circumvent a law, for example, President Obama's policy to stop federal authorities from cracking down on states that had declared marijuana legal. This was a policy of the Obama administration that sidestepped the federal law that prohibits the use, possession, and cultivation of marijuana.

Now that we have a better understanding between the differences of these regulatory words, let's return to the immigration issues broiling on the U.S./Mexico border and my main point for this article: There are absolutely no such laws that require families to be separated at the border, nor are there any policies from previous administrations that require family separation. Arguably, every immigration policy since the Clinton Administration has been enacted to protect children, not rip them away from their families. The most infamous example being touted today as the "law" by which families must be separated is a 1997 reactionary court case, known as The Flores Settlement, which stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the ACLU against the U.S. Government that involved the detainment of an unaccompanied minor. At 15 years old, Jenny Lisette Flores had fled her home in El Salvador by herself in search for an aunt who was living in the U.S. Subsequently, she was detained by authorities at the U.S. border and reportedly subjected to regular strip-searches (at the age of 15!) while being forced to share sleeping quarters and bathrooms with adult men and women, whom she did not know. According to the lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the U.S. would not release Flores to her aunt, only to her mother and father, although, as the ACLU asserted, Flores and other unaccompanied minors "had a constitutional right to be released to responsible adults." The agreement between the ACLU and the federal government on this case is what ultimately has become known as The Flores Settlement, and is the scapegoat for the Trump administration's policy of zero-tolerance that separates immigrant children from their families.

In short, the Flores Settlement is simply a court order that limits the number of days that immigrant children caught on the border can be held in detention centers and outlines to whom they can be released. After a maximum of 20 days, minors must be released to their "parents, adult relatives, or other caretakers" OR "kept in the least restrictive setting," in that order. For some reason, which I will attribute to confusion, many seem to read the settlement as the case for child-family separations, yet this could not be farther from the truth. There is absolutely no language within the settlement that calls for such an act, especially given the fact that it originally pertained only to unaccompanied minors, not those minors traveling with their families, and is meant to severely limit detention time and require the release of the children back to their family.

Some of you may be asking, "Why is this such a big deal? This girl just spent waaaay too much time talking about laws and policies and settlements — boooooring!" It all just boils down to one main problem: the fact that the very people charged with informing our citizens and governing our country can tout such audacious and auspicious lies with no recourse, lies such as, "The law is the law!" (Um, what law?) or, "But they [previous administrations] did it [separating families] first!" (Um, no they didn't). Separating children from their families is not grounded in any law within the United States, but on the very policy that the current administration chooses to enact arbitrary rules such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions' own, and very new, policy of "zero-tolerance." I know that some of this stuff can seem boring and confusing, but it is up to the average American citizen to exercise their due diligence by researching and fact-checking these 24-hour news and entertainment companies (as well as our presidential administrations) to get down to the root and facts of the issue so that we don't end up in a version of "The Handmaid's Tale" wondering how in the world America could let something like this happen to us.

America is destined for so much greatness. It's time to act like it and take our country back, one informed and engaged citizen at a time.