Louisiana slave law: more humane than Trump's border policy

[Sgent]

https://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2018/06/families_separated_border.html

More than a few people have connected Donald Trump's decision to tear apart families seeking asylum at our southern border to the history of American slave-owners separating parents and children for whatever reason they saw fit. It's not the most perfect analogy -- at least not in this state. Because slave-holding Louisiana, believe it or not, had a law against separating enslaved mothers and their young children.

"And be it further enacted," Section 9 of Louisiana's 1806 Code Noir (Black Code) reads, "That every person is expressly prohibited from selling separately from their mothers, the children who shall not have attained the full age of ten years." During 2015's Purchased Lives exhibit at The Historic New Orleans Collection, curator Erin Greenwald said a shipment of 11 children for sale without their parents arrived in New Orleans via the brig Ajax and that the diminutive heights listed on the ship's manifest suggest that some were described as older just to circumvent Louisiana law.

But, still. There was a prohibition on the books.

On Thursday (June 7) The New York Times published a story featuring Jose, a 5-year-old from Honduras who was taken away from his father at the border. The woman assigned to care for the boy in Michigan said Jose cried himself to sleep the first few nights and that the crying was eventually replaced with "just moaning and moaning."