Republicans Once Again Show No Understanding Of ‘Family Values’

After a Maryland father was mistakenly deported to an El Salvadoran prison famous for its abuses, the Trump administration admitted that it was an error — but refused to do anything to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back.

In fact, government officials scoffed at the notion that Abrego Garcia deserved to return from the Salvadoran supermax prison the Trump administration has been busy deporting people to. The institution is known for disturbingly harsh conditions and lack of contact: Last month, the administration shared a glossy propaganda video of immigrant men getting their heads shaved and marched into cells, held bent-double by two masked guards each.

“You’re acting like he’s father of the year,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing on Wednesday when questioned about Abrego Garcia.

Vice President JD Vance echoed her comments during an interview on Fox News. “He had committed some traffic violations. He had not shown up for some court dates,” Vance said. “This is not exactly father of the year here.”

Abrego Garcia was arrested at an Ikea parking lot in front of his 5-year-old son, his lawyers say — even though he was granted protection from deportation by a judge in 2019. On Friday, a federal judge ordered the U.S. to return the 29-year-old by 11:59 p.m. Monday. When reached for comment, the White House pointed HuffPost to comments Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin made on Fox News on Friday.

“The American people should know who this individual is,” she said. “He’s not some Maryland father, he’s actually a member of MS-13.” There is no evidence that Abrego Garcia is in a gang, his attorneys say.

While Abrego Garcia’s family awaits his fate, his attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg says the amount of attention the case has gotten has left them rattled, enough so that they have fled their home to escape it. “I’m also really worried about right-wing vigilante violence,” he told HuffPost.

Deportations aren’t just about any one person: the impacts spread through their family and the wider community.

Approximately 5 million children have at least one undocumented parent at home. The children left to deal with the aftermath of a parent’s deportation may experience increased anxiety and other mental health issues that can last long after the initial event, according to the National Immigration Law Center. There’s an economic angle, too — studieshave shown that deportations can plunge a family into poverty after the sudden loss of income.

“It’s incredibly destabilizing,” Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, told HuffPost. “Deportations are like a nuclear bomb: First there’s the immediate impact and then life-long effects.”

For decades — since Ronald Reagan was able to woo the evangelical Christian voting bloc — the Republican Party has positioned itself as the party of traditional and family values.The words “family” or “families” appear 18 times in the 17 pages of their 2024 party platform: “Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage, the blessings of childhood, the foundational role of families, and supports working parents. We will end policies that punish families,” the platform proclaims. The Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Donald Trump, despite being twice divorced with five children by three women, has championed traditional family values. “We will again stand proudly for families and for life,” Trump told anti-abortion protesters at the March For Life back in January.

But too often, these proclamations come up sharp against the actual results of the other policies the party espouses, like the fact that their anti-immigrant, pro-deportation stance is splitting up families, just as it did during Trump’s first term. “Family values” was always a softening cover for what was otherwise a pro-capitalist, anti-equality agenda.

Just look at this past week — when the so-called pro-family party has, it turns out, made quite a few anti-family moves.

Among them, moves that will hurt families trying to expand. The Trump administration’s foray into pretending to care about infertility treatments started last year when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos produced from in vitro fertilization are unborn children — meaning they could now be treated as people under the law. The ruling opened up clinics to lawsuits if an embryo is damaged or destroyed, as well as raised questions of what would happen to unused embryos — all thorny legal issues that clinics were unprepared to deal with or defend. Clinics in the state were forced to pause treatments indefinitely, leaving hopeful parents in limbo and prompting a massive public outcry.

In response, the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature passed a law to ensure that IVF clinics would be shielded from lawsuits over the damage or destruction of embryos. Republicans set out to prove that just because they considered embryos and fetuses to be children when it came to abortion, they certainly weren’t willing to use that argument to prevent people from having kids.

On the campaign trail, Trump began saying he would make the government pay for IVF treatments, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. When he returned to the White House, he signed an executive order that would supposedly bring down the costs of IVF treatments, but reproductive rights advocates said the order was not specific about how it would actually accomplish that.

Trump has even started referring to himself as the “fertilization president.” “We’re going to have tremendous, tremendous goodies in the bag for women, too, the women between the fertilization and all of the other things that we’re talking about,” he said at a Women’s History month White House event last week. “I’ll be known as the fertilization president, that’s not bad, that’s not bad.”

But just one week after declaring himself President Fertilization, his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off a small but highly specialized team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that studied IVF, as part of the sweeping cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services.

The six-person Assisted Reproductive Technology Surveillance team had tracked how well IVF is working and researched topics like how to make the procedure less expensive. Without them, experts warn, hopeful parents will be cut off from valuable resources that can help them make important decisions about their treatment.

Infertility experts were stunned. “This is a big handicap for the administration as they embrace IVF and want to expand coverage,” Barbara Collura, CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association, told NBC News. “These are the right people to have at your side.”

Oops?

Even GOP politicians themselves haven’t been immune from the conflict between their stated priorities and actual agenda. A debate over a bill meant to help parents serving in Congress caused a party rift this week that prompted one member to leave a right-wing caucus.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Texas), who had a child in 2023, proposed a bill that would allow new parents in the U.S. House to vote by proxy for up to 12 weeks and has been lobbying for bipartisan support. But a small group of Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, were aghast at the suggestion. Even though many of them voted by proxy during COVID lockdowns, they balked at the idea of affording the same flexibility to new parents.

Things came to a head when Johnson, however, declined to let a committee have a hearing on the proposal this week. So Luna used a different approach. Through what’s called a “discharge” petition, she got enough signatures from her colleagues to force her bill to the floor.

Instead, Johnson took his ball and went home, canceling votes for the rest of the week. In response, Luna abruptly quit the House Freedom Caucus, the far-right faction of Congress, saying their opposition to her “family-centered bill” was a “betrayal of trust.”

In a letter, Luna accused some of her Republican colleagues of smearing her by tying her proposal to a bill that would require proof of citizenship to vote.

“The intent was clear: to misrepresent me and the members supporting this pro-life, pro-family initiative—one of the most significant in congressional history—as obstructing the President and opposing election integrity,” Luna wrote.

“Republicans should stop lecturing people on being pro-family when they’re opposing this uniformly,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) told reporters about the situation.

But perhaps nothing encapsulates the notion that the GOP’s pro-family proclamations are nothing more than lip service better than the president, who often vacillates wildly between positions with no concern for what Republicans have been saying. Trump weighed in on the Luna bill on Thursday, throwing a curveball to Johnson by saying he supported it.

“I don’t know why it’s so controversial,” he told reporters.