"Each one of these children is its own story. And those stories are absolutely heartbreaking.
"One 4-year-old from Honduras had glasses. The boy's parents had been able to get him a case to protect the glasses." Gelernt said the 'glasses case became the most important thing in their life because they knew if the glasses broke, they might not be able to get him another pair.'
“When the boy was separated from his mother, he had his glasses, but he didn't have the case.
"All day long, all the mother thought about was, 'Can my little boy see?'"
– Lee Gelernt, Deputy Director of the ACLU’s national Immigrants’ Rights Project and Director of the Project’s Program on Access to the Courts.
Lawyers appointed by a federal judge to identify migrant families who were separated by the Trump administration say that they have yet to track down the parents of 545 children and that about two-thirds of those parents were deported to Central America without their children, according to a filing Tuesday from the American Civil Liberties Union.
For hundreds of those children, reunion is made all the more complicated by the fact that the government already deported their parents – without a plan for how they would be ever be located.
(Amrit Cheng. “More Than 500 Children Are Still Separated. Here’s What Comes Next.” ACLU. August 21, 2020.)
The Trump administration instituted a "zero tolerance" policy in 2018 that separated migrant children and parents at the southern U.S. border. The administration later confirmed that it had actually begun separating families in 2017 along some parts of the border under a pilot program. The ACLU and other pro-bono law firms were tasked with finding the members of families separated during the pilot program.
Unlike the 2,800 families separated under zero tolerance in 2018, most of whom remained in custody when the policy was ended by executive order, many of the more than 1,000 parents separated from their children under the pilot program had already been deported before a federal judge in California ordered that they be found.
"People ask when we will find all of these families, and sadly, I can't give an answer. I just don't know But we will not stop looking until we have found every one of the families, no matter how long it takes. The tragic reality is that hundreds of parents were deported to Central America without their children, who remain here with foster families or distant relatives."
– Lee Gelernt
The separation of migrant children from their parents, sometimes for months, was at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on immigration.
Representative Gregory Meeks of New York said: "We know from reporting that the cruelty of this policy was intentional. This isn't an unintended consequence, this is the predictable outcome of an incompetent administration that thought ripping families apart would send a message."
A recent report by the inspector general of the DOJ reveals that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then-Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein pushed for enforcing Trump's family separation policy, with Sessions saying that "we need to take away the children" to deter asylum seekers from entering the U.S.
(Nancy Stancil. “'Just Babies at the Time': ACLU Says It Can't Find Parents of Over 500 Children Separated From Families by Trump.” Common Dreams. October 21, 2020.)
Rosenstein went even further telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.
(Michael D. Shear, Katie Benner and Michael S. Schmidt. “‘We Need to Take Away Children,’ No Matter How Young, Justice Dept. Officials Said.” The New York Times. October 06, 2020.)
The Children
"The child doesn't know whether they'll ever see their parent again. The separation of these families is both historic and can never be forgotten. This can never be repeated again."
– Lee Gelernt
Gelernt said, “First, we have not even found these 545 parents so neither we nor certainly the administration can know whether they want to be reunited.”
“Second, in the past there have certainly have been parents who have made the agonizing decision to leave the child in the U.S. because of the danger the child would face upon return. The humane and simple solution is for the Trump administration to allow the parents to return to the U.S. to reunite with their children but the administration is not allowing that.“
(Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff. “Lawyers say they can't find the parents of 545 migrant children separated by Trump administration.” NBC News. October 21, 2020.)
The present government has argued that families can only be reunited in their countries of origin. This means that children who have a current asylum claim may have to forfeit theirs in order be reunited with their parents. If their parents don’t want them to lose the opportunity to seek protection in the U.S., children will have to navigate the asylum system without their parents, while bearing the weight of continued separation.
The ACLU reports: “Parents who may have been misled or coerced into signing away their asylum rights will be left without redress. Already in this lawsuit, we’ve filed declarations of parents who were pressured by ICE officers to give up asylum claims, or to sign forms that they were unable to read.”
"Because of the Trump administration's calculated cruelty, 545 children have not seen their parents since 2017. And have no idea if or when they will ever see them again. Evil is too kind a word for what the Trump administration has done here.The staggering inhumanity of this president's treatment of these children belongs in the darkest chapters of our nation's history – the ones we can never forget and must never repeat."
– Senator of Washington Patty Murray
Vice President Joe Biden released a statement calling the reports "an outrage, a moral failing, and a stain on our national character," adding that the principle that "families belong together" will be at the "core" of his immigration policy if he is elected in November.
Biden has pledged to create a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented individuals living in the United States.
“This is appalling. The Trump Admin. separated children and lied about it. They deported many of their parents – and more than 500 children still haven’t been reunited. The disregard for human rights in this administration knows no bounds.”
– Representative Nanette Barragán of California
A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The asylum seekers had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents before being sent to a processing center for possible separation. (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
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