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Tag: family separation policy
Border Patrol Kept Families Separated To Avoid ‘Paperwork’

Border Patrol Kept Families Separated To Avoid ‘Paperwork’

Unsettling details of Trump’s family separation policy were laid out in a new investigative report released by congressional staff for Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), acknowledging that “child separations were more harmful, traumatic, and chaotic than previously known.”

The investigation found that the youngest known child to be ripped away from his parents was a four-month-old Romanian boy.

In another instance, an eight-month-old baby was taken from her father in May 2018. At the time of his father’s release from custody, “the baby had spent nearly half of his life without his parents, in the custody of the Trump Administration,” according to the report. “It is unclear whether the child and father have been reunited.”

In total, the report identifies 18 infants and toddlers under the age of 2 were torn away from their parents. The 18 babies were part of the 2,648 children the Trump administration acknowledges it separated from their parents.

In some case, parents left detention to go to court only to return hours later to find their children removed from the detention facility and whisked away to another unknown location. In some cases, those parents were deported without their children.

Even when Trump officials had the opportunity to reunite children with their parents, laziness trumped compassion.

The report describes a situation in McAllen, Texas, where border patrol agents devised a system to transfer parents returning from court directly into ICE custody rather than readmitting them to the same facility detaining their children. Border agents made the decision to keep families separated because they wanted to “avoid doing the additional paperwork” required to reunite families.

The Trump administration faced massive backlash for its family separation policy in 2018, forcing an eventual change by Trump. Despite the outrage, many children have still not been reunited with their parents, and the Trump administration may have separated more children than it initially acknowledged.

In the end, the report concludes that “policy of separating children from their parents appears to be a deliberate, unnecessary, and cruel choice by President Trump and his Administration.”

 

Published with permission of The American Independent.

Judge Orders Trump Officials To Return Migrant Children By October

Judge Orders Trump Officials To Return Migrant Children By October

On Thursday, a federal judge gave Trump officials six months to identify every single immigrant child they kidnapped as part of Trump’s family separation policy — which may have victimized thousands more children than the public initially knew about.

The order is a rebuke of the Trump administration, which had asked the court for up to two years to find all the children stolen from their families at the border. At the time, the ACLU skewered the administration for the suggested timeline.

“The government’s proposed plan reflects the administration’s continuing refusal to treat these separations with the urgency they deserve,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney, told NBC News in early April. “The government was able to quickly gather resources to tear these children away from their families and now they need to gather the resources to fix the damage.”

The ACLU praised the new six-month timeline ordered by U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw.

“This order shows that the court continues to recognize the gravity of this situation,” Gelernt said in a statement. As a part of the order, the administration will turn over the names of stolen children to the ACLU on a rolling basis so that the organization can contact their families and give parents the opportunity to reunite with their children.

The Trump administration’s lackluster efforts drew the ire of Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

“A federal judge should have appointed a Special Master long ago to take this out of the government’s hands,” Castro told Shareblue Media. “The Trump Administration has proven it’s too malicious, incompetent or indifferent to reunite families properly and timely.”

The ruling is part of an ongoing legal battle between the ACLU and the Trump administration over thousands of children forcibly separated from their parents in 2017 and 2018. In January 2019, the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services warned that “thousands of children” — in addition to the 2,737 children previously identified as taken from their parents — may have been separated in 2017.

Before suggesting the two-year timeline, the Trump administration resisted the notion that they should be forced to find any of the newly-identified children at all. Lawyers arguing on behalf of Trump argued that locating the children was a “significant burden,” and that the administration has already “done all things to correct the wrong.”

But Judge Sabraw was having none of it. In a March 2019 ruling, he criticized the Trump administration’s position, saying the “hallmark of a civilized society is measured by how it treats its people and those within its borders.” He added that identifying the children so they can be reunited with their parents is both necessary and worthwhile.

Despite worldwide outrage over the unconscionable family separation policy — described by human rights organizations as an “abuse of children” — the Trump administration has steadfastly resisted court orders to reunite the kidnapped children with their families.

Rather than do the right thing on its own, the Trump administration is being forced to do it by a federal judge.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

IMAGE: Demonstrators march during the “Day Without Immigrants” protest in Washington, DC, February 16, 2017. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein

Child-Snatching At The Border: Is This Who We Are?

Child-Snatching At The Border: Is This Who We Are?

Let’s face it: Donald Trump enjoys hurting and humiliating people, and that’s the thing some of his loudest supporters like about him. Making women and children cry makes him feel manly and powerful. The more defenseless, the better. He particularly enjoys punishing racial minorities.

See, when his victims have no ability to respond, Trump can mouth off without hiding behind bodyguards, as he’s done all his life. The way he did with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — calling the leader of America’s closest ally “weak” before beating an early retreat on Air Force One.

No way would he talk that way to the younger man’s face. Trump only bullies people he has power over.

This president’s incessant lying is yet another expression of his sadism—playing people for fools, making them grovel. Does anybody, anybody, actually believe that the heartbreaking result of the White House’s “zero tolerance” policy of tearing children from their mothers’ arms at the U.S./Mexican border is the fault of the Democrats?

The Democrats who control neither the White House, the Senate, nor the House of Representatives and have no power even to bring an immigration bill to a vote, much less pass one? Those Democrats?

“Democrats are the problem,” Trump tweeted. “They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!”

In the next breath, Trump asserts that he’s holding the immigrant children hostage until Congress gives him his ridiculous wall—the wall Mexico was supposed to pay for.

So who are you going to believe, Trump supporters? Him or your lying eyes? The president could stop this obscene charade exactly the way he started it last April, with an executive order. It’s purely up to him and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“The White House can fix it if they want to,” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-UT) said. “I don’t think there’s any question about that.”

For the White House to pretend otherwise isn’t an exaggeration, a misunderstanding, or a falsehood. It’s a sheer, brazen, indefensible lie, suggestive of Trump’s contempt for his own supporters. He knows that as long as he’s sticking it to black or brown people and antagonizing “elitists” like me, they’ll believe—or pretend to believe, anyway—damn near anything.

The president says asylum-seeking refugees from Central America “infest” our country. He says they “could be murderers and thieves.” Such as that wailing little three year-old from Honduras in John Moore’s widely-circulated photo, snatched away from her mother by Border Patrol agents. 

A stone killer, I am sure.

“They look so innocent. They’re not innocent,” Trump has said about “alien minors.” He’s been telling aides that the media cherry-picks images of sorrowful children to make him look bad.

See, that’s another aspect of the president’s personality: He’s incapable of admitting error or taking responsibility. He’s always right, and somebody else is always to blame. Every single time.

Meanwhile, have you heard the ProPublica audio of weeping children, crying out for their parents?

Give it a listen, Trump fans. Then get back to work on those emails suggesting that I leave the country or kill myself.

Former first lady Laura Bush, bless her, may have said it simplest and best: “I live in a border state,” she wrote in TheWashington Post. “I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.”

GOP Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) worries about what this ugly debacle is doing to America’s place in the world: “The administration’s current family separation policy is an affront to the decency of the American people, and contrary to principles and values upon which our nation was founded. The administration has the power to rescind this policy. It should do so now.”

America’s allies and friends, see, are beginning to wonder if maybe the Trump presidency isn’t some awful freak political error. Maybe this is who we really are.

If the president gets his way, we could find out as early as November. Supposedly, Trump’s advisors have persuaded him that kidnapping immigrant children is a winning issue. One White House insider told the Washington Post that “if we’re having an argument on immigration, we always win because that’s our ground, no matter what the nuances of the argument are.”

Supposedly Trump also told GOP Senators that unless he gets everything he wants on immigration he’ll shut the government down come September—a  barefaced case of extortion against our democracy. Polls suggest that this would be a political blunder of generational proportions, but who could put it past him?

Could be we’re fixing to find out just how many stone Trump cultists there are, and exactly how far they’re willing to go.