Adelaida Reynoso and her mother, María, were among the first migrant families broken up by the Trump administration, on July 31, 2017, long before the government acknowledged it was separating parents and children at the border.
Tag: Trump family separations
ACLU: U.S. has taken nearly 1,000 child migrants from their parents since judge ordered stop to border separations
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union told a federal judge Tuesday that the Trump administration has taken nearly 1,000 migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border since the judge ordered the United States government to curtail the practice more than a year ago.
In a lengthy court filing in U.S. District Court in San Diego, lawyers wrote that one migrant lost his daughter because a U.S. Border Patrol agent claimed that he had failed to change the girl’s diaper. Another migrant lost his child because of a conviction on a malicious destruction of property charge with alleged damage of $5. One father, who lawyers say has a speech impediment, was separated from his 4-year-old son because he could not clearly answer Customs and Border Proection agents’ questions.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan has said that family separations remain “extraordinarily rare” and occur only when the adults pose a risk to the child because of their criminal record, a communicable disease, abuse or neglect. Of tens of thousands of children taken into custody at the border this year, 911 children were separated since the June 26, 2018 court order, as of June 29, according to the ACLU, citing statistics the organization received from the government as part of ongoing legal proceedings.
View the complete July 30 article by Maria Sacchetti on The Washington Post website here.
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.”
View the complete July 13 article by Dan Desai Martin on the National Memo website here.
‘A nightmare’: Even ICE agents are fed up with Trump’s ‘dumbsh*t’ political stunts
When President Donald Trump is hoping to rally his base, one of the things he typically does is try to remind supporters how tough he is on illegal immigration. But according to a report by The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer, agents for the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are growing increasingly fed up with being used as a political football.
Blitzer notes that on June 17, Trump announced there’d be immigration raids the following week he promised would result in the deportation of “millions of illegal aliens.” But ICE, Blitzer reports, had to “scramble” in order to accommodate Trump’s announcement and wished he had given them more advance notice.
Carrying out the types of raids Trump wanted, Blizter explains, requires preparation — and ICE agents weren’t given nearly enough time to prepare. An ICE agent, interviewed anonymously, told Blitzer, “Almost nobody was looking forward to this operation. It was a boondoggle, a nightmare.”
View the complete June 25 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.
Grimm Compares Migrant Children’s Conditions to ‘Day Care’ Dropoff
The following article by Jeff Cirillo was posted on the Roll Call website June 20, 2018:
Former Republican Rep. Michael G. Grimm of New York dismissed the cries of migrant children separated from their families on the border as equivalent to the weeping of kids being dropped off at day care.
“I can take you to any nursery and you’re going to hear the exact same things. As a mother leaves to go to work and has to leave her child at day care, you’re going to hear those exact same things,” Grimm said during an interview with local news media Tuesday.
Grimm, who is challenging Republican Rep. Dan Donovan for the 25th District of New York congressional seat, was referring to audiotapes secretly recorded and released by ProPublica of migrant children wailing after being separated from their parents. Continue reading “Grimm Compares Migrant Children’s Conditions to ‘Day Care’ Dropoff”