The Trump Administration revealed Thursday that an additional 1,556 children have been separated from their parents than previously reported, bringing the total number of family separations since July 2017 up to nearly 5,500. The new instances of family separation came to light after a judge ordered the Administration to deliver an accounting of every case.
About 200 of the 1,556 cases involved children under 5 years old, says the ACLU, which is leading a class-action lawsuit against the Administration. “We — naively, looking back — assumed the government was telling us about all the children they had separated,” Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU attorney in the lawsuit, tells TIME. “I think what we’ve learned is that we need to continuously press the government to find out what they may not be disclosing.”
The ACLU’s class-action lawsuit has now expanded to include the 1,556 families along with the original 2,800 who were separated during former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Zero-Tolerance Policy. “At every stage of this case there have been shocking revelations,” Gelernt says. “In some ways, the real work is going to begin [now] because we have to try to find all these 1,500 families.”
View the complete October 26 article by Jasmine Aguilera on the Time website here.