Almost half the immigrant children separated from their parents by the Trump administration still haven’t been reunited, according to an investigative report in New York magazine.
The Feb. 27 report says more than 5,000 children were taken from their parents as they crossed the U.S. border seeking asylum beginning in April 2018. The “zero tolerance” policy was designed by Trump adviser Stephen Miller as a way to scare immigrants from coming to the United States. It was described as the cruelest of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies.
Official administration of the policy lasted only about two months, halted by an ACLU class-action lawsuit called Ms. L.v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A federal judge ordered the children and parents reunited within 30 days.
That couldn’t happen, however, because the Trump administration often did not collect and did not keep records on the children they were wresting from their parents’ arms.
At the time of the court order, the Trump government had records for about 2,800 separated families.
Six years later, as many as 2,000 children still haven’t been reunited with their parents, some of whom have been killed in the countries where they were sent.
Reporter Piper French explains: “These figures are estimates at best; three years into a new presidency, it appears likely the U.S. government will never be able to provide a thorough accounting of the policy’s victims. The damage grows with every year that passes: Separated parents have been murdered after being deported, and others have vanished during another attempt to cross the border. Kids, too, have died.”
Anilu Chadwick
Anilu Chadwick, a lawyer for Kids in Need of Defense, has spent five years working to identify and reunite separated families.
The New York article tracks her journey to remedy the chaos created by the Trump policy that made international headlines.
She and others working for justice on behalf of the separated families immediately encountered several problems. Among those:
- For about 470 families, the parents already had been deported.
- The Trump administration declined to track them down, causing the ACLU to step in.
- The separations had been done with “total disorganization,” according to Nan Schivone, Justice in Motion’s legal director. “There was no intention of reuniting families, and so they didn’t design the system to be able to keep track.”
- There was no way to communicate between federal agencies involved: Customs and Border Protection took families into custody; ICE oversaw their detainment; the Office of Refugee Resettlement was responsible for the separated children.
“We give you a luggage tag for your luggage,” Gisela Voss, a former board member of Together & Free, which supports families seeking asylum told the magazine. “We separated parents from their kids and didn’t give them, like, a number.”
“We give you a luggage tag for your luggage.”
By January 2019, the HHS Office of Inspector General revealed that 1,500 more families had been separated than the Trump administration had previously disclosed, and the vast majority of the parents had been deported.
Even when officials did locate parents in other countries, “because of the Trump administration’s hostility toward asylum claims, … the only available remedy was for their child to repatriate. Some families made the difficult choice to remain apart; they thought their children would be better off in the U.S.”
The trauma of leaving home and seeking shelter in a new country was compounded by what these parents experienced in America.
One such example cited in the article is that of Carolina and Antonio Amador and their two daughters. After armed men came to the family home in Honduras, threatening to burn it down if they didn’t pay weekly tributes, the couple decided to send Antonio and their elder daughter, Maily, then 7, to the U.S., in hopes of making enough money to send for his wife and younger daughter later.
“You feel defeated, useless, as though you had no arms, nothing to fight back.”
The reporter explains their experience: “Antonio still struggles to assign language to the feeling of watching through a window as officials forced his daughter’s hands above her head, patted her down, and took her away. It was like they had found his weak spot, like they were removing his own blood, he told me: ‘You feel defeated, useless, as though you had no arms, nothing to fight back.’ Later, the guards taunted him, telling him that Maily had been put up for adoption. He was deported, and Maily ended up being shuttled between aunts in California and Louisiana. For several years, Carolina and Antonio’s parenting was limited to a daily video call on WhatsApp. Maily cried all the time.”
Trump has said if he is elected to another term as president he might try family separations again. Reuters reported Nov. 27: “Trump touted the efficacy of family separations during a CNN town hall in May and declined to rule out reinstating them. He defended them again in an interview with Spanish-language television channel Univision that aired on Nov. 9.”
At that CNN town hall, Trump said: “When you have that policy, people don’t come. If a family hears that they’re going to be separated — they love their family — they don’t come. I know it sounds harsh.”
Pressed further about whether he would reinstate the policy, Trump replied: “We have to save our country. When you say to a family that if you come we’re going to break you up, they don’t come.”
Research across time in several countries has shown family separations, along with other similar threats, are not effective in reducing the influx of immigration.
Aside from any effectiveness as a deterrent, the Trump policy was denounced widely as cruel and immoral and inhumane.
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