The Trump administration is scrambling to meet Judge Dana Sabraw’s July 26 deadline to reunite migrant children over age five kidnapped from parents at the U.S. border due to Donald Trump’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy. Vox’s Dara Lind reports that more than 1,000 kids have been reunited with their parents as of Monday evening—“about 40 percent of all children in the total pool of 2,551”—but potentially hundreds of families, as many as 460, could remain separated after the deadline because the parents may have already been deported.
“The federal government is still trying to track down those parents—the ACLU has offered help via international NGOs—but it’s still obligated to find them, even after the deadline passes.” Lind continues. There are disturbing reports that some parents were coerced or mislead by immigration officials into agreeing to deportation, “and some parents say they signed paperwork they didn't understand and unknowingly relinquished their rights to reunite with their children.”
“Many detained migrants come from parts of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras where indigenous languages are spoken,” CNN reports. “But lawyers who spoke to detainees said many of them reported receiving forms related to their cases in Spanish or English, languages they don't understand.” And yet, Kirstjen Nielsen, disgraceful Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, has the nerve to claim that "all of these adults who left without their kids left based on a decision to leave their children."
During a press conference Thursday morning, a delegation of House Democrats said that if parents were deported under these circumstances, the just thing to do is to reunify them here, echoing the calls from leading immigrant rights advocates. “If parents were coerced into being deported,” said Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, “they should be brought back to the U.S. and admitted on humanitarian parole.”
Hundreds of other families may also not be reunited today because the administration has judged them to be “ineligible” for reunification, Lind writes, reporting that “in a few cases, the parent has a criminal record that the government thinks is disqualifying.” But all you have to do is turn on the TV or open Twitter to know that the administration loves calling immigrant families criminals, and will lie and doctor evidence to do it. Just ask Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient Daniel Ramirez Medina, falsely accused, for over a year now, of gang affiliation by the government.
The administration can try to justify for a hundred years about why it can’t reunify families it separated, but it doesn’t change the fact that this has been an atrocity carried out by the U.S., including Nielsen, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Health and Human Services (HHS) Sec. Alex Azar, White House aide and white supremacist Stephen Miller, and, of course, Trump. This will only be more damning in the next few days as we find out just how many precious children are still not in the safe arms of their parents. All must be reunited. History is watching.