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The Trump administration has torn apart at least 389 migrant families at the southern border since a federal judge ordered a stop to most family separation last summer, data received by the American Civil Liberties Union indicates. “One-fifth of the newly separated children are younger than 5 years old, according to the figures.”
Judge Dana Sabraw’s order “exempted cases in which the safety of the child was at risk,” ProPublica reported in November, but “imposed no standards or oversight over those decisions,” essentially leaving it in the hands of border agents with no child welfare expertise. During Congressional testimony this week, acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan claimed separations are “being done very carefully in extraordinarily rare circumstances," but advocates—and the data—say otherwise.
“Attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project said they've counted more than 40 separated families a month in the McAllen area since the injunction in June,” USA Today reports. “Officials at Al Otro Lado, which advocates for immigrants in California, said dozens of families are separated each day throughout the San Diego metro area.” In one instance, border officials kidnapped a 4-year-old boy by falsely accusing his dad, who was fleeing gang threats, of gang affiliation.
In September, border officials exploited Sabraw’s loophole and accused Julio, a Salvadoran asylum-seeker, of gang ties, despite the fact that he was carrying with him “sworn statements from his former employer vouching for his character.” Officials then refused to provide evidence to back up their claim, both to ProPublica and, astoundingly, a judge. Julio was subsequently ordered released by a court, and was reunited with his son Brayan. They were separated for 11 weeks.
“Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees all immigration enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which carries out the separations, refused to answer questions about the separations,” USA Today reports. “They would not say how many separations have occurred since Sabraw's order or what happened to the separated minors.”
This stonewalling comes as internal emails have revealed that during the height of media attention on family separation last June, Trump officials lied when they claimed they could reunite thousands of families using a "central database.” There was no such central database, and the information they did have on hand could reunite only 60 families.
”You know when we put this out tonight, a couple people said to me, ‘did we already know this?’” MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff told Chris Hayes about the documents. “Yes, we did know that there was never a system, the HHS and the DHS inspector general made that very clear, as have subsequent testimonies, but we’ve never seen the behind-the-scenes, basically scrambling to figure out how to literally fill a spreadsheet.”
Children are still separated from their families due to the actions of this administration. “It’s clearer than ever,” said Pili Tobar of immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice, “that the administration willingly instigated a reign of terror.” Donald Trump’s crimes against humanity at the border, condemned repeatedly by the United Nations, merited his eviction from the White House long ago, yet he’s still there, and kids are still without their loved ones. Family separation remains a crisis.