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During a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said that “what we are in is a race against time” to reunite migrant families that were torn apart at the southern border by the Trump administration. “We are creating generational trauma,” she said, “for which we will have to answer for decades from now.”
The committee this week authorized the first subpoenas of the new Democratic House, demanding the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services hand over documents relating to this barbaric policy—but not without objections from Republicans, who are now in the minority. Ocasio-Cortez slammed the partisan blockade, saying this humanitarian disaster “is beyond partisanship.”
“I don’t care if it was one child separated from their parent,” she said. “That is an international human rights violation, and the fact that this nation has potentially committed 3,000 of those, and each day is a violation, tens of thousands of human rights violations, and we want to delay? So I invite all the colleagues who do believe in delaying to go on the record in doing so, because this is outrageous.”
216 days past a federal judge’s reunification deadline, a recent court filing states that 76 children stolen from families under the policy remain in U.S. custody. But that doesn’t include potentially thousands of kids who were separated before the policy, or the children who have been separated from families after the policy due to totally made-up claims. Every day is another day of trauma, as Ocasio-Cortez warns, and our nation is irrevocably and intentionally damaging the most vulnerable among us.