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During a town hall Saturday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for “a 9/11-style commission” to investigate the Trump administration’s family separation policy, which resulted in the state-led kidnapping of nearly 3,000 children from families at the southern border. There is urgency for this: more than a year past a federal judge’s reunification order, 30 kids stolen under the policy continue to remain separated, a number of them because their parents were already deported.
“The 9/11 commission, they were charged with the investigating and making sure they dug out every nook and cranny of what happened and how it happened in our system,” she told the Queens, New York audience. “And I think that that kind of study is what’s going to be required in order to reunite as many children with their parents as possible. That’s the work that we have to do.”
Hearings led by House Democrats have continued to expose the administration’s human rights abuses—one Trump official admitted that he was warned about the damage that family separation posed to kids, and ignored the advice anyway—but Ocasio-Cortez said that the extent of that state-inflicted trauma on children necessitates more, like a commission.
“Even if you separate a kid from their parents for two days you have already created life long lasting trauma,” she said. During a House hearing in March, Dr. Julie Linton, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Immigrant Health Special Interest Group, testified that an eight-year-old boy separated from his mom for a week had been returned to her “a shell of his previous self.”
Now imagine the kids who were separated for months, those separated for as long as a year, and those who continue to remain separated. “It chills me to my core to think about 20 years from now, when these kids grow up, the story that they will have about America,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, further stating that “we have responsibility to provide mental healthcare services to those children for the rest of their lives.”
Families have sued the Trump administration over the “lasting consequences” of the policy on their children. Eleven-year-old "C.J.'s nightmares are so bad that he falls out of bed,” CNN reported last year. “Another child—a 10-year-old referred to in the lawsuit by her initials of K.O.-—‘wakes up in the middle of the night, crying.’” The Trump administration’s response has been a giant nope, saying it has no "constitutional duty" to pay for any mental health counseling.
Family separation at the southern border has been one of the most disgraceful and shameful periods in the history of the United States—and it is still ongoing, much quieter but no less evil. During another House hearing last week, acting Homeland Security head Kevin McAleenan boasted that “fewer than 1,000” kids have been stolen from their families since the supposed end of the policy, like it was a number to be proud of.