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Nearly 80 days past a federal judge’s reunification order, the children are still not with their parents. Friday, October 12, marks 78 days since Judge Dana Sabraw ordered the Trump administration to reunite the thousands of migrant children who were kidnapped from the arms of parents at the southern border, yet over 100 kids remain under U.S. custody.
The separations continue as a new report from Amnesty International finds the administration tore up far more families than officials publicly admitted. “The report calculates that more than 6,000 people (including at least 3,000 children) were separated from relatives at the border from late spring to mid-August (with the bulk of those separations happening before the end of the Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance” policy, after a public outcry, in late June),” Vox’s Dara Lind reports.
“Without any understanding of how many families were actually separated or who they are,” Rewire’s Tina Vasquez reports, “there’s no way to know who has been prioritized for reunification, who remains separated, and whose families are being acknowledged as families.” This is a humanitarian disaster created by—and continued by—the Trump administration.
Inexplicably, the judge overseeing the family reunification case has not punished one single Trump official, namely Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen or Health and Human Services (HHS) Sec. Alex Azar, by holding them in contempt of court. During a Senate hearing earlier this week, parents and advocates let Nielsen know they haven’t forgotten about her role in implementing state-sanctioned child kidnapping, and walked out on her testimony.
“We walked out of the hearing today as Sec. Nielsen spoke,” tweeted Kunoor Ojha of The National Domestic Workers Alliance, one of the advocates calling for Nielsen’s resignation. “We wore Mylar blankets to represent the conditions that kids in detention are subjected to under her watch.” According to the numbers we know about, the parents of 96 separated kids have already been deported. Of those children, two are age five or under. And as Amnesty International reports, this humanitarian disaster is far bigger than we could have ever imagined. Yes, family separation remains a crisis.
These families still need our help. Can you give $5 to some of the important grassroots organizations working to make sure they have legal help and other aid?
