More than 160 children who were stolen from families at the southern border will continue to remain under U.S. custody in the new year, according to a most recent filing in the court decision ordering the reunification of separated families. Most of these children are still detained because their parents were deported and have said, for varying reasons, that they don’t wish to reunify with their child.
Others are still detained because their parents have already been deported and now officials can’t find them. MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff reports that the “Steering Committee has advised that resolution will be delayed” for four of these children. This could mean anything, but it most likely means that this intentionally cruel administration has no idea where those parents currently are, because parents were deported as carelessly as they were torn from their kids.
In some instances, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) leaders have had to do the job of Trump officials and navigate “treacherous roads, distrustful communities and remote villages” to try to locate parents that Trump officials carelessly deported. “Resolution will be delayed.” Really, a much less harsh way of saying, “permanent separation.”
But even being freed from a baby jail hasn’t necessarily meant kids have been reunited with their loved ones. January 2019 will mark one year since 11-year-old Isaac last hugged his mom, after the asylum seekers were torn apart at the border. While his mom was deported back to Honduras, Isaac was released to an uncle in Illinois. He spent Christmas without her, and now the new year. “It’s been hard on him,” said the boy’s pastor. “This time of the year is the worst, since it’s all about family.”
But as we also remember the children kidnapped at the border, we must also remember the thousands of other kids who came to the U.S. alone, and instead of being released to relatives or other sponsors, continue to languish in Tornillo and other facilities, and at ongoing risk. Health and Human Services (HHS) said earlier this month that the U.S. has nearly 15,000 kids in custody, leaving children’s detention facilities near capacity at 92 percent full.
Outside Tornillo, activists wanted to let the children know they had not been forgotten, and held a Christmas Day procession outside the prison camp. “We’re creating sacred space here, because this country has lost its way,” says Elizabeth Vega, a counselor. “This space is a fight for the sacred. This is a fight for humanity—not just for the children in there.”
Children do not belong in detention, period. Free the children torn from their families. Free the children from Tornillo and elsewhere.