Despite “Ms. L.” passing her initial asylum screening after fleeing the Democratic Republic of Congo last year, she remains in federal immigration detention in San Diego, California. Compounding her pain is the fact that her 7-year-old daughter, “S.S.,” was torn from her side just days after the pair presented themselves to border agents and is now detained, alone, thousands of miles away in Chicago, Illinois. In most cases, families are detained together (though they shouldn’t be detention facilities period, where they can languish for months). But not Ms. L and S.S., “who was taken from her without any explanation or justification”:
When the officers separated them, Ms. L. could hear her daughter in the next room screaming that she did not want to be taken away from her mother. No one explained why her daughter was being taken away, where she was being taken, or when she would see her child again. More than 3 1/2 months later, Ms. L. remains at a detention center in the San Diego area, while her daughter is detained in Chicago, halfway across the country, without her mother or anyone else she knows.
With mother and daughter cruelly separated from each other for months now—and Ms. L already successfully establishing that she has a “credible fear” of returning to the Congo—the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued for their immediate release and asks that they should at the least be detained together, arguing “that the separation of Ms. L. and her daughter is in blatant violation of the due process protections of the Fifth Amendment since the two were separated without justification or even a hearing”:
In the time that they have been separated, Ms. L. has only been able to speak to her child a handful of times— always by phone, not video. In those calls, the young girl cries. She’s scared because she doesn’t know what will happen to her and her mother. Ms. L. tries to stay strong for her daughter, but, in reality, the stress and uncertainty of the situation have taken a huge toll on her as well. She struggles to eat and sleep, and she suffers from depression.
The ACLU notes the American Association of Pediatrics’ take on separating parents from their kids: “The psychological distress, anxiety, and depression associated with separation from a parent would follow the children well after the immediate period of separation—even after the eventual reunification with a parent or other family.” The ACLU: “This cruelty must not go on any longer. Ms. L. and her daughter should be reunited at once. The Constitution and basic human decency demand it.”