Campaign Action
Ripping children from the arms of immigrant parents at the U.S./Mexico border is abhorrent, barbaric—and “unprecedented” policy created by Donald Trump’s administration, despite his claims otherwise. “Under Trump’s policy announced just three weeks ago,” immigrant rights group America’s Voice said, “a DHS official confirmed at a Senate hearing that more than 600 children were taken from parents in just the first two weeks under this new policy.” Some of these kids, Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Immigrants’ Rights Project and Laura St. John of the Florence Project tell MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, have been “as young as 53 weeks old”:
St. John: “The type of devastation we’re talking about—what Lee mentioned a family or separated mother doesn’t know where her child is for four days—that is entirely common right now in this administration—is that parents and children sometimes don’t have anyway to communicate with each other for days, for weeks, I’ve seen months where a parent had no idea where their child was after the US government took their child away.”
Hayes: “You’re suing—can they do this?”
Gelernt: “We don’t believe they can. We are waiting for the decision.…The named plaintiff in our case, she did time served for a few days for the prosecution. It’s been 7 months and they haven’t returned her child... They told her, ‘Your son is in Chicago.’ She said to us, ‘I don’t know if Chicago is a man, a place, a facility.’ That’s all they said to her: ‘Your son is in Chicago.’”
In March, the ACLU sued the administration over family separation, after representing a Congolese asylum-seeker and her 7-year-old daughter. Despite “Ms. L” passing her initial interview, her daughter was torn from her and detained in Illinois, while the mother languished in pain in California. “Ms. L. could hear her daughter in the next room screaming that she did not want to be taken away from her mother,” the ACLU said at the time.
There is no legal reason to be doing this, other than inflicting pain on families and discouraging vulnerable asylum-seekers from petitioning for protections, despite this being a right under U.S. and international law. “I think what is happening is absolutely inhumane,” St. John continued. “I think you mentioned that a lot of things about immigration law are complicated and can be confusing. I would say this is not that situation. Taking parents and children and separating them for no good reason—there is no reason to do that—it is just unjustifiable frankly and inhumane.”