Campaign Action
The Trump administration has made tearing kids from the arms of immigrant parents at the border official policy, even targeting families who are following U.S. law by petitioning for asylum at a port of entry. Other parents have been unable to locate, for days now, where their children are being detained. Now, immigrant rights advocates and civil rights groups have “accused the United States of human rights violations in an official complaint filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights”:
“In one particularly chilling example, immigration agents told two immigrant mothers that they were taking their daughters away to the bath — but they never returned, and the mothers have not seen them since,” the attorneys and advocates said in the petition.
The petitioners complained in the request that dozens of minor children have been taken from their parents in the last month. In addition, parents and attorneys haven’t been told where the children are or whether parents and children will be reunited.
The number of children who have been separated and detained is surging. "Between May 6 and May 19, 638 adults were referred for prosecution,” CBS News reported late last month. “Those adults brought with them a total of 658 children, all of whom were separated from the adults they traveled with.” When a U.S. senator attempted to visit one of the detention facilities for these children, he was barred from entering. With families in anguish, “a human rights emergency request was filed on behalf of a group of parents and the children:
The human rights petition asks for the commission's intervention to “immediately stop a human rights and humanitarian crisis perpetrated by the U.S. government in the Texas-Mexico border."
In a recent letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) and leading House Democrats called for a briefing on family separations, writing that “denying protection to those fleeing persecution is cruel and unproductive; removing children from their parents is unconscionable and simply un-American”:
As you know, many of the families and individuals crossing the southwest border between ports of entry are travelling from countries ravaged by violence and are seeking protection. Many of these individuals first presented themselves at ports of entry only to be turned away. It is well established that the United States must process asylum applications, including those filed by individuals who do not present themselves at a port of entry. That is why we are extremely alarmed that the Administration would enact a policy that prioritizes the criminal prosecution of those seeking protection rather than the assessment of their asylum claims.
According to the petition, agents told asylum seeker Dagoberto Melchor Santacruz, “who arrived at the South Texas border from El Salvador around May 22, that asylum wasn’t available”—this is a lie, and a lie that the administration has already been sued over—“and that he couldn’t be with his son.” Melchor Santacruz hasn’t seen his 16-year-old, who is partially deaf, since then:
"The request for precautionary measures is grounded in the current ongoing and future violations of human rights as enshrined in inter-American treaties and instruments that the U.S. is legally bound to," said Leah Chavla of the Women's Refugee Commission. She said one of those instruments is the 1951 Convention on Refugees, which prohibits prosecution or punishment of asylum seekers, she said.
In one widely-publicized case, a Congolese asylum-seeker and her 7-year-old daughter were detained separately for more than four months, despite the mom passing her initial interview. “When the officers separated them,” the American Civil Liberties (ACLU) said at the time, “Ms. L. could hear her daughter in the next room screaming that she did not want to be taken away from her mother.”
“Toying with the lives of people fleeing violence to send a message is not only cruel,” said Texas Civil Rights Project’s Efren Olivares, one of the groups leading the petition along with the Women’s Refugee Commission, the University of Texas School of Law, and Garcia and Garcia law firm, “but also a violation of international human rights and conventions to which the United States is a party.”