Nearly two weeks after Judge Dana Sabraw’s family reunification deadline, almost 600 migrant children kidnapped from the arms of parents at the U.S./Mexico border continue to remain under U.S. custody, hundreds of them because their parents have already been deported. “The government simply can’t find them,” tweeted MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff.
The Trump administration created this crisis, yet it just tried to shove its court-mandated responsibility to reunite these families onto the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which sued the administration over family separation in the first place. Last week, Judge Sabraw, The Washington Post noted in a recent op-ed, “was having none of it. ‘This responsibility is 100 percent on the government,’ he said.”
What’s also on the hands of the Trump administration is the trauma that reunited children have suffered due to their detention, and the trauma that children that continue to be detained are suffering at this very moment. Just days ago, an employee at a migrant child’s detention facility—the same one visited by Melania Trump in her publicity stunt—was charged with molesting a 14-year-old girl. Other released children have alleged being fed rotten food and denied drinking water, and even forced drugging.
These detained children have remained in these facilities because the administration arbitrarily decided that their parents were “ineligible.” What a coincidence that this classification came as the administration was clearly going to miss Sabraw’s July 26 deadline. Other parents remained “ineligible” for reunification simply because they had already been deported, but at least on that, the judge put his foot down. “Mr. Sabraw ordered the administration to appoint an individual to oversee what will be the painstaking process of tracking down deported parents,” The Post continued.
But it’s simply not enough. “The ACLU’s Lee Gelernt, on MSNBC last night, made it clear that even when the Trump administration does have information that would be useful in tracking down deported parents,” immigrant rights group America’s Voice said, “the government is dragging their feet.” Sabraw, who has bent over backwards to work with this incompetent administration, should clamp down on those violating his orders, because the time for punishment, including jail time for administration officials, is long overdue.
“It’s time for Judge Sabraw,” columnist Will Bunch writes, “to designate a high-ranking government official—my nominees would be HHS Secretary Alex Azar or Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen—and make it clear that he or she will be jailed if (barring an extreme circumstance in a particular case) the 572 families are not reunited within a matter of days. That would be a serious remedy for a serious human rights violation.”
This crisis has fallen off the radar of too many while Donald Trump tweets about anything but this, but it’s a crisis that is still going on. Children are still suffering, parents are still suffering, families are still being detained together, and recently reunited migrant families are still at risk of being deported, despite having valid asylum claims. They need us to keep fighting, and they need justice. Justice means that even when these families are reunited—because they must be, especially in the U.S. if they were tricked or misled into deportation—officials must pay for these human rights atrocities.