The U.S. was among the nations singled out for human rights abuses in the first major speech from new U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet. The former Chilean president, herself a former political detainee under the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, condemned the Trump administration's barbaric "zero tolerance" policy, as well as its new effort to jail migrant children indefinitely.
"The United States has halted the unconscionable practice of separating immigrant children from their families," Bachelet, imprisoned as a young adult along with her mother and father, said. "But the authorities have still not taken measures to provide redress for the families whom it has victimised; and over 500 migrant children taken away from their parents by US officials have still not been returned to their families."
According to the recent numbers from the administration, 416 kidnapped migrant children continue to remain under U.S. custody, including 14 kids age 5 and under. The parents of 304 of those children have already been deported, including six kids age 5 and under. Other families, reunited but traumatized, have filed a class action lawsuit demanding the U.S. pay for mental health counseling and other damages.
Bachelet also singled out the U.S. effort seeking to eviscerate standards protecting migrant kids under custody. “Of further concern,” she continued, “is the announcement last week that the government would no longer abide by a court settlement limiting detention of children to 20 days.” Rather than kidnapping children from parents—a crisis that still continues, in light of the kids that remained separated—the administration now wants to jail them together.
“I have been a political detainee and the daughter of political detainees,” Bachelet continued. “I have been a refugee and a physician—including for children who experienced torture, and the enforced disappearance of their parents. My country has known the pain and terror of tyranny. But I am proud to say we have been able to surmount divisions and meet vast challenges—shaping institutions which enable greater participation, and greater freedom, justice and dignity, for our people.”
This not the first time the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has condemned the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy.
In June, former commissioner Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein called the kidnappings “government-sanctioned child abuse,” adding that “the thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable.” It remains unconscionable, and now due to Trump and his enablers, a stain on nation’s our history in the eyes of anyone with basic human decency.