New court documents confirm what advocates have been saying for months: the Trump administration has continued to steal hundreds of children from families at the southern border since a federal judge’s June 2018 court order. “More than 700 children were taken from their parents or, in a few cases, from other relatives between June 2018 and May 2019,” Houston Chronicle reports.
Officials have done this by exploiting a clause in the ruling that allowed a child to be removed if the parents posed a danger. “But no guidelines were imposed,” leaving it up entirely to the discretion of border agents with no input from child welfare experts. “As a result, hundreds continue to be removed from their parents—often, advocates say, for unclear reasons or with little apparent justification.”
“Officials listed a parent’s gang membership or criminal history as the reason for separating 65 percent of about 400 children between the June 20 executive order and March 2019,” but the ACLU said officials have used incidents as minor as a traffic violation as an excuse to separate families. Some asylum-seekers have been falsely accused of gang ties, and kept separated from their kids for over 100 days.
This has been a blatant abuse of a court order, and the ACLU said it may take the federal government back to court over the issue. “In the last few months these types of separations have risen drastically,” said attorney Lee Gelernt. “The government is trying to drive a truck through what was supposed to be a very narrow exception.”
Advocates are calling for oversight where this is currently none. Lisa Koop of the National Immigrant Justice Center said that when separations did occur before this administration, there “were usually strong indicators of real and legitimate child welfare concerns.” But “what we’re seeing right now is of an entirely different character,” she continued. “These are gratuitous separations.”
Border officials continue to steal more children when they have shown themselves to be unfit to care for children. During a recent inspection of border facilities, attorneys found dozens of sick children neglected by officials. “In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention,” said Holly Cooper of the University of California, Davis’s Immigration Law Clinic, “I have never heard of this level of inhumanity.”