Two days into 2019, more than 160 children kidnapped from families at the southern border in 2018 continue to remain in U.S. custody, 160 days past a federal judge’s reunification deadline. This is a humanitarian disaster that can never be washed from the hands of the Trump administration, and in particular, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen and departing White House chief of staff, John Kelly.
The administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy has created orphans, yet Nielsen is unapologetic, continuing to lie about the very existence of a family separation policy. "Shame on everybody that separates children and allows them to stay at the other side of the border fearing death, fearing hunger, fearing sickness,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez shot back. “Shame on us for wearing our badge of Christianity during Christmas for allowing the secretary to come here and lie."
Kelly, meanwhile, is already in full rehabilitation mode and has been trying to wash his hands of the policy by pointing fingers at the former attorney general, even though DHS, under Kelly’s watch at the time, was “piloting” family separation the year before Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III officially announced the policy. The Trump administration ultimately kidnapped more than 2,500 children from families at the border.
Eighty-four of these kids are still separated because their parents have already been departed, and “whose intent not to reunify has been confirmed” by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). But some parents have said they “were coerced into signing deportation forms after being falsely told by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers that it was the only way to reunite with their children.”
Others are still detained because their parents were deported and officials now can’t find them. In some instances, the ACLU has had to do the job of the government and navigate “treacherous roads, distrustful communities and remote villages” to try to locate asylum seekers that the government carelessly kicked out. This is how separation becomes permanent separation.
One of these kids, five-year-old Helen, was welcomed home to Texas with a party after being separated from her grandma at the border for 55 days, but her family told the The New Yorker that the child “hides in the closet and refuses to go to sleep, afraid that her family might leave her in the night.” This is the horror that the Trump administration, including Nielsen and Kelly, created.
