In the second such lawsuit in as many months—and quite possibly the most far-reaching one to date—one of the nation’s largest civil rights organizations filed a lawsuit last week over the administration’s family separation policy, naming a number of current and former Trump officials and seeking potentially millions in damages on behalf of thousands of kids and parents torn apart at the border for as a long as 16 months under the inhumane policy.
“The suffering and trauma inflicted on these little children and parents is horrific,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which last year successfully sued to block the policy and force the administration to reunite these families. “Tragically, it could take years for these families to heal. Some may never recover, but we are fighting to give them a chance.”
A September 2019 report from the Health and Human Services inspector general found children stolen from their parents suffered “fear, feelings of abandonment, and post-traumatic stress” as a result of their separation, causing some kids to believe that “their parents had abandoned them,” while others “expressed acute grief that caused them to cry inconsolably.” The ACLU’s complaint details further horrors at the hands of the United States government.
Jairo, a dad from Guatemala, said he was told by officials that he’d be deported whether or not he signed the papers he didn’t understand, but the officer said that “he would see his daughter sooner if he signed.” He signed them, but the officer had lied to him: He wouldn’t see his 5-year-old daughter Beatriz for another five months, when she was deported too. Beatriz remained in custody so long, she “mostly lost her ability to speak and understand Mam,” the indigenous Mayan language she spoke at home.
A separate lawsuit filed last month by Arnold & Porter; Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin; the American Immigration Council; and the National Immigrant Justice Center noted that mom “L.G.” and daughter “B.G.” were separated for two months after following the rules and asking for asylum at a U.S. port of entry. While they were eventually overjoyed to be reunited, B.G. now “cannot sleep unless her mother holds her,” and can’t go outside because she’s afraid something will happen to her.
Beatriz, the stolen child mentioned in the ACLU’s lawsuit, “struggled in other ways as well,” the group’s complaint continues. “She was uncomfortable being around her parents after they were reunited, almost as if they were strangers to her, and had trouble following instructions from them. And she is now more inclined to throw temper tantrums than she was prior to the separation.” Six-year-old Andrés, another child named in the lawsuit, was "torn kicking and screaming" from his dad and sent to live with foster parents who told him to call them “mom” and “dad.”
“The lawsuit cites violations of the Fourth Amendment (unreasonable seizure of children); the Fifth Amendment due process clause (fundamental right to family integrity; right to a hearing; right to adequate health care); and equal protection (prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin),” the ACLU said. “In addition to damages, the lawsuit seeks the creation of a fund to pay for professional mental health services for affected families.”
The group’s lawsuit names a number of both current and former administration officials who were architects and overseers of this inhumane policy, including White House aide Stephen Miller, former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner Mark Morgan, Border Patrol chief Carla Provost, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and former Homeland Security secretaries John Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen, the latter of whom repeatedly lied about the policy.
“We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period,” Nielsen notoriously tweeted in June 2018, yet more than 1,000 families have continued to be ripped apart at the southern border since Judge Dana Sabraw’s court order against the policy that same month. The ACLU recently returned to Sabraw’s courtroom to ask him again to put a stop to further separations, correctly saying that forcible separations are “basically child abuse, you’re terrorizing these little children.”