The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and leaders from a number of congressional caucuses held a panel discussion to discuss key findings from the commission’s October report on family separation, which found that this barbaric policy resulted in “widespread, long-term, and perhaps irreversible physical, mental and emotional childhood trauma.” During the Wednesday hearing, leaders continued to stress the dire seriousness of the Trump administration’s policy.
“The institution of the zero tolerance policy and decision to forcibly and deliberately separate children, including infants and toddlers, from parents or adult family members on a mass scale, which proceeded with no plans or coordination to reunite families, is a gross human and civil rights violation,” U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Vice Chair Patricia Timmons Goodson told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, and Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Timmons Goodson further stated that conditions inside detention facilities have continued to deteriorate, even as the Trump administration has fought tooth and nail to keep children jailed for longer periods of time. “Some child detention facilities lack basic hygiene and sleeping arrangements; they sometimes lack soap, blankets, dental hygiene, potable water, clean clothing, and nutritious food,” she said. Of course, it’s not just children being traumatized.
During the hearing, Rep. Ayanna Pressley recalled her heart-wrenching visit to the border, “where mothers and and grandmothers who clung to me in tears, longing for their babies and grandbabies. Another woman sobbed in my arms, explaining her fear that at any moment she could fall to the floor in a seizure due to her epilepsy medication being confiscated.” Each of these women, she said, had survived “treacherous journeys” and violence in their home countries, “only to have their babies torn away from them, and forced into cages. And for what? For having the audacity to seek asylum in the United States. Asylum. A human right.”
A key finding from the commission’s report was that Trump administration officials carried out this inhumane policy knowing full well of the damage it would inflict on children in particular. Officials “chose to ignore the advice and warnings from trauma experts, stakeholder organizations, and even experts within the administration. Nearly a year before the policy was implemented, hundreds of child health and welfare organizations laid out in a letter the specific harms that family separations would inflict on children and families.” They were ignored by the administration.
“Disturbingly, there remain credible allegations that family separations continue, despite an executive order halting them,” Timmons Goodson continued during the Wednesday panel. In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union returned to court in September to call on the federal judge who ordered a stop to family separation in June 2018 to again intervene, saying border officials have ripped another 1,000 kids from their families since then. “We’ve had instances of fathers separated from their children because the last time the father was in the U.S. years ago, he got a ticket for driving with an expired license,” one advocate said.
Rep. Pressley said it is “our responsibility to continue uplifting these stories. I can’t help but still feel guilty for having left those women behind in those cages, behind that glass. The only difference between myself and those women was the country listed on my birth certificate. So as elected officials, as human beings, we have a duty to speak out and to continue to center these stories, to not look away, no matter how uncomfortable they make us and how painful they are. We simply cannot allow for this brutality to be normalized.”