Campaign Action
Immigrant rights advocates erected an art display featuring statues of child in a cage and an anguished parent with outstretched arms and wrapped in a foil blanket on the Capitol Hill lawn in Washington, D.C. Tuesday, in full view of the legislators who have spoken out in condemnation of the family separation policy—and in full view of those who have remained complicit by doing nothing.
May 7 marked the one year anniversary of former attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s public remarks promising state-sanctioned kidnapping at the southern border. The barbaric “zero tolerance” policy led to the forcible-separation of 2,800 children from their families, with potentially thousands of others separated before the official policy even began.
With kids still in U.S. custody and separation at the border continuing, Families Belong Together leader Jess Morales Rocketto said “there’s still urgency” to keep fighting. Border officials have exploited a loophole in a federal judge’s June order to take children from parents, even falsely accusing some parents of gang ties. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan has claimed separations are “being done very carefully in extraordinarily rare circumstances," but that’s a lie.
“Attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project said they've counted more than 40 separated families a month in the McAllen area since the injunction in June,” USA Today reported. Data from the American Civil Liberties Union indicates the Trump administration has separated at least 389 families since the June order.
Investigations from House Democrats have also found that officials were warned about the harm family separation posed to kids, but essentially waved those concerns away. More recently, internal emails from last year revealed officials were promising that they could reunite all families they had separated, when in fact they had enough information to reunite only 60 of those families.
“It’s clearer than ever,” Pili Tobar of immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice said, “that the administration willingly instigated a reign of terror.” Morales Rocketto said that the art display, created by artist and activist Paola Mendoza, is “a message to the families themselves that we haven’t forgotten them and that we will continue to advocate until every single one of them is reunited.”
Mendoza’s display, in all its anguish depicting this crime against humanity at the border, also features flowers covering the cage that is detaining the boy. “The flowers, Mendoza said, are a representation of what can grow from those seeds as a ‘painful and hopeful reminder’ to immigrant families living in and coming to the U.S. that no matter what hurdles the government puts in their way, ‘we hope and believe they will continue to fight, that they will continue to grow and they will continue to live, no matter how [they] try to stamp out their lives.’”