One year ago today, Donald Trump, under widespread condemnation for the forcible separation of families at the border, signed an executive order purporting to end the crisis he created, claiming that “we're going to keep the families together. I didn't like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.”
But this crime against humanity was his administration’s creation—in just one instance, a frantic Trump falsely claimed the policy was an “Obama law”—and families continue to be separated to this very day.
Unshackled border agents have skirted around the June 2018 court order blocking the Trump administration from continuing to separate families by exploiting a clause that did allow officials to remove a child from parents who posed a danger, and falsely accusing parents, some escaping gang violence, of being gang members themselves.
One of these parents, Adolfo, was separated from his two children for 184 days by the Trump administration under such a false accusation, even though he had documentation from the Salvadoran government showing that he had no criminal record. When he asked for an attorney, agents told him no: “You don’t have any rights here.” Then they took his kids.
A leading civil rights group said other families continue to be ripped apart because officials don’t consider them to be “real.” “We have witnessed hundreds of siblings, uncles and aunts, cousins and grandparents go through the same suffering of losing a child as biological parents face,” said Efrén Olivares of the Texas Civil Rights Project. “Often, these relatives are the only form of parents the children know. Their trauma goes unrecognized, unreported and ignored.”
The group said it has seen hundreds of families separated since both Trump’s executive order and the court order. “As a result of the government's narrow definition of ‘family,’ thousands more migrant children bear the trauma of having their guardians and loved ones taken away, for reasons they cannot comprehend,” Olivares continued.
Parents who have been reunited with their children have described horrific trauma. Asylum-seeker L.G. described in a court filing how her 7-year-old daughter “cannot sleep unless her mother holds her.” Another mom, Leticia, said her 5-year-old daughter has nightmares and wakes up sweating, screaming, “Mama, mama.”
Family separation continues. The trauma of family separation continues. For this ongoing humanitarian disaster alone, Trump deserves impeachment.