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Twenty Salvadoran moms who fled gang violence were instead accused by U.S. border officials of being gang members themselves, legal advocates told The New York Times. Their children—along with nearly a 1,000 others over the past year—were then ripped out of their arms, in spite of a federal judge’s ruling ordering the Trump administration to stop the forcible separation of families at the southern border.
Of the 911 children stolen since the supposed end of family separation last year, the administration has returned fewer than 100 back to their parents “after having been separated a median length of 85 days,” The Times continued. “The majority are in the custody of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department.”
A court filing listed children stolen from their families for no reason other than sheer cruelty. A dirty diaper. Traffic citations. In one instance, officials stole a nursing child from a Salvadoran mom who had been forced to deliver a small amount of pot to the gang member who raped her. This family is still separated, the child “placed with friends in Iowa, where she continues to cry for her mother at night.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has now returned to Judge Dana Sabraw, who initially ordered family reunifications last year, to ask for both a halt to this second round of separations, and “to clarify a set of standards” of when the government is allowed to remove children from a parent, because border officials have carried out these state-sponsored kidnappings with no consultation from child welfare experts.
What advocates who are part of the ACLU’s court filing also hope is that this time around, Sabraw puts his foot down. The administration failed to meet reunification deadlines after his order last year—in fact, as of this month, some 30 kids ordered to be reunited under that order have continued to remain separated. Yet not one single administration official went to jail for contempt of court, with Sabraw instead preferring to work out issues in the courtroom.
For the sake of these children’s lives and physical and emotional well-being, that needs to end, now. Even small amounts of separation and detention can traumatize children, and their parents. "These individuals have no criminal record, and yet these are mothers who have languished in immigration jails away from their kids for months on end," said Lisa Kroop of the National Immigrant Justice Center. "They are suffering so much." Family separation remains a crisis.