The American Civil Liberties Union was back in court on Friday to again call on a federal judge to block the Trump administration from forcibly separating migrant families at the southern border. ACLU attorneys said that more than 1,000 families have been ripped apart since Judge Dana Sabraw’s June 2018 court order, “for the most minor crimes” and for reasons as petty as a dirty diaper.
Sabraw’s 2018 order allowed a child to be removed from the parent if the parent posed a danger, but “imposed no standards or oversight over those decisions,” ProPublica reported last year, leaving those decisions in the hands of border agents with no child welfare expertise who themselves have a track record of child abuse. They, of course, have also abused Sabraw’s exemption.
“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,” said Texas Civil Rights Project attorney Efrén Olivares. “He was arrested, and therefore now has a criminal conviction on his record, and that is the justification for the separation.” Officials have also separated families based on outright lies. In June, asylum-seeker Adolfo was reunited with his two kids after 184 days of separation, torn apart based solely on a lie that he was in a gang.
But in court on Friday, “Deputy Assistant Attorney General Scott Stewart pushed back on the notion that the government should have to follow a rigid policy on when to separate,” The San Diego Union-Tribune reported, “underscoring the complexity of the border and the need to make quick decisions on limited information.” But separating a family should never be a “quick decision,” and that decision certainly shouldn’t rest in the hands of border agents alone.
“We’re talking about permanent trauma to these children for no real reason,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said. Reported Law 360, “Every child expert and doctor with whom Gelernt has spoken agrees that separation is ‘basically child abuse, you’re terrorizing these little children,’ he said.” During a House hearing last week, a career official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services testified that family separation inflicted “extraordinarily severe” trauma on kids, and this trauma is ongoing.
So are the separations. “The judge took the entire matter under submission and will issue a ruling later,” The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote. But with separation and trauma at the hands of reckless border officials ongoing, a decision that favors children and their families can’t come soon enough. “What we have are parents losing children when they are perfectly capable and not a danger,” Gelernt said.