Two fathers who were forcibly separated from their children under the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy have sued the Trump administration, saying that both children suffered abuse following the state-sanctioned kidnapping. “Plaintiffs suffered, and continue to suffer, physical, mental, and emotional harm because of the intentional, reckless, and negligent acts of U.S. government policy makers at the highest levels, whose goal was to inflict harm and instill terror,” the suit states.
The two fathers, identified in the filing as J.V.S. and A.P.F., were both separated from their kids for more than two months after arriving to the U.S. border in May 2018. “For weeks, the fathers, despite desperate pleas for information, were told nothing about the safety or location of their children—and had no way to communicate with their children,” the suit continues. Officials finally allowed them to speak to their kids, but in severely limited amounts: A.P.F. was only allowed to speak to his son, Obet, just once over the 71 days they were separated.
A.P.F.’s relatives were also able to speak to the seven-year-old boy, which is how he “learned something that broke him all over again: after Obet had been taken away from [A.P.F.], Obet had been sexually abused in a foster home in New York,” the suit said. “After learning about his son’s sexual abuse, [A.P.F.] increased his efforts to ask ICE for information about his son. Still, no officers paid attention to [A.P.F.’s] requests.”
“I never dreamed that the United States would treat my son and me this way,” the dad said in a statement from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Covington & Burling, and Coppersmith Brockelman, which filed the lawsuit. “We came looking for safety, and instead, we were caged like animals. No one answered my calls for help when my son grew more and more sick [before we were separated]. He was taken from me and I had no idea what was happening to him. When I learned that he was abused by other boys, I was sick with grief. No one deserves this cruelty.”
J.V.S.’ five-year-old daughter, Herlinda, was also abused while in foster care, when another boy in the household touched her chest inappropriately, the lawsuit states. Herlinda was then moved to a second foster home after “Child Protective Services was informed and law enforcement officers came to the home to investigate the incident,” but the boy remained in the same “class” as her.
J.V.S. and Herlinda would remain separated for more than ten weeks. The father “did not learn of all the incidents of harm that Herlinda endured in [Office of Refugee Resettlement] custody until after their reunification. When he learned of this additional harm to Herlinda, it caused [J.V.S.] further distress. At night [J.V.S.] still remembers the ‘pain of it all,’” the filing continued.
A report last year from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called family separation policy “a gross human and civil rights violation,” saying that the forcible separation of thousands of families at the border and other anti-immigrant policies resulted in “widespread, longterm, and perhaps irreversible physical, mental and emotional childhood trauma,” and the violation of constitutional due process rights. Yet, there has been little justice when it comes to holding those who carried out this policy responsible.
“The Trump Administration’s inhumane and unlawful family separation policy caused deep and lasting harm to children and their parents,” Michelle Lapointe, an attorney with SPLC, said in the statement. “Multiple internal government investigations have already exposed the reckless implementation and devastating impact of this policy, which was designed and executed to inflict the maximum amount of cruelty possible on vulnerable people, like our clients.”