NBC News reports that pressure continues to build for the incoming Biden administration to allow families separated by the Trump administration at the southern border to be reunited in the United States, which he reportedly has not yet decided. Medical experts and children’s advocates are joining the legal advocates in saying reunifications must happen here—and that the new administration should go further.
"The families should be reunited in the United States and provided legal status,” Physicians for Human Rights Executive Director Donna McKay tells NBC News. "But after what the U.S. government subjected these families to—which constituted torture and enforced disappearance under international law—the administration is obligated to provide reparations and mental health services to the affected children and parents.”
Earlier this month, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) officials said the incoming Biden administration must reunite in the U.S. the hundreds of families who remain separated due to the Trump administration’s family separation policy. “We think that’s only fair given what they’ve been put through,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told the AP, saying that these families must also be protected once here.
“We will find the families but we cannot provide the families with the right to return to the United States and give legal status,” Gelernt said. “Only the administration can do that.” A group of clinical developmental neuroscientists from Yale University have since echoed similar demands, calling the policy a “severe human rights violation” in a Los Angeles Times op-ed.
“The new administration must immediately reunify and provide mental health care services to affected families,” Emily Cohodes, Sahana Kribakaran, and Dylan Gee write, urging incoming officials to also provide families with mental health counseling. “Every day of separation from caregivers matters in the life of a young child, and even a few months’ delay while the Biden administration decides how to proceed is enough to intensify the adverse effects of trauma on emotional and neurobiological development.”
NBC News reports that the American Academy of Pediatrics last month also called on the Biden administration to provide separated families with free mental health services. “Families that have previously been separated should be reunited and have access to trauma-informed care and mental health supports,” the organization said. “The administration should seek to reunify all separated children with the parents. All children and parents who have been separated should receive mental health services, at no cost to them, immediately and into the future.”
Government watchdog reports have confirmed that Trump administration officials were warned about the traumatic effects of family separation and continued carrying out the policy anyway. The Health and Human Services (HHS) inspector general said in a report this year that HHS officials instead scolded staffers for putting their concerns in writing. A separate report from the inspector general found separated children suffered “fear, feelings of abandonment, and post-traumatic stress” as a result of being taken from their families, causing some to believe that “their parents had abandoned them,” or that their parents were dead.
The Trump administration is still intentionally hurting these families. Advocates including the ACLU said that after months of pleading, officials only just recently handed over additional data that could help with reunification efforts. “This is disturbing,” a federal judge said in demanding to know why officials delayed, “in that it seems to be readily available information and it was a matter of tapping into it.”
“The Trump administration’s immigration policies were designed to inflict the greatest possible suffering on migrant families,” Cohodes, Kribakaran, and Gee continued in their op-ed. “In Biden’s first speech as president-elect, he vowed to ‘marshal the forces of decency, the forces of fairness … the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time.’ Thousands of children are waiting for the Biden-Harris administration to make good on its promise, and every day matters.”
