The Trump administration may be just hours away from resuming large-scale family separation when a federal judge’s deadline hits on Friday—and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials may still proceed with their criminal and inhumane plan in spite of medical experts hired by the administration loudly warning about the serious damage to kids and parents, BuzzFeed News reports. The experts now hope federal legislators can intervene.
“We are writing to you, members of Congress responsible for overseeing DHS, because we have a professional obligation to raise our grave concerns about DHS’s reattempt to separate children from their families in response to a federal court order to release the children when it is within ICE discretion to release the families intact,” they wrote according to the report.
BuzzFeed News obtained the letter that the three experts hired by the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties sent to federal legislators. Their jobs are to inspect “the care of those in government custody,” the report said, yet the Trump administration is so far appearing ready to ignore them when Judge Dolly Gee’s deadline comes on Friday.
While Gee last month ordered officials to release kids detained with their moms and dads at three Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) migrant family jails, her order only covered children and not their parents. A second judge’s ruling that could cover moms and dads has been delayed until next week, meaning ICE may begin forcing families into separating, and against the pleas of experts.
”The doctors said they shared their ‘concerns about the serious medical and mental health risks associated with the detention of families, exacerbated by the coronavirus spreading in congregate settings’ with the lead official in charge of the DHS civil rights division last week,” BuzzFeed News report said. Dana Gold, an attorney at the Government Accountability Project who represents the experts, told BuzzFeed News that the administration possibly resuming large-scale family separation “is a recipe for disaster.”
"That ICE is considering repeating one of the darkest moments of this administration—separating children from their families—knowing this will cause serious medical and psychological harm to children is nothing less than willful endangerment,” he said according to the report. “That DHS’s own medical and mental health experts need to speak up to try to prevent this agency from inflicting imminent harm on innocent children is another grotesque example of the government ignoring its medical experts.”
But the administration has known for years of the kind of trauma that this state-sanctioned kidnapping inflicts on children in particular, because past government inspector general reports have already found that senior officials ignored staff warnings about the government’s policy. Just this year, a report from the Health and Human Services inspector general “found no evidence that these three senior HHS officials took action to protect children’s interests in response to the information and concerns raised by [Office of Refugee Resettlement] staff.”
Some children stolen from their parents by the administration thought their moms and dads had abandoned them. Other separated children thought their parents were dead. This is what the administration wants to continue. “Worse, DHS is now attempting to reinstate the practice of family separation using a federal court order as justification,” the doctors said in their letter according to BuzzFeed News.
If you were outraged about large-scale family separation in 2018, you should be outraged again. Here’s what we can do about it: