Friday was a major day for vulnerable people seeking safety in the U.S. On the same day that the Biden administration announced it will be ending Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum Title 42 policy by end of May, a GOP-appointed federal judge rejected the federal government’s request to toss litigation filed by families separated at the southern border by the previous president, Bloomberg reports.
While President Joe Biden said separated families “deserve” compensation, his Justice Department has argued that “affected families aren’t entitled to payouts from the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act,” Vox reported in January. But last week, U.S. District Judge John Hinderaker said litigation can go forward.
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“The court was correct to deny the government’s motion to dismiss the case against the United States and to allow discovery into the barbaric family separation practice,” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Lee Gelernt told Bloomberg. “The ruling should signal to the Biden administration that it is time to do what’s right for these families and stop fighting them in court.”
However, Hinderaker dismissed more than a dozen former officials from the litigation, including ex-Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, and noted white supremacist Stephen Miller. “The judge agreed with the Justice Department that allowing such claims against individual high-ranking federal officials isn’t supported by legal precedent,” the report said.
That doesn’t in any way change the fact that these three in particular were instrumental in carrying out this human rights atrocity, as steadily chronicled here throughout the previous administration. Miller was reportedly so peeved about separations going too slowly that he had cabinet officials vote on it. Nielsen, meanwhile, has steadily lied about there being “no policy to separate families” when she’s the one who signed the policy into place.
When it comes to Sessions, he instructed U.S. attorneys "to take away children,” the Justice Department’s inspector general said in report. Despite being named as a main force behind the policy, Sessions refused to participate in the inspector general’s probe, apparently protected by the fact that former employees can’t be forced to submit to an interview. Again, these three ex-officials may be protected by legal precedent, but it doesn’t make them innocent in any way.
”Hinderaker concluded the ACLU’s claims for negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress and loss of ‘consortium’ between children and parents are legally adequate to proceed,” Bloomberg continues. “A jury could find the government’s conduct extreme and outrageous and that such emotional distress resulted from the government’s conduct,” Hinderaker wrote, according to the report.
Physicians for Human Rights said in its groundbreaking study last year that children who were kidnapped under the policy continued to meet criteria for PTSD a year after reunification. One child, an 8-year-old boy, continued to meet criteria for PTSD, as well as separation anxiety disorder, two years after reunification. Parents, many of whom were separated without a chance to even say goodbye, similarly reported trauma.
“Three of the 19 parents also experienced suicidal thoughts while separated from their children,” the report said.
Maine Sen. Susan Collins in June 2018 called the policy "traumatizing,” saying children are “innocent victims” and stating that separating them from their families “is contrary to our values in this country.” But she’s since been among the Republicans who have sought to block reported settlements for families. “Giving out potentially billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to people who broke federal law to enter the country is outrageous and an insult to the American people,” Mitch McConnell lied. Once again: Asylum is legal immigration.
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