The Trump administration separated more than 400 parents from their children and deported them while their children are being held in the U.S. And now the American Civil Liberties Union says that ICE appears to have withheld phone numbers for deported parents, making it harder to track them down to reunite them with their kids.
According to immigration attorneys in contact with the ACLU, phone numbers for the parents have been in the children’s files and parents and children have even been in contact with each other for weeks … but the government didn’t give the ACLU that information until August 7, under pressure from a federal judge. “Every day that we didn’t get [the numbers] is another day we didn’t track parents down [and] weeks and months, potentially, where kids are potentially by themselves,” said the ACLU’s Lee Gelernt.
Cathleen Caron, the founder and executive director of the migrant rights group Justice in Motion, said that before the government provided phone numbers for deported parents, advocates only had a list of addresses that were oftentimes vague or incomplete. “Maybe the list says Miguel in Guatemala City, and that’s not [helpful],” she said. “Guatemala City has more than 2.5 million people.” According to the ACLU, more than 100 of the government-provided addresses were completely useless, while others simply listed cities or descriptions such as “street without a name.” [...]
Peter Schey, the executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, said that, although NGOs are “searching for a needle in a haystack,” the government has access to embassies, consulates and State Department employees in Central America. “They have most of the information and the resources… [to] easily to locate deported parents. But they just don’t want to do it. It’s almost like a policy of intentional chaos.”
It’s not “almost like”—it is. And the intentional chaos is a means to the ultimate goal of cruelty. The Trump administration separated these children from their parents for no reason other than cruelty, and it has intentionally kept them apart for the same reason. This is evil.
