More than a year after a judge’s reunification order, 30 children who were supposed to be returned to their families after being kidnapped by the Trump administration have remained in U.S. custody, a recent House Committee on Oversight and Reform report says, and at least 10 of those kids remain separated because their parents have already been deported. Family separation remains a crisis.
The administration has continued to rip apart families since the judge’s order, under outrageous circumstances, even as kids ordered to be reunited remain without their parents, the report says. One of those kids, a 9-year-old Guatemalan boy, has been apart from his dad since May 2018, and as of May 2019 was being held at the Shiloh Treatment Center in Texas. This place has a history of forcibly injecting kids with powerful psychiatric drugs: A lawsuit last year alleged that “children were told they would not be released or see their parents unless they took medication and that they only were receiving vitamins.”
The boy’s dad was deported a year ago this month, the report says. “Records do not indicate what steps the administration has taken to reunify the father and the child, who is now nine years old.” Another Guatemalan child was also ripped from his dad in May 2018, and has remained in U.S. custody in Texas since his dad’s August 2018 deportation. “Again, the records produced to the Committee do not indicate what steps the administration has taken to reunify this family, and this boy is now 14 years old.”
The report reveals that the Trump administration kidnapped at least 18 babies and toddlers under the age of two—“including nine infants under the age of one”—from families and kept some separated for as long as six months. The youngest was just 4 months old, and was kept separated from his family for five months. “Now more than a year and a half old,” The New York Times reported last month, “the baby still can’t walk on his own, and has not spoken.”
From state-sanctioned kidnapping to baby jails to forcing families into homelessness, there is no modern presidency that has been as anti-child as the Trump administration, and the trauma inflicted on them will be for a lifetime—if it doesn’t kill them first. “Were parents or caregivers who brought their kids to me treating them like the migrant children being detained by the Trump administration,” pediatrician Daniel Summers recently wrote, “I would report them for further investigation.”
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