Lawyers Can't Locate Deported Parents Of 545 Migrant Children

[annabenedetti]

Lawyers Can't Locate Deported Parents Of 545 Migrant Children
The Trump administration was warned by officials that "record keeping wasn't there, they wouldn't be able to track these families down."

WASHINGTON — Lawyers appointed by a federal judge to identify migrant families who were separated by the Trump administration say that they have yet to track down the parents of 545 children and that about two-thirds of those parents were deported to Central America without their children, according to a filing Tuesday from the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Trump administration instituted a "zero tolerance" policy in 2018 that separated migrant children and parents at the southern U.S. border. The administration later confirmed that it had actually begun separating families in 2017 along some parts of the border under a pilot program. The ACLU and other pro-bono law firms were tasked with finding the members of families separated during the pilot program.

Unlike the 2,800 families separated under zero tolerance in 2018, most of whom remained in custody when the policy was ended by executive order, many of the more than 1,000 parents separated from their children under the pilot program had already been deported before a federal judge in California ordered that they be found.

 

[The Barbarian]

Remember, all this was intentional. Trump's AG deliberately messed up the records, as one more way of "discouraging" asylum applications. ICE employees just threw away many of the records.

 

[ok doser]

... at the southern U.S. border.

that's the one with Mexico, right?

tell me again why Mexico didn't keep them within their borders?

 

[annabenedetti]

Remember, all this was intentional. Trump's AG deliberately messed up the records, as one more way of "discouraging" asylum applications. ICE employees just threw away many of the records.

Yes, this was intentional.

"We need to take away children,” Sessions told the prosecutors in a conference call, according to participants’ notes, the Times reported. One participant added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids," the report said.

Rosenstein, in a second call about a week later, told the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were and that government lawyers should not have declined to prosecute two cases based on the fact the children were very young. The Guardian first reported details of Rosenstein refusing to rule out separating any child based on age.

 

[annabenedetti]

Let’s not mince words. The Trump administration kidnapped children.

THE TRUMP administration’s immorality, cruelty and bureaucratic malpractice in tearing migrant toddlers, tweens and teens away from their parents in 2017 and 2018 were the work of many co-conspirators, most of them faithfully carrying out the wishes of the president himself. A draft report by the Justice Department’s inspector general has made that clear. Perhaps even more shocking is that policy’s present-day legacy: More than 500 children who, having been wrenched from their families by U.S. government officials with no plan or mechanism ever to reunite them, remain separated.

That is the case despite years of efforts to track down parents who were, in many cases, deported after their children were seized and placed with family sponsors in the United States. For all intents and purposes, these children were kidnapped by the U.S. government.

In fact, it has not even been the U.S. government that has tried to reunite these sundered families. That has been the work of a court-appointed body organized by the American Civil Liberties Union, a nongovernmental organization. The ACLU, in effect, was put in charge of trying to fix what the Trump administration shattered — the lives of hundreds of children and families. Even now, the parents of 545 separated children cannot be located, despite the efforts of lawyers and advocates, according to a new court filing.

To its authors in the Trump administration, the child separation policy was justified in the name of inflicting such emotional trauma on migrant families that further illegal crossing of the southern border would be deterred. . . .

 

[ok doser]