Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union told a federal judge Tuesday that President Donald Trump's administration has taken nearly 1,000 migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border since the judge ordered the United States government to curtail the practice more than a year ago.
In a lengthy court filing in U.S. District Court in San Diego, lawyers wrote that one migrant lost his daughter because a U.S. Border Patrol agent claimed that he had failed to change the girl's diaper. Another migrant lost his child because of an outstanding warrant on a destruction-of-property charge with alleged damage of $5. One father, who lawyers say has a speech impediment, was separated from his 4-year-old son because he could not clearly answer Customs and Border Protection agents' questions.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan has said that family separations remain "extraordinarily rare" and occur only when the adults pose a risk to the children because of criminal records, communicable diseases, abuse or neglect.
The ACLU said that as of June 29, 911 children had been separated from their families since the June 26, 2018, court order. The organization cited statistics it received from the government as part of ongoing legal proceedings.
While the judge recognized that parents and children might still be separated when a parent is found to pose a risk to a child, the ACLU and others say federal immigration and border agents are splitting up families over minor alleged offenses -- including traffic violations. The ACLU urged the judge Tuesday to clarify when such separations should be allowed to occur.
"They're taking what was supposed to be a narrow exception for cases where the parent was genuinely a danger to the child and using it as a loophole to continue family separation," ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said in an interview. "What everyone understands intuitively and what the medical evidence shows, this will have a devastating effect on the children and possibly cause permanent damage to these children, not to mention the toll on the parents."
Six parents were separated from their children over convictions for marijuana possession. Eight were split up over fraud and forgery offenses.
A 2-year-old Guatemalan girl was separated from her father after authorities examined her for a fever and diaper rash and found she was malnourished and underdeveloped, the ACLU said. The father, who the ACLU said was from an "extraordinarily impoverished community" rife with malnutrition, was accused of neglect.
About 20% of the 911 children separated from their families were under 5 years old, including babies, the ACLU said. They include 678 children whose parents faced allegations of criminal conduct. Other reasons include alleged unfitness or child-safety concerns, "unverified familial relationship," or parent illness.
"It is shocking that the Trump administration continues to take babies from their parents," Gelernt said. "The administration must not be allowed to circumvent the court order over infractions like minor traffic violations."
The government also took children from women who they believed had gang ties but who in fact had been gang targets, the ACLU said.
One woman from El Salvador said a gang member forced her to be his girlfriend until he was arrested in late 2018. She came to the U.S. in February and was separated from her 3-year-old son for three months while an attorney tracked down Salvadoran documents showing she had been a victim, not a criminal.
Another Salvadoran woman was separated from her 2-year-old daughter on the toddler's birthday because of suspected gang ties. But the woman's attorney said her client had been raped repeatedly by a gangster who forced her to deliver marijuana inside a prison. The woman refused and gave the drugs to authorities, but she was arrested anyway, the ACLU said.
In other cases, families were separated over minor crimes that, if committed by people living in the U.S., would never result in a child being taken away.
A 7-year-old girl has been in custody since June after being separated from her father because he had a conviction for driving without a license and had previously entered the country without authorization.
The ACLU said 14 parents were separated from their children based on immigration convictions combined with driving-under-the-influence charges or unspecified traffic offenses.
SEPARATION POLICIES
The rising tally of child separations adds to the approximately 2,700 children who were taken from their parents during a six-week period from May to June 20 last year, during a border crackdown.
The policy sought to deter a crush of asylum seekers, who were surrendering as families at the U.S. southern border, by prosecuting parents for the crime of illegal entry and sending their children to federal shelters. Reports of traumatized, crying children led to widespread demands to reunite the families.
Trump ordered federal officials to stop separating families on June 20, 2018, and said it is the "policy of this Administration to maintain family unity" unless the parent poses "a risk" to the child.
Six days later, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, a President George W. Bush appointee in San Diego, ordered the Trump administration to reunite the families, a process that dragged on for months because the government hadn't tracked the families after splitting them up. A still-unknown number of families were separated before the policy officially began.
McAleenan, who at the time signed off on the zero-tolerance policy and carried it out as commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in May that family separations are "extraordinarily rare" and make up a tiny portion of the approximately 400,000 families apprehended this year.
At that time, he testified, about one to three family separations occurred out of approximately 1,500 to 3,000 family members apprehended each day. He also said then that separations occurred "under very controlled circumstances."
Testifying before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on July 18, McAleenan emphasized that the separation process is "carefully governed by policy and by court order" to protect the children.
"This is in the interest of the child," he said. "It's overseen by a supervisor, and those decisions are made."
But the ACLU and other nonprofit organizations serving migrants estimated that a small fraction of the 911 children the Department of Homeland Security has taken from their parents since June 2018 have been at risk.
Jennifer Nagda, policy director of the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights, an advocate for unaccompanied and separated children, told the House Oversight Committee that the group represented 120 children and found that nearly all separations were "contrary to the best interests of the child" and "devastating" to families.
Children spent nearly four months in federal custody, on average, in part because it was difficult for lawyers and caseworkers to locate their parents and assess the reasons they were separated.
"[Homeland Security Department] officials with no child-welfare expertise are making split-second decisions, and these decisions have traumatic, lifelong consequences for the children and their families," Nagda said in her testimony.
Information for this article was contributed by Maria Sacchetti of The Washington Post and by Elliot Spagat and Astrid Galvan of The Associated Press.
A Section on 07/31/2019