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family separation
'Calculated Cruelty': Report Details Lasting Harms of Trump Family Separation Policy
Up to 1,360 children who were separated from their parents under the Trump administration have not been reunited six years later, according to the new report from a trio of human rights groups.
Dec 16, 2024
A report published Monday by a coalition of human rights groups estimates that as many as 1,360 children who were separated from their parents under the first Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy have yet to be reunited, causing immense suffering for families ensnared in the punitive effort to deter border crossings.
The 135-page report was produced by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School, and it comes as immigrant rights advocates brace for President-elect Donald Trump's return to power alongside officials who helped develop and implement the large-scale family separations.
"Forcible separation of children from their families inflicted harms that were severe and foreseeable," states the report, which examines public and internal government documents, materials from legal proceedings, and the findings of government investigations and features interviews with parents and children who were forcibly separated by the Trump administration.
"Once parents realized they would not be immediately reunited with their children, they were distraught," the report continues. "Some children sobbed uncontrollably. Many felt abandoned. Nearly all were bewildered, not least because immigration officials would not tell them where their parents were or gave responses that proved to be lies."
The groups estimate that the first Trump administration separated more than 4,600 children from their families during its four years in power, and nearly 30% of the children are unaccounted for and "may remain separated from their parents."
"A government should never target children to send a message to parents."
While family separations predated Trump's first term and have continued under President Joe Biden, experts argue the Trump administration's policy was uniquely expansive and cruel. The groups behind the new report said the Trump administration's family separation efforts "constituted enforced disappearance and may have constituted torture."
"We need to take away children," Jeff Sessions, then Trump's attorney general, reportedly said during a May 2018 call with five federal prosecutors, the report observes, citing handwritten notes from one of the prosecutors.
Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior children's rights counsel at HRW and an author of the new report, said in a statement Monday that "it's chilling to see, in document after document, the calculated cruelty that went into the forcible family separation policy."
"A government should never target children to send a message to parents," Bochenek added.
The separations traumatized both parents and children, according to the report.
"Migrant children who have been forcibly separated from their parents demonstrate greater emotional and behavioral difficulties than children who have never been separated," the report notes. "Parents repeatedly told Al Otro Lado, a legal services organization based in Tijuana, that forced separation from their children was 'the worst thing they had ever experienced' and reported 'continued disturbances in sleep, nightmares, loss of appetite, loss of interest, fear for the future, constant worry, hopelessness, and loss of the ability to concentrate.'"
"In May 2018," the report adds, "a man killed himself after [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] agents forcibly separated him from his children."
HRW, TCRP, and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic called on Congress and the Biden administration to "put in place comprehensive measures to remedy the wrongs these families suffered" and urged the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—soon to be led by far-right South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem—to "adopt standards that presumptively keep families together, separating them only when in a child's best interest."
Trump campaigned during the 2024 election on a pledge to launch the "largest domestic deportation operation in American history," and he said during an interview aired last week that "we don't have to separate families."
"We'll send the whole family, very humanely, back to the country where they came," Trump said, suggesting he'll also deport children who are U.S. citizens.
When pressed on whether he intends to revive the "zero tolerance" policy, Trump said, "We need deterrence."
"When somebody comes here illegally, they're going out. It's very simple," he added. "Now if they come here illegally but their family is here legally, then the family has a choice. The person that came in illegally can go out, or they can all go out together."
The ACLU, which has represented separated families in court, has pledged to take swift legal action if the incoming Trump administration brings back "zero tolerance."
"I am hopeful that the Trump administration recognized the outpouring from the American public and the worldwide revulsion to ripping little children away from their parents and will not try to separate families again," ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt toldTIME magazine last month. "But if it does we will be back in court immediately."
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Trump Spokesperson Affirms Day 1 Plans for Nation's 'Largest Mass Deportation Operation'
"As always, we will go to court to challenge illegal policies, but it is equally essential that the public push back, as it did with family separation," one rights advocate said.
Nov 07, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump is set to begin his promised mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as soon as he takes office on January 20, 2025, even as rights groups are mobilizing to stop him.
Trump national press secretary Karoline Leavitt toldFox News Wednesday morning that "the American people delivered a resounding victory for President Trump."
"It gives him a mandate to govern as he campaigned, to deliver on the promises that he made, which include, on Day 1, launching the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants that Kamala Harris has allowed into this country," Leavitt said.
"We have a simple message for President-elect Trump or his deputies if they decide to make good on their despicable plans: We will see you in court."
Trump has pledged to conduct the largest deportation in U.S. history, with running mate and now Vice President-elect JD Vance promising 1 million deportations each year. The plan would likely rely on mobilizing federal agencies, the military, diplomats, and Republican-led states while using federal funds to pressure uncooperative states and cities into complying.
The stocks of private prison companies like GEOGroup and Core Civic rose significantly after Trump's win, and private contractors had already been discussing ahead of the election how to build enough detention space to accommodate Trump's plans.
A study released by the American Immigration Council in October found that a massive, one-time deportation program of the estimated 13.3 million migrants in the country without legal status would cost the government at least $315 billion while a 1-million-a-year approach would cost $88 billion a year for a total of $967.9 billion. It would also shrink the nation's gross domestic product by between 4.2 and 6.8%, not to mention the massive human cost to immigrant families, as around 5.1 million children who are U.S. citizens live with an undocumented family member.
The council also warned that such a program would likely threaten the well-being of all immigrants and increase vigilantism and hate crimes.
"As bad as the first Trump administration was for immigrants, we anticipate it will be much worse this time and are particularly concerned about the use of the military to round up immigrants," Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who fought the first Trump administration on family separation and other policies, toldThe Washington Post. "As always, we will go to court to challenge illegal policies, but it is equally essential that the public push back, as it did with family separation."
Exit polls show that 56% of U.S. voters favor offering immigrants already in the U.S. a pathway to citizenship, while Data for Progress found that survey respondents did not favor deportation for 7 out of 9 categories of people who might be caught up in a mass deportation scheme.
The ACLU has urged cities and states to take steps to protect their undocumented residents ahead of January 20.
"They should prepare for mass deportations because those will wreak havoc on the communities," Noreen Shah, director of government affairs at the ACLU's equality division, toldNewsweek. "It will mean kids who go to school and their parents are gone and not there to pick them up at the end of the day."
In particular, legal groups are gearing up for Trump to potentially evoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which authorizes the country to deport noncitizens of a hostile nation. It has only been used three times, most recently to detain Japanese Americans during World War II.
"Many fear that a second Trump administration would seek to use this law to justify indefinite detention and remove people from the country swiftly and without judicial review," Shah told Reuters.
The Brennan Center for Justice has called on Congress to repeal the act.
"This law was shameful and dangerous back when it was created 200 years ago," the center's Marcelo Agudo wrote in October. "It's even more so today. It must be repealed or overturned."
Several other organizations pledged to continue defending immigrants and refugees after Trump declared victory.
"We have a simple message for President-elect Trump or his deputies if they decide to make good on their despicable plans: We will see you in court," Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, said in a statement. "And, we have a message of love to immigrant communities, we see you, we are you, and we will stand with you."
Calling Trump's win "one of the most dangerous moments in our country's history, National Immigration Law Center president Kica Matos said the organization had led a "movement-wide effort to plan for this moment."
"Trump and his allies told us what he plans to do: mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, ending the right to public education for immigrant children, internment camps, and using the military to hunt down immigrants. We should take him at his word," Matos said.
She continued: "One thing is certain: we cannot and will not retreat. For more than 40 years, NILC has been steadfast in our fight to defend the rights of low-income immigrants and their loved ones. We successfully fought Donald Trump before, and we will do it again."
The American Immigrant Lawyers Association (AILA) pledged to continue working for its clients.
"If implemented, the anti-immigrant policies avowed by candidate Trump will inflict lasting damage to the American economy, communities, and character," AILA Executive Director Benjamin Johnson said in a statement. "AILA and its more than 16,000 members will continue to defend the Constitution and stand against laws and policies that violate due process, undermine civil rights, or denigrate the contributions of immigrants. Our future prosperity depends on not giving up. We must stand together and work towards a brighter future."
Refugees International also promised to continue with its "shared commitment to rights and refuge for people forced from their homes."
"Amid historic levels of global displacement, the incoming Trump administration plans to enact an anti-refugee, anti-asylum agenda that will endanger millions of people—both those threatened by crises overseas and those who have been welcomed as neighbors into communities across the United States," the group's president, Jeremy Konyndyk, said in a message to supporters. "Yet we hold on to hope, even as we are clear-eyed about the daunting struggles ahead."
Knowndyk added: "As we do under any presidential administration, we will work tirelessly with all of you to defend and advance the rights, protection, and well-being of all people forced to flee their homes."
United We Dream, the largest U.S. organization led by immigrant youth, committed to building the "largest pro-immigrant movement this country has ever seen."
"Immigrant young people of United We Dream declare ourselves hopeful and clear eyed about the fight ahead," said the group's executive director Greisa Martínez Rosas. "With Trump pledging to carry out the largest deportation effort in our country's history—ctivating the military to raid our communities, schools, hospitals, and more in order to round up our people into concentration camps—young, Black, brown, and queer leaders who have been at the vanguard of our movement and of creating meaningful change are ready move mountains to protect our communities."
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On Immigration, the Democrats Must Propose a True Alternative to Trumpism
Agreeing with Trump that immigrants are the enemy to be detained at the border, and then only disagreeing on the numbers and methods, contradicts any commitment to a fact-based policy, while making immigrant communities scapegoats.
Aug 19, 2024
On August 17, a group of committed migrant activists set forth on a three-day march from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, highlighting the choices for progressive candidates in the coming November election. Should their campaigns amplify the hysteria about an immigration “crisis,” or should they speak the truth to the American people about the border and the roots of migration? Even more important, these marchers are providing a practical way for activists and political leaders to advocate for rights as they work to defeat the threat of MAGA racism.
The question at hand is whether to support the compromise immigration enforcement bill negotiated between centrist Democrats and Republicans last year, and to campaign against former U.S. President Donald Trump from the right, attacking him for undermining Republican support for the enforcement measures it contained.
In that bill, President Joe Biden agreed that he would close the border to asylum applicants if their number rose beyond 5,000 per day, while making it much harder to gain legal status for those even allowed to apply. Biden said he would cut short the time for screening asylum applicants by asylum officers, which would make winning permission to stay much more difficult.
Winning public understanding of immigration is the only way to decisively defeat this anti-immigrant hysteria, rather than caving into its illogic, and to the media frenzy and the onslaught of Republicans and MAGA acolytes.
To keep people imprisoned while their cases are in process, instead of releasing them, Biden proposed an additional $3 billion for more detention centers, a euphemism for immigrant prisons. There are already over 200, according to the group Freedom for Immigrants. Under a law signed by former President Barack Obama, Congress required that 34,000 detention beds be filled every night. At the end of 2023, those beds held 36,263 people, and another 194,427 were in “Alternatives to Detention,” which required wearing the hated ankle bracelets that bar travel for more than a few blocks. Over 90% of these jails are run for profit by private companies like the Geo Group, (formerly the Pinkerton Detective Agency).
These proposals respond to a media-driven frenzy that constantly refers to an immigration “crisis” and calls the border “broken.” That media coverage, and the response by centrist Democrats and Republicans, treats migrants as criminals, as an enemy. Political operatives in Washington then take polls, announce that the public wants draconian enforcement, and advise candidates that going against this tide will lead to election losses.
Yet this accepted political “wisdom” in Washington is not actually based on facts.
Let’s Look at the Numbers
Department of Homeland Security statistics show that over the decades the number of people crossing the border, and subject to deportation, rises and falls, while displacement and forced migration remain constant. In 2022, about 1.1 million people were expelled after trying to cross, and another 350,000 deported. In 1992, about 1.2 million were stopped at the border and 1.1 million deported. Over a million people were deported in 1954 during the infamous “Operation Wetback.” Arrests at the border have totaled over a million in 29 of the last 46 years.
Last year the number arrested at the border was higher: about 2.5 million. But the reality is that the migration flow has not stopped and will not stop anytime soon. What, then, is the “crisis”? New York Times reporter Miriam Jordan says, “In December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern border, a record number.” They all believe, she says, that “once they make it into the United States they will be able to stay. Forever. And by and large, they are not wrong.”
In fact, the number of refugee admissions in 2022 was 60,000. In 1992, it was 132,000. According to Jordan, applicants are simply released to live normal lives until their date before an immigration judge. That will certainly be news to families facing separation and the constant threat of deportation. But this is what Republicans and anti-immigrant Democrats call an “invasion” and threaten to “shut the border.”
Criminalizing the Undocumented
Should Trump win election in November, he promises to reinstitute the notorious family separation policy. Children who survive the crossing might easily be lost, as so many were, in the huge detention system. Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) wants to reintroduce the “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which people wanting asylum were not allowed to enter the United States at all, to file their applications. The Mexican government was forced to set up detention centers just south of the border to house them while they waited.
Trump and other Republicans would imprison all migrants who face a court proceeding that allows them to apply to stay or stop a deportation. Pending cases now number in the millions, because the immigration court system is starved for the resources for processing them.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has pushed through a law that makes being undocumented a state crime. Republicans in Congress last year proposed to build more border walls, create barriers to asylum, force the firing of millions of undocumented workers, and permit children to be held in detention prisons with their parents. Centrist Democrats are very willing to agree to modified proposals like these.
No money, running from something or someone, trying to keep a family together and give it a future, or just needing a job at whatever wage—these are the commonalities of the thousands who arrive at the U.S. border every year. Winning public understanding of immigration is the only way to decisively defeat this anti-immigrant hysteria, rather than caving into its illogic, and to the media frenzy and the onslaught of Republicans and MAGA acolytes.
Roots of Migration
President Obama made some acknowledgement of the poverty and violence that impels people to come but drew the line at recognizing this migration’s historical roots, much less any culpability on the part of the U.S. government. President Biden sent Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic candidate for president, to Central America in his first year in office with a similar message—don’t come.
So far, the new presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has not taken a different direction. In Arizona she gave a speech recommitting to the Biden-brokered compromise and criticizing Trump for killing it. In a new TV ad, she promised to hire thousands of additional border patrol agents. The three enforcement arms of the Department of Homeland Security—the Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement today account for 52,300 officers, making it the largest law enforcement agency in the country. The numbers mushroomed by 22,000 in the past 20 years; the Border Patrol alone tripled from 2,700 to 8,200.
The rationale for this huge increase is that immigrants must be met with deterrence and enforcement to stop them from coming. Today an unwillingness to look at U.S. responsibility for producing displacement and migration is starkest in relation to Haitians and Venezuelans, who have made up a large percentage of the migrants arriving at the Rio Grande in the last two years.
No matter how many walls and migrant prisons the government builds, people will come.
After Haitians finally rid themselves of the U.S.-supported Duvalier regime and elected Jean Bertrand Aristide president, the United States put him on an outbound plane in 2004, as it did with Miguel Zelaya in Honduras. A string of U.S.-backed corrupt but business-friendly governments followed, which pocketed millions while Haitians went hungry and homeless by the tens of thousands after earthquakes and other disasters. The treatment of Haitian migrants is a form of institutionalized racism.
Survival in Venezuela became impossible for many as its economy suffered body blows from U.S. political intervention and economic sanctions. If the United States moves further to increase sanctions in response to the recent elections, it will produce even more migration.
These interventions produce migrants and then criminalize them. In 2023, the Border Patrol took 334,914 Venezuelans into custody, along with 163,701 Haitians. And while promoting military intervention in Haiti and regime change in Venezuela, the Biden administration put people on deportation flights back home, in the hope that this would discourage others from starting the journey north.
The disconnect is obvious to anyone born south of the Mexican border. Sergio Sosa, a Guatemalan exile who heads the Heartland Workers Center in Omaha, observes: “People from Europe and the U.S. crossed borders to come to us, and took over our land and economy. Migration is a form of fighting back. We’re in our situation, not because we decided to be, but because we’re in the U.S.’s backyard.” While former President Bill Clinton was the author of many anti-immigrant measures, he did recognize this historic truth, and apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. support of the military dictatorships that massacred thousands.
The Democrats have to tell people the truth, and political campaigns are the times when this is most important. Agreeing with Trump that immigrants are the enemy to be detained at the border, and then only disagreeing on the numbers and methods, contradicts any commitment to a fact-based policy, while making immigrant communities scapegoats.
As they march from Silicon Valley, immigrant rights campaigners are reminding the Democratic Party of this truth and are calling for a commitment to the welfare of the 11 million people already in the United States who lack legal immigration status. That commitment has been all but lost in the border “crisis” hype.
An Alternative Approach
The goal of these marchers is to win support for a bill that could make a profound difference in the lives of millions of people. Today, anyone who entered the United States without a visa before January 1, 1972 can apply for legal permanent residence. From 2015 to 2019, however, only 305 people received legal status this way because over 90% of undocumented immigrants came after that date. As the years go by, ever fewer numbers qualify.
Known as the Registry Bill, HR 1511 would allow anyone in the country for seven years to apply for legal status. Emma Delgado, a leader of Mujeres Unidas y Activas (United and Active Women) in San Francisco says, “I haven’t seen my children in many years because there is currently no way for me to apply for legal residency.” She called the family separation produced by current immigration law “immoral.”
Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigration Reform in Los Angeles, challenges the idea that Democrats can’t campaign for it during an election year, and that a Republican majority in the House dooms it. “Think of all the millions of U.S. citizens who have immigrant parents,” she urges, “and how many have had their fathers or mothers deported. All over the country. Immigrant workers are a big part of the workforce. They’re all part of a base that can force change. We can’t depend on political winds or what people tell us is possible.”
No matter how many walls and migrant prisons the government builds, people will come. Over the years they will become part of communities here, and with progressive immigration policies, eventually voting citizens. Democrats need a long-term vision that sees the future in organizing and defending them, in turning those old anti-immigrant arguments around, rather than reinforcing them.
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