SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
rod rosenstein
'Damning' New IG Report, Says ACLU, Shows Just How Far Trump Team 'Was Willing to Go to Destroy' Immigrant Families
"Just when you think the Trump administration can't sink any lower, it does."
Jan 13, 2021
As a former leading U.S. Justice Department official on Thursday said he regretted the role he played in the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" migrant family separation policy in the wake of a scathing inspector general report, human and civil rights groups pointed to the probe's findings as "damning" proof of the administration's cruelty toward people seeking refuge in the United States.
"The incoming administration must reunite the separated families in the United States, but we cannot stop there. These families deserve citizenship, resources, care, and a commitment that family separation will never happen again."
--Lee Gelernt, ACLU
The inspector general's report (pdf) concluded that President Donald Trump, ex-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and other senior officials were woefully unprepared when U.S. agents started seizing thousands of migrant children from their asylum-seeking parents and relatives who were often imprisoned in concentration camps after entering the United States, first in a 2017 DOJ pilot program and then nationwide the following year.
The report, based on interviews with dozens of DOJ officials and a review of over 200,000 emails and other electronic files, directly implicates Trump in the disastrous policy. It also found that senior administration officials were "fully aware" that the policy would result in children being separated from their families but pressed ahead with it anyway.
\u201cThe cruelty is the point. \n\nThis administration\u2019s unconscionable family separation policy will forever be a stain on our nation\u2019s history.\n\nhttps://t.co/9dscvdoxC4\u201d— Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (@Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley) 1610651249
In response to the report, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Thusday released a statement of regret.
"Since leaving the department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero tolerance immigration policy," Rosenstein toldNBC News. "It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better."
The ACLU--which successfully sued to block family separation and immediately reunite families--led human and civil rights groups in reacting to what it called the "damning" report.
"The barbaric family separation practice was immoral and illegal," said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer who led the family separation suit, in a statement on Thursday. "This new report shows just how far the Trump administration was willing to go to destroy these families. Just when you think the Trump administration can't sink any lower, it does."
\u201cThe more we learn about family separation, the more we see was both a willfully cruel and criminally negligent policy.\n\nWe must hold every person who created and facilitated family separation accountable under the law and never repeat this mistake. https://t.co/eIWf8S986j\u201d— Juli\u00e1n Castro (@Juli\u00e1n Castro) 1610647584
\u201cA reminder that those quitting on Trump now are the same people who stood by him as he cruelly separated families and caged kids.\n\nWe must do everything we can to reunite families, hold all those who caused this torture accountable, and humanely reform our immigration system.\u201d— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@Rep. Pramila Jayapal) 1610665156
The new DOJ report's findings correspond with those of a 21-month House Judiciary Committee investigation published last October that accused the Trump administration of "reckless incompetence and intentional cruelty" in its implementation of the zero tolerance policy. In November, Conmon Dreams reported that 666 children--about 20% of whom were under the age of 5 when they were ripped away from their parents--remained separated from their families.
As a result of the separation policy, both parents and children--who were often told by U.S. officials that they would never see each other again--have suffered tremendous emotional and psychological trauma that Physicians for Human Rights has called "torture" and "state-sanctioned child abuse."
Some of the seized children have been placed in U.S. families, who are sometimes able to petition for permanent custody, and it is feared that some of the children may indeed never see their parents again.
In late June 2018, as public outrage mounted in the face of stories like a breastfeeding baby being torn away from her mother and a father driven to suicide after being separated from his wife and child, the administration reluctantly rolled back the policy--which, along with forced surgical removal of reproductive organs of migrant women has been called the Trump administration's worst domestic human rights violation.
During the 2020 election, President-elect Joe Biden vowed to form a task force to reunite all of the separated children with their relatives. Gelernt stressed that he must now follow through on his promise.
"The Biden-Harris administration will inherit the legacy of family separation, and we don't doubt that more horrific details will continue to emerge," the ACLU attorney said. "We need them to act with urgency--every day without action makes it harder to find and reunite families."
"The incoming administration must reunite the separated families in the United States, but we cannot stop there," Gelernt added. "These families deserve citizenship, resources, care, and a commitment that family separation will never happen again."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Just Babies at the Time': ACLU Says It Can't Find Parents of Over 500 Children Separated From Families by Trump
"We will not stop looking until we have found every one of the families, no matter how long it takes."
Oct 21, 2020
Lawyers appointed by a federal judge to locate members of families separated in 2017 during a clampdown along the U.S.-Mexico border reported Tuesday night that they have yet to find the parents of 545 migrant children, according to a new court filing by the ACLU, prompting renewed denunciations of President Donald Trump's cruel immigration policies.
"This isn't an unintended consequence, this is the predictable outcome of an incompetent administration that thought ripping families apart would send a message."
--Rep. Gregory Meeks
The filing (pdf) says that roughly two-thirds of the missing parents are believed to be in their Central American countries of origin after having been deported without their children, who remain in the U.S. with foster families or distant relatives.
"People are constantly asking me when we will find all the families and I unfortunately do not know," attorney Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, toldBuzzFeed News. "The numbers tell one story, but each individual child has his or her own story with its own human dimension."
\u201cBREAKING: Through our litigation, we just reported to the court that the parents of 545 kids \u2014 forcibly separated by the Trump administration's cruel family separation practice \u2014 still cannot be found.\n\nThis is why we fight. https://t.co/OH34S8Play\u201d— ACLU (@ACLU) 1603239185
According to BuzzFeed News:
In 2018, the Trump administration systematically separated thousands of children from their parents under a so-called "zero tolerance policy" in which parents were sent to federal prison before going to court on charges of entering the U.S. without authorization. Because children can't be sent to federal prison with their parents, the government separated them, listed them as unaccompanied minors, and transferred them to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
It was later revealed and confirmed that the White House had actually begun separating families in 2017 under a pilot program.
The ACLU found that between 2017 and 2018, the Trump administration separated at least 4,200 migrant children from their guardians and deported hundreds of parents without their kids, often prior to collecting adequate contact information.
NBC News noted that "the ACLU and other pro-bono law firms were tasked with finding the members of families separated during the 2017 pilot program," while "a separate court order directed that the Trump administration reunite families separated under zero tolerance in 2018."
NBC News continued:
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 in 2017 under the pilot program had already been deported before a federal judge in California ordered that they be found.
Human rights advocates and legal organizations constituting a court-appointed steering committee have "been able to contact the parents of more than 550 children," NBC News reported. Of those, it is predicted that "about 25 of them may have a chance to come back to the U.S. for reunification."
In addition to the obstacles to reunification created by U.S. policy, Gelernt described how some of the parents who have been located have made the difficult decision to keep their children in the U.S. "due to fear of what will happen to their child if they return" to their country of origin.
In an interview Tuesday night with MSNBC's Chris Hayes, journalist Jacob Soboroff pointed out that the trauma endured by migrant children separated from their parents has been characterized as "government-sanctioned child abuse" by the American Academy of Pediatrics and as "torture" by Physicians for Human Rights.
"Because of the Trump administration's calculated cruelty, 545 children have not seen their parents since 2017," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wa.) said Wednesday in a statement. "And have no idea if or when they will ever see them again."
"Evil is too kind a word for what the Trump administration has done here," the legislator said, calling for the passage of the Stop Cruelty to Migrant Children Act she introduced in 2019.
"Evil is too kind a word for what the Trump administration has done."
--Sen. Patty Murray
"The staggering inhumanity of this president's treatment of these children," Murray added, "belongs in the darkest chapters of our nation's history--the ones we can never forget and must never repeat."
According to Soboroff, the White House pursued family separation even after being warned by some officials in the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) that implementing this policy "was going to have the exact consequences we're talking about right now."
"The record-keeping wasn't there, they wouldn't be able to track these families down," he added, "and here we are... almost three years later."
Furthermore, Soboroff noted on social media that "most of these parents, if ever found, will face insurmountable hurdles to reunification with their children in the U.S."
\u201cMost of these parents, if ever found, will face insurmountable hurdles to reunification with their children in the United States.\u201d— Jacob Soboroff (@Jacob Soboroff) 1603232733
"We know from reporting that the cruelty of this policy was intentional," Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) tweeted Wednesday. "This isn't an unintended consequence, this is the predictable outcome of an incompetent administration that thought ripping families apart would send a message."
As Common Dreams detailed earlier this month, a recent report by the inspector general of the DOJ reveals that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then-Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein pushed for enforcing Trump's family separation policy, with Sessions saying that "we need to take away the children" to deter asylum seekers from entering the U.S.
The Center for American Progress on Tuesday released a heart-wrenching video depicting the "horrors of family separation and the lasting harms... [of] inhumane immigration policies."
\u201c[BREAKING] Today @amprog released a video, which highlighted the current administration's "family separation" policy that forcibly separated more than 5,400 children - including infants and toddlers-from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.\u201d— CAP Immigration (@CAP Immigration) 1603235015
"There is so much more work to be done," Gelernt said, referring to the hundreds of parents yet to be found.
"The contact information the government gave us was largely stale, so we've been looking for the families on the ground in Central America," he added, "but because of Covid-19, the on-the ground-search [had] halted."
However, the filing states that "limited physical on-the-ground searches for separated parents has now resumed where possible to do so while protecting the health of personnel working with the steering committee and members of vulnerable communities in separated parents' home countries."
\u201cWe are conducting on-the-ground searches in Central America and Mexico to find and help these parents. Visit https://t.co/j85L1Rqser to learn more, and please consider donating to support our efforts! \n\nvia @jacobsoboroff and @JuliaEAinsley\u201d— Justice In Motion (@Justice In Motion) 1603236160
"Some of these children have been separated for years and were just babies at the time," Gelernt said.
"We will not stop looking until we have found every one of the families," he added, "no matter how long it takes."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Crimes Against Humanity': Inspector General's Report Reveals Top Trump DOJ Officials Drove Family Separation Policy
"If Trump wins a second term expect more heartless, cruel, barbaric behavior towards infants and children."
Oct 07, 2020
A damning new draft report by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Justice details how former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, were the driving force behind enforcement of the Trump administration's family separation policy and pressured officials who spoke out to go along with prosecuting parents of children as young as infants.
Drawing from nearly 50 interviews with DOJ officials as well as internal documents, the report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz refutes claims by DOJ officials who sought to distance themselves from President Donald Trump's "zero tolerance" policy, under which government attorneys were directed to prosecute all cases of undocumented immigrants who crossed the southern U.S. border, even if they arrived with their children, and calling for families to be separated upon arrival to deter future immigrants.
"It is vile that our officials failed to stop this. No indictments, not even impeachment for it. These are crimes against humanity."
--Sarah Kendzior, host, "Gaslit Nation"
As the New York Timesreported, U.S. attorneys who met with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the spring of 2018 noted that Sessions told them, "We need to take away children," according to internal documents. One prosecutor wrote in notes from a meeting in May 2018 a summary of the administration's view on why family separation should be U.S. policy: "If [asylum seekers] care about kids, don't bring them in. Won't give amnesty to people with kids."
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein rebuked U.S. attorneys who declined to prosecute two cases against parents of very young children, the report found.
Horowitz's findings called into question Sessions' claim, made just after Trump was forced to sign an executive order in June 2018 ending the family separation policy, that the DOJ had never intended to separate children from their parents.
Months before the policy was officially announced in April 2018, a secret pilot program was launched in southwestern states with the explicit goal of separating families as a means to cut down on immigration.
A Border Patrol official told the U.S. attorney in New Mexico in October 2017 that "it is the hope that this separation will act as a deterrent to parents bringing their children into the harsh circumstances that are present when trying to enter the United States illegally."
The report also refutes claims by DOJ officials that they believed families would only be separated for a matter of hours, indicating that the officials knew parents were being sentenced to jail terms as long as 14 days, necessitating family separation for at least that long.
"We found no evidence, before or after receipt of the memorandum, that DOJ leaders sought to expedite the process for completing sentencing in order to facilitate reunification of separated families," Horowitz wrote in the draft.
Times immigration reporter Caitlin Dickerson tweeted that Horowitz's report confirms once and for all that the DOJ has lied repeatedly in the last two years about the intent of the policy.
In an interview with the inspector general's office, Rosenstein said that although the DOJ was behind the family separation policy, the department was not responsible for keeping track of where the thousands of children ended up or for their welfare.
"I just don't see that as a DOJ equity," Rosenstein said, according to the report.
Last year, the ACLU reported that more than 5,400 children were taken away from their parents by the Trump administration--far more than previously acknowledged--between July 2017 and October 2019. With the DOJ's failure to track the locations of children, many families were separated for months. In July 2019, the Texas Tribunereported that hundreds of children had been forcibly separated from their parents after the policy officially ended.
According to Horowitz's investigation, former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was resistant to the policy but relented in May 2018 when she signed a memo referring all adults who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without going through a port of entry for prosecution.
Soon after, Nielsen became a staunch defender of the policy, vehemently denying that the Trump administration was trying to deter asylum-seekers from coming to the United States.
Critics on social media expressed disgust at the report, with calls for Sessions and Rosenstein to testify publicly on their involvement in the policy and warnings that the president must be voted out of office in November to prevent further abuses of immigrant families.
\u201c\u201cWe need to take away children.\u201d - \u2066then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions\n\n\u2066@jeffsessions\u2069 and \u2066@RodRosenstein\u2069 need to answer for their role in the separation of children from their families. Congress should subpoena them to testify. https://t.co/5vXyRc5E7E\u201d— Renato Mariotti (@Renato Mariotti) 1602028189
\u201cThread from June 2018, the night the migrant family separation story broke. I was giving a talk and started to cry on stage, which I never do.\n\nIt is vile that our officials failed to stop this. No indictments, not even impeachment for it. These are crimes against humanity.\u201d— Sarah Kendzior (@Sarah Kendzior) 1602039881
\u201cIf Trump wins a second term expect more heartless, cruel, barbaric behavior towards infants and children. He only stopped the first time because it affected his poll numbers. #FamiliesBelongTogether #Immigration https://t.co/0kw8V5hQmG\u201d— Susan Church (@Susan Church) 1602038380
"If Trump wins a second term expect more heartless, cruel, barbaric behavior towards infants and children," tweeted Susan Church, an immigration attorney in Massachusetts. "He only stopped the first time because it affected his poll numbers."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular