The Trump administration appears to have lied about the number of migrant children it had separated at the border, despite months of focus on the atrocity by news organizations and activists around the world.
According to a Thursday report by The Intercept, the Trump administration “carried out thousands more family separations than previously acknowledged.” The government’s own data, the reporters say, “indicates that the campaign was far more expansive — and far more destructive — than previously acknowledged.”
Americans are used to hearing that about 2500 children were separated from their parents. That number is substantially larger.
From April 19, 2018 to August 15, 2018 – just under four months – U.S. Customs and Border Protection numbers say 6022 “family units,” which CBP refuses to define, were separated. A family unit could be one person in a family, or several members of a family, or an entire family. CBP will not say, The Intercept reports.
But it’s even worse.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S LATEST ATTACK ON MIGRANT CHILDREN NATIONWIDE WILL RIP YOUR HEART OUT
“Using available statistics from the last two years,” Amnesty International also “reports that in 2017 and 2018, the Trump administration appears to have separated approximately 8,000 ‘family units’ along the border. Even if half of the people referred to in that figure were parents, the remaining 4,000 children would dwarf the total number of kids commonly reported to have been impacted by the “zero tolerance” campaign — that total tends to hover between 2,500 to 3,000.”
But the worst can be suspected.
“The closest Amnesty [International] could get to a clarification on the ‘family unit’ question,” the reports author sad, “was a claim from CBP that the 6,022 figure ‘appeared’ to refer to individuals.”
4000 is about 60 percent more than the 2500 generally reported. 6022 is far more than twice what Americans were told. 8000 is close to triple.
Alt-right hero Stephen Miller, a Senior Advisor to the President and the person responsible for crafting the child separation policy, early on said it was a “simple decision” to implement ripping children, some as young as two, apart from their parents.
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