A “significant” number of children who were U.S. citizens were separated by the Trump administration from their parents, a result of the then-president’s broader “zero-tolerance” anti-immigrant polices created to send a message to migrants in Central America to not travel to the United States or risk their families being permanently destroyed.
“A government task force is tracking the fates of U.S. citizen children taken from migrant parents during the Trump administration. Some have spent years in foster care,” The New York Times revealed in a bombshell report Tuesday. “Hundreds, and possibly as many as 1,000, children born to immigrant parents in the United States were removed from them at the border, according to lawyers and immigrant advocates who are working with the government to find the families.”
Just as with the more than 5000 immigrant children the Trump administration separated from their families who the Biden administration has been actively working to re-unite, some of the 1000 children who are U.S. citizens have also yet to be reunited with their families.
“In many cases, the U.S.-born children were placed into foster care for lengthy periods, and some have yet to be reunited with their parents, lost in the system nearly five years after the separations took place.”
The Trump administration built what many called concentration camps to house the thousands of migrant children it had taken from their parents, as Trump administration attorneys argued in court the children did not need soap or toothbrushes.
The Times notes, “anyone wronged by the United States can bring claims against the government, and many families are doing so with the help of the A.C.L.U. as well as other groups and private lawyers.”
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Attorney Leecia Welch, deputy litigation director at Children’s Rights, told The Times, “When you think it can’t get any worse, you hear additional facts about the horror of the policy.”
That child separation policy was created and promoted by White House Senior Advisor to the President Stephen Miller, a far-right extremist who “promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.