Joe Biden said this approach “violates any notion of who we are as a nation”. (File)
New York, United States:
A grueling exchange between Donald Trump and Joe Biden during Thursday’s televised debate renewed attention to the unknown fate of the parents of 545 migrant children separated from their families under U.S. border policy.
President Trump appealed to his right-wing base in defending the “zero tolerance” policy that pursued immigrants who entered the United States illegally, separating more than 5,000 children from their parents in 2017 and 2018.
“Kids are brought here by coyotes and a lot of bad guys, cartels, and they’re brought here and they were using them to get into our country,” Trump said during the second and final televised debate before the Nov. 3 election.
Biden countered that the approach – which failed to put in place a system to reunite families, most of whom were fleeing poverty and violence in Mexico and Central America – “violates any notion of who we are. as a nation ”.
“Their children have been torn from their arms and separated … now these children are alone, nowhere to go, nowhere to go. It is criminal,” said the Democratic candidate.
In June 2018, a judge ordered the government to reunite the separated families.
The task fell to activists and volunteer lawyers who travel through small towns in countries like El Salvador, add Honduras, broadcast radio commercials and speak to community leaders to try to find relatives.
However, they don’t always succeed.
Trump said his government was trying to find the parents, but in the meantime the children are “so well taken care of” in “so clean” facilities.
A lawsuit filed on Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that the parents of 545 children, about 60 of whom are under the age of five, separated when the policy began with a pilot program in Texas in 2017, have yet to be localized.
“History will judge”
Lawyers estimate that about two-thirds of the more than 1,000 parents separated from their children have been deported.
Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer in charge of the trial, said the separation was “the worst practice” he had seen in three decades of fighting for human rights.
“We have to find them,” he tweeted. “History will judge.”
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), one of the organizations the government has approached to help trace the parents, says she is “shocked” by Trump’s comments .
“If the president thinks Mylar blankets, concrete floors, windowless rooms and chain link fences are child protection standards, he is sorely mistaken,” she told AFP.
These conditions “were just the beginning of a three-year nightmare that has not ended and that will perhaps traumatize them for the rest of their lives,” she added.
“They will go to bed tonight like they did for a thousand nights without knowing where their parents are,” Vignarajah said, recalling the heartbreaking recordings and images of children crying at the border after being separated.
The task of reuniting families is difficult because the US government has not kept records on all parents separated from their children.
Many have been deported to remote areas and do not have internet access, while some speak only indigenous languages and not Spanish.
George Hoffman, director of the University of Houston Texas Immigration Clinic, said the failure looked like more than just miscommunication between agencies.
“It is incredible negligence,” he told AFP.
“Deploy these policies which aim to energize their base but without any legal authority. This is exactly what happened here,” Hoffman added, also citing a travel ban in several Muslim-majority countries that was blocked by various courts.
“We made a mistake”
Trump broke his 2016 election promise to build a wall with Mexico and expelled less than half of the three million undocumented immigrants he had announced he would expel from the country.
But he gave the immigration law enforcement agency known as ICE more powers to detain foreigners and imposed measures to deter asylum claims, among other measures.
During the debate, Trump attacked Biden over the immigration policies of the Barack Obama administration when he was vice president.
Obama deported 3.2 million people between 2009 and 2016.
“Who built the cages, Joe?” Trump needle-punched it on several occasions, referring to photos from 2014 showing migrants temporarily housed behind chain-link pens.
The president asked why Biden was now promising a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants when Obama had failed to achieve it during his eight years in office.
If elected, Biden says he will ask Congress to legalize America’s 11 million illegal immigrants, including children who arrived with their parents, known as “dreamers.”
“We made a mistake, it took too long to get it right,” he said.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
