https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-was-a-7-year-old-separated-from-her-mother-for-four-months-dhs-wont-say/2018/03/15/7d0dc09a-27a4-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html?utm_term=.e726c83aab19
Why was a 7-year-old separated from her mother for four months? DHS won’t say.
The seal of the Department of Homeland Security. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)WHO KNOWS why Homeland Security agents in Southern California forcibly separated a 7-year-old Congolese girl from her mother last fall, flew her 2,000 miles to Chicago, where she was placed at a facility for unaccompanied minors, and kept her there for more than four months? Who knows why the girl, who is credibly reported to have been traumatized, has been permitted to speak with her mother, only recently released from a detention center near San Diego, just a handful of times in the intervening four months? And in the absence of any evidence of wrongdoing by the mother, who presented herself to U.S. officials when she crossed the border from Mexico, who knows why the government has continued to keep parent and child apart?
The Department of Homeland Security has declined to comment on the case of the two asylum seekers, known in court filings as Ms. L and S.S. But a spokesman said in a statement that agents may separate children and adults if they suspect the child may be a human-trafficking victim. “If we are unable to confirm this relationship [between adult and child],” said the spokesman, Tyler Houlton, “we must take steps to protect the child,” including placing her in a facility for unaccompanied children.
In this case, DHS’s effort to establish Ms. L’s guilt by insinuation failed, and its stated concern for the child’s protection and well-being has been exposed as phony. For four months, no testing was performed to establish the woman’s maternity. And when, following a lawsuit filed on their behalf, the two were finally subjected to DNA testing this month, the result was unequivocal: Ms. L is the mother of S.S.
That finding has been met with silence by DHS. The department, having originally expressed indignation at the idea that it would separate children from their parents for any reason other than the child’s welfare, has been rendered speechless.
U.S. officials who interviewed Ms. L when she crossed the border made a preliminary finding that she had a plausible claim for asylum, based on her account of having fled what the lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, said was “near certain death” in Congo. Despite that, she was detained until the lawsuit and ensuing publicity prompted her sudden release last week.
In a class-action suit, the ACLU asserts that the Trump administration has separated children from their parents in more than 100 cases, even though the department says it does not “currently” have a policy on the matter. If it seems unthinkable that the administration and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen would carry out a practice so cruel, one likely to inflict long-term harm on children, think again: DHS officials, including Ms. Nielsen’s predecessor, John F. Kelly, now the White House chief of staff, have said they believe it would be an effective means of deterring asylum seekers.
If DHS has subjected this small girl to trauma as a warning to other asylum seekers, it is an unconscionable means to an end. If that is not the reason, then what is?
********************************************
Here’s the always highly informative and very readable Post immigration reporter Maria Sacchetti with a summary of what the ACLU suit is all about:
“A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington on Thursday alleges the Trump administration is illegally jailing asylum seekers with credible cases for months on end in an attempt to deter them and others from seeking refuge in the United States.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups filed the class-action lawsuit on behalf of nine detained asylum seekers from Haiti, Venezuela and other countries. They are asking a judge to order the administration to follow a 2009 policy that allows officials to release foreigners while they await their immigration court hearings, a process that can take years.
Among the plaintiffs are Ansly Damus, a 41-year-old ethics teacher who said he was attacked by a gang in Haiti that beat him, set his motorcycle ablaze and threatened to kill him for criticizing a politician. He won his asylum case — twice — but has spent 16 months in detention, most recently in Ohio, while the government appeals.
Other plaintiffs are Alexi Montes, an 18-year-old gay man harassed and beaten in Honduras and who has a relative in Virginia; Abelardo Asensio Callol, a 30-year-old software engineer from Cuba who refused to join the Communist Party or rally for the now-deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro; and, an unnamed father of two from Mexico who said a drug cartel kidnapped his two brothers and threatened to kill him and his family.
All were initially deemed to have had credible stories and are entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge, lawyers said. While awaiting those hearings, they have been jailed for months.
“The fact that we are doing this to people . . . is really outrageous,” said Michael Tan, a New York-based staff attorney for the ACLU. “What they’re doing here is using detention to send a message that asylum seekers need not apply and they’re not welcome here in the United States.”
The legal challenge comes as the Trump administration engineers a wide-ranging review of the nation’s immigration policies and asylum fraud, which it blames in part for a backlog in the immigration courts of more than 600,000 cases, triple the number in 2009.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last year that the asylum system is being “gamed” by foreigners and “dirty immigration lawyers.” Instead of a lifeline to people in peril, he said, it had become an “easy ticket to illegal entry into the United States.”
The Justice Department has also said it wants to slash the immigration court docket of 600,000 cases in half by 2020.”
********************************************
Read the rest of Maria’s article at the link.
Pretty predictable that there is a tie to Sessions’s bogus attack on vulnerable asylum seekers. He’s concealing how his mismanagement of the U.S. Immigration Courts, promotion of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” and biased legal views are in fact fueling the docket backlog.
Those actively engaged in oppression and covering up their own misdeeds always look for “scapegoats.” And asylum seekers, many of them scared women and children trying to save their lives, who already are treated with disrespect and lack of due process by our Immigration Court system and DHS are an easy target. Targeting the most vulnerable — that’s exactly what bullies and cowards do!
Pretty disgraceful! But, if we all unite behind the efforts of the New Due Process Army and fight for full Due Process for everyone in the United States in our Article III Courts, we can eventually force a stop to this Administration’s human rights abuses, end the “New American Gulag,” and derail the Sessions/DHS White Nationalist restrictionist program!
Due Process Forever!
PWS
03-16-18