!ll lies.
You see, an unacompanied minor is, by legal requirement, placed with HHS within 72 hours.
A child placed with HHS is guaranteed legal representation for all legal proceedings.

You can win this debate very quickly stumbler: provide the name of a single ILLEGAL MIGRANT MINOR who was forced to appear in court without legal representation.
One.
Just one.

 

One case, stumbler. These articles don't cut it.
One case.

 

US interest in fostering migrant kids booms as COVID fears ease
Transitional foster homes are widely considered to be the best option for unaccompanied children in US custody.

As a record number of children fled violence from Central America and crossed the Mexican border alone this spring, most were sent to large-scale emergency shelters that the Biden administration quickly opened at United States military bases, convention centres, and fairgrounds.

Transitional foster homes, where families are licenced to care for migrant children, are widely considered to be the best option for children in US custody, especially for minors who have been traumatised, are very young, pregnant or are teen parents and require extra emotional support.

Providers say in recent months, interest in fostering migrant children is booming, with Americans getting vaccinated against the coronavirus and virus-related restrictions on daily life being lifted. They are urging the government to move more kids into foster homes.

By May more than 22,000 migrant children were in US government custody, as the US grappled with the highest number of migrants arriving at its southern border in 21 years.

Chris Umphlett and his family hosted a 12-year-old girl from Honduras for a month in their Michigan home while US officials contacted and vetted her mother, who lives in Texas. She barely uttered a word when she arrived after crossing the Mexican border alone.

The couple and their four young children, who live in the city of East Lansing, invited her on walks and bike rides, and watched Disney movies with Spanish subtitles. A Honduran woman from their church made a home-cooked Honduran meal of meat and red beans and tres leches cake, which got a smile.

“I imagine her first introduction to the US was probably not super friendly, was probably confusing,” said Umphlett, 37, who works for a software company. “We tried to give her a better experience.”

While there are not enough families licenced yet to take in the thousands of children in US custody, advocates say homes could take many of the kids under the age of 12 and other vulnerable youth, such as pregnant teens, now at the government’s unlicenced shelters. At the Los Angeles County fairgrounds in Pomona, last week there were some 300 children under the age of 12 among the nearly 1,400 minors housed there.

The risk of psychological and emotional harm grows the longer kids are in shelters, according to a June 22 federal court filing by the attorneys monitoring the care of minors in US custody as part of a long-standing court settlement.

At the end of May, when about 500 transitional foster care beds were unoccupied, there were 5- and 6-year-old children who had spent more than a month at the shelters, according to the court filing.

“What a child receives at a shelter will never compare to the love of a parent caring for a child,” said Kayla Park of Samaritas, the provider that connects the Umphlett family with migrant children. “They might tuck them in bed at night or maybe the family’s children play with them. That kind of human interaction is so necessary and it can’t be replicated in a shelter.”

The administration of President Joe Biden said it is not a matter of simply filling beds. Some siblings might have to go to a shelter to stay together or to have the space to quarantine if someone tests positive for the coronavirus, so there is a need to leave beds unoccupied to deal with circumstances as they arise, US Health and Human Service Secretary Xavier Becerra told reporters last week.

“You take a hit trying to completely maximise your space,” Becerra said when asked about unoccupied licenced beds after visiting a shelter that houses 800 children at Fort Bliss Army base near El Paso, Texas and that has been plagued by complaints.

Providers agree that foster care is more complicated for placements because age and gender must be taken into account, especially in homes where the migrant children might be sharing rooms with the family’s children, like in the home of the Umphletts, who only accept girls 12 and younger.

And the pandemic restricted things further. Many families did not want to take a child directly from the border for fear of being exposed to the coronavirus.

Other families were not equipped to take in someone while they worked at home with kids doing virtual learning, like the Umphletts, who did not take anyone until March of this year.

But providers, such as the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, are seeing a huge increase in families interested in fostering migrant kids, providing an opportunity that should be seized, said its director, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah.

“I truly believe if we invest and focus on building out this network of prospective foster care parents, these homes can and should be the medium to long-term solution so we don’t have to rely on influx facilities in the future,” she said.

Source: AP

 

Treasonous conservative/Republicans try to distract and deflect to things like the horrors of foster care while they sit there and support actual torture of migrants and their children carried out by their Dear Leader Trump.

New study finds Trump's border separations rose to level of torture

“In the cases reviewed, it is apparent that U.S. officials intentionally carried out actions causing severe pain and suffering in order to punish and intimidate mainly Central American asylum seekers to not pursue their asylum claims,” the study’s authors wrote.

By
Brooke Migdon | Dec. 2, 2021

• A qualitative study of children and families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border as part of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy has found that the treatment of families rose to the level of torture.
• Most individuals interviewed by clinicians met criteria for diagnoses like PTSD, major depressive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.
• Some children still exhibited systems of severe trauma more than a year after reunification with their parents.

Extreme psychological trauma experienced by families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under a Trump-era policy rose to the level of torture as defined by the United Nations, according to a qualitative study of children and parents.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE late last month, the study by Physicians for Human Rights found the U.S. government’s separation of 31 parents and children at the border “constitutes cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment” which “rise to the level of torture,” using the definition established by the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

“In the cases reviewed, it is apparent that U.S. officials intentionally carried out actions causing severe pain and suffering in order to punish and intimidate mainly Central American asylum seekers to not pursue their asylum claims,” the study’s authors wrote.

The U.S. government between 2017 and 2018 separated more than 5,000 children from their parents as part of former President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. As of August, at least 1,841 families were still separated, according to the study, which reviewed narratives from clinical experts who had interviewed separated parents and children.

Trump in 2018 defended his administration’s actions at the border shortly before issuing an executivenmj order rolling back family separations.

“I don't want children taken away from parents,” he said at the time during a speech before the National Federation of Independent Businesses. “When you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally, which should happen, you have to take the children away.”



Clinicians reported that most individuals exhibited signs and symptoms of trauma after reunification and met criteria for mental health diagnoses like post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.

Two small children evaluated “long after reunification with their parents” still exhibited severe symptoms of PTSD and separation anxiety disorder, according to the researchers, noting that “neither had exhibited these symptoms prior to the separation event.”

Parents and children also shared pre-migration traumas, and in almost all cases had been victims of persecution in their home countries that included gang-based violence, death threats, physical assault, murder of relatives, extortion, sexual assault, and robbery. Children had also been drugged, kidnapped, and poisoned before arriving in the U.S.

“Parents were confident that the journey to the United States would ensure protection for their children,” researchers wrote.

But, according to reports, officials were often punitive rather than protective, and immigration authorities forcibly removed children from parents’ arms in some cases. In others, children “disappeared” while their parents were in courtrooms or receiving medical care.

In nearly every case, parents reported that officials would not tell them why they were being separated and if or how they would be reunited. When parents asked about the whereabouts of their children, they were mocked.

https://thehill.com/changing-americ...study-finds-trumps-border-separations-rose-to

 

A new study eh?
So tell us, stumbler, did you ever find that youth unrepresented in court?
No?

 

The fun thing is, the biden/harris administration thinks it would be fine to pay these ILLEGAL migrant families $400K because they got separated, but we can't find a way to fix our own veteran homeless problem, or provide anything like $400 K for our own kids in foster care.

No wonder we're so screwed up.

But hey, just a "shithole country" anyway, eh Stumbler?

 

Biden administration has reunited nearly 400 children stolen from parents by previous president

The Biden administration’s Family Reunification Task Force says that nearly 400 children cruelly ripped from their parents by the previous administration have now been reunited, marking a significant milestone in attempting to right the wrongs of one of the darkest moments in modern U.S. history.

Michelle Brané, a leading immigrant rights advocate who was appointed by the administration to head the task force, said that most of the parents who’ve been reunited with their children had been deported, NBC News’ Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff reported. Soboroff tweeted that more than 2,000 families members affected by the policy have been allowed to temporarily live in the U.S.






“More than 5,000 families were separated under Trump’s 2018 ‘zero tolerance’ policy and a 2017 pilot program and advocates estimate over 1,000 remain separated,” the report said. “Because the Trump administration did not keep records of which children were separated and where they were sent, the task force and lawyers working on behalf of separated families have had a difficult time identifying families to offer them the chance of reunification.”

Soboroff tweeted that the parents of 168 known children ripped away by the previous administration have still not been located. The parents of most of these kids have likely been deported. Soboroff said that officials have no contact information for three of these children. Remember that officials with the previous administration had claimed they had “a central database" that could quickly link children and parents, but that turned out to be a giant lie.

“We are thrilled for the hundreds of children who will finally be with their parents after all these years, but we are not even halfway through reuniting all the families that remain separated by the Trump administration,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt told NBC News. "And indeed, we still haven’t located nearly 200 families. I think the Biden administration would agree that there’s a lot of work yet to be done.”

Deported parents have been returned to the U.S. by the administration under a process known as humanitarian parole, which allows them to live here for period of three years. The president has said he supports permanent legal status for separated families, but that’ll only be possible through the backlogged asylum system, or congressional action. Lawmakers including Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro have previously introduced legislation that would accomplish that, but it has failed to advance.

“While we applaud the Biden admin's efforts to reunite families separated by the cruel Zero Tolerance policy, Congress must provide the resources necessary to facilitate future reunions and help families heal from the trauma of their separation,” tweeted Kids in Need of Defense (KIND). Brané told NBC News that “many of the families have suffered from profound mental health issues after their separation and counseling is often needed before they reunify.”

Both “M.S.E.” and “J.M.,” the mother and son from the recent lawsuit, were traumatized by the policy. M.S.E., as she’s identified in court documents, said her son appeared “withdrawn” and “very sad for a long time. He even began cutting himself,” documents said.

“J.M. still hurts from the separation. He still remembers it vividly and viscerally: he feels great pain in his chest and throat when he thinks about it. Now 19 years old, J.M. continues to struggle with the damage the separation caused, stating, ‘I’m big now, so I try to be strong. But I still feel broken inside.’”

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...ren-stolen-from-parents-by-previous-president

 

What a load of shit.
All the old lies and misinformation from 4 years ago is in that one story.
Really.
Go back and read the old posts.

Damn liars.

 

This is the guy who crafted a policy of kidnapping children from their parents and not even keeping records of them. Just kidnap the kids and throw them in cages.

But he is really barking up the wrong tree now. His racism might be very important to him but concern about immigration doesn't even register on important issues for Americans who are much more concerned about the economy especially inflation and gas prices.


Child separation mastermind Stephen Miller says Biden deserves 'eternal shame of history'

David Edwards
August 07, 2022



Fox News/screen grab

The Trump adviser who pushed a plan to separate migrant children from their families now says that President Joe Biden deserves the "eternal shame of history" over his border policies.

During an interview on Fox News, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller blasted Biden for dismantling Trump-era immigration policies.

"The decision to terminate President Trump's hugely successful border controls is a crime against humanity," Miller told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. "And my plea to every single member of Congress on the Republican side of the aisle is raise holy hell about what's happening on our border."

He added: "This administration deserves to lose not only a record number of seats in the House and the Senate over this border crisis but the eternal shame of history! For what they have done has no precedent. It is an abomination."

During his time in the White House, Miller pursued harsh immigration policies that separated children from their families. Activists have called for the International Criminal Court to charge Miller with crimes against humanity for his role.

Watch the video below from Fox News.

https://www.rawstory.com/stephen-miller-crimes-against-humanity/

 

"This is the guy who crafted a policy of kidnapping children from their parents and not even keeping records of them. Just kidnap the kids and throw them in cages."
​

Well, lets see. Wasn't it Obama who built those cages to "throw kids into"?
Wasn't it the Obama policy that encouraged those unaccompanied minors to come here in the first place?
No records? We covered this before.
Have you found a single kid under age 18 who has walked into any court room in America unrepresented?
You might recall when Shooter gave you that challenge. What, 5 years ago?
Still waiting ............

Hell, have you found a single kid who wasn't identified almost instantly, and given representation and had their own asylum case and elected to remain in this country even when given the option of returning home with their familes?

You are a liar and lack the ethics or morals to offer an honest argument about anything.

 

Slowly, ever so slowly, the truth is coming out.
Biden’s open borders betrayal (msn.com)

The situation is so dire that the Biden administration is taking a page out of President Trump’s book and building sections of the border wall in Arizona, saying it will “save lives.” Two years ago, these same leaders called Trump’s wall “racist.”

More importantly, their move is mere window dressing. It comes too little, too late.

The liberal media barely reports it, but migrants hoist their bags over their heads and wade waist-deep across the Rio Grande River by the thousands every day — because Biden has invited them to. Many have died.

At the same time lethal drugs are pouring across our border and spreading throughout the United States, killing Americans.

Since October, 56 people on the terror watchlist have been caught trying to cross the border between ports of entry — not to mention those who might have already slipped through.

I have one word: unprecedented.

The numbers confirm this. In June alone, more than 207,000 illegal immigrants were caught crossing the southern border, marking a 310 percent increase from average June apprehensions under Trump. Now, roughly 4 million illegal immigrants have crossed the border in just 18 months since Biden has been in office. Unprecedented. And since he came into office over 13,000 pounds of fentanyl have been seized at the southern border — enough to kill millions of Americans many times over. Unprecedented. The fallout is seeping deep into our country.

In 2021, the U.S. reached an all-time high in drug overdose deaths. Yet recently Biden’s Drug Policy Director Kemp Chester said the Biden administration is approaching the drug and opioid crisis devastating our nation’s communities with “action that is bold, far-reaching, and innovative” — though he did admit secure borders would curtail fentanyl pouring in.

Biden’s open borders are by design. He came into office, signed executive orders and dismantled the immigration system the Trump administration built. The magnitude of this crisis simply cannot be overstated. The floodgates are wide open, and migrants surging to our border know that more likely than not, if they cross over they have a real shot at staying in the United States.

At the same time the Biden administration has cut down on prosecuting illegal immigrants by nearly 80 percent. This all but invites more to come. Under Biden’s watch, over 800,000 illegal immigrants have now come into the United States unapprehended — the “got-aways.” We simply don’t know what criminal types were among them — we do know that just since October, there were 56 people on the terror watchlist among the ones we did apprehend. Biden’s callous disregard for public safety is beyond worrisome.

I was once a Border Patrol agent. We need to listen to the agents, not demonize them like Biden and radical progressives like AOC have done. A Texas DPS agent recently said that “nothing has been done. It’s been the complete opposite — it’s actually gotten much worse.”

In April, a Border Patrol agent said his worst fear is “the people coming in … We get prisoners, folks that just got out of prison, sex offenders, murderers, and no idea how many bad folks are coming in.”

“Every day,” he said, “it’s getting worse.”

In July, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said: “I think that we are doing a good job.” In May, he said: “We do not believe the policies of this administration have caused [the border crisis].” Last October, Biden acted like visiting the border was a nuisance to his schedule, saying he hasn’t “had a whole hell of a lot of time” to go.

Clearly, American security and sovereignty are being disastrously mishandled. Americans have been betrayed. And November elections can’t come soon enough.

We will secure our borders, enforce our laws, support our Border Patrol agents, hold Biden and complicit Democrats accountable, and expel with the full force of our dedicated law enforcement agencies those already unlawfully in our great country. It will save lives and protect America.

 

You know its bad when big city mayors from your own party start taking note of your policy failures. And in this case all it took was a nudge from a deplorable governor.

NYC Mayor Adams outraged over ‘small part’ of border crisis impacting his sanctuary city, Texas AG (msn.com)

During an interview on "Fox & Friends Weekend," Sunday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton discusses Governor Greg Abbott's decision to bus migrants to New York City and Washington D.C . as a solution for the overwhelming border crisis, arguing that Texas is sending sanctuary cities a "statement of fairness.'

KEN PAXTON: …Part of it is that we have a significant problem on the border. They're [NYC] only experiencing a slight bit of this. I mean, it's almost a little inconvenience for them, but it's a major problem for us. And so it's just interesting to see some of these mayors who have invited and have created sanctuary cities to suddenly start complaining that they've got a few thousand immigrants when we're dealing with millions.
NYC mayor outraged over the ‘small part’ of the border crisis impacting his city, asks for reinforcement: Texas AG

View on Watch

© Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty ImagesMayor Eric Adams speaks at City Hall Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
So it's kind of a statement of, first of all, fairness and, hey, why don't you pay attention to our real problem on the border? You're experiencing just a small part of it.

 

OH, LOOKIT!
A despicable mayor has his panties wadded up cause ILLEGAL migrants are running amuck in his sanctuary city!
Does it get any more hypocritical than this?
Eric Adams thinks it's cruel to send migrants to his sanctuary city (msn.com)

 

And Abbott continues to send ILLEGAL migrants to New York and now DC.
Hopefully, he can get a bus headed for San Francisco. Then we can watch the shit really hit the fan (pun intended)
WATCH: Abbott sends more buses of migrants to New York City (msn.com)

 

So where's your outrage?

U.S.-Born Children, Too, Were Separated From Parents at the Border
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.



April 11, 2023Updated 12:44 p.m. ET
LOS ANGELES — The Trump administration intentionally separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the southern border in the spring of 2018, an aggressive attempt to discourage family crossings that caused lasting trauma and drew widespread condemnation.

What is only now becoming clear, however, is that a significant number of U.S. citizen children were also removed from their parents under the so-called zero tolerance policy, in which migrant parents were criminally prosecuted and jailed for crossing the border without authorization.

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.

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.




“We don’t even know where these parents are today, and whether or not they know where their children are,” said Paige Chan, executive director of the nonprofit Together and Free, who has been working with a federal task force charged with tracking the whereabouts of separated families. “The U.S. government is only beginning to account for the number of U.S. citizens put through this unimaginable trauma.”

Some 5,500 foreign-born children were already known to have been separated from their parents under the policy. The separations usually lasted for a matter of weeks, but in some cases they lasted years.



The revelations represent the first confirmation that U.S.-born children traveling with migrant parents were also subjected to the separation policy, which became official along the entire border in April 2018 after it was piloted in El Paso the previous year.

As U.S. citizens, the children did not necessarily have any additional rights that would have prevented them from being taken from parents who were jailed, legal analysts said. In fact, it may have put them at a disadvantage: Their status as citizens automatically placed them under the oversight of state child welfare authorities, complicating efforts to keep track of them and reconnect them with parents.

While foreign-born children were transferred to shelters operated by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, where they were entered into federal databases and eventually allowed to speak with their parents by telephone, there was no such system for children dispatched to state foster care systems. State family courts, using varied sets of criteria, were left to decide independently how to handle the cases.



The situation became even more difficult when parents were deported.

“Theoretically, a state dependency court would determine whether it is in a child’s best interests to be reunited with a parent, even if the parent has been removed or is facing imminent removal,” said Carlos Holguin, a lawyer who has represented thousands of migrant children in federal custody.


Image


Most of the children involved were born in the United States to immigrant parents who then went back to their home countries, only to return amid a worsening economy and escalating gang violence in Central America and Mexico.


The parents of American citizens are not automatically allowed to remain in the United States, though such children after turning 21 can sponsor the undocumented parent for a green card.



Because official records are scattered and incomplete, it will take months for the government to review additional files to identify separated parents and children and then try to determine their whereabouts in the United States or abroad, said several immigrant advocates who have been working with the interagency task force, led by the Department of Homeland Security, to track the cases.

Angelo Fernandez, a spokesman for the department, confirmed that an unknown number of U.S. citizen children had been caught up in the border separations and said the task force has been “combing through records” to identify them.

The department has been encouraging separated families to register on a website established to ensure they receive services, he said.

Leecia Welch, deputy litigation director at Children’s Rights, who litigates cases involving children at the border, said the discovery of so many U.S. citizen children added a new challenge to what had already been a vexing problem.

“When you think it can’t get any worse, you hear additional facts about the horror of the policy,” she said.




Ms. Chan said that her organization was aware of at least 226 American children who had been sent to the child protective services agency in San Diego County, Calif. Records for separated children delivered to foster care in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas do not exist, she said.

Children of a variety of ages and nationalities were caught up in the family separation policy, hundreds of whom were under 5 years old. The Trump administration said at the time that the policy was an attempt to deter the thousands of parents who officials said were putting their children in danger by taking them on perilous journeys to the border.

Removing children from parents who are being jailed is standard practice, the officials said. Children are commonly removed from U.S. citizen parents in other cases, for instance when women give birth while incarcerated, or where there has been parental abuse or neglect.

Still, images and audio of traumatized children weeping after being forcibly torn from their migrant parents caused domestic and global outrage, and the policy was rescinded.

A federal judge in California ordered the government in June 2018 to reunite separated parents and children, in response to a class-action lawsuit against the separation policy that was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. Federal authorities facilitated reunions for parents and children who were still in custody. But many of the parents had been deported.




About 900 deported parents and siblings have since been brought back to the United States and have been allowed to remain in the country with a temporary legal status until a long-term settlement is reached.

The reunited families have been eligible for government-funded mental health services, and the A.C.L.U. is arguing that the families should be offered a path to permanent status in the United States to compensate for the damage inflicted by the separations.

Lee Gelernt, who is leading the court case for the civil rights organization, said in court last month that discussions with the government were “moving very rapidly,” suggesting that a settlement may be imminent.

“This is about the unfinished business of redressing the cruel policy that devastated families and traumatized children,” said Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer with Public Counsel, a public-interest law office that represented separated families in a related lawsuit.

“There is a whole group of families with citizen children that fell through the cracks,” said Mr. Rosenbaum. “These parents and children experienced identical harm.”

Separate settlement negotiations had for a time also included discussions of monetary compensation for migrant families. But reports in 2021 that the Biden administration was considering payments of up to $450,000 for each person affected by the policy drew criticism from conservative lawmakers, who said that people who had entered the country unlawfully should not be entitled to a large settlement. President Biden denied that such a sum was under consideration, and the government suspended the negotiations over damages.

Still, 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.




Vilma Carrillo, who was separated at the Arizona border from her American daughter, Yeisvi, then 11, recalled watching as immigration officials near the detention center in Georgia where she was housed called one mother after another to reunite them with their children. She was never paged.



Foreign-born children were being returned more readily to their parents, immigration lawyers said, because they were being held in government shelters and could quickly be transported to their parents’ locations without going through the state bureaucracies of foster care systems.

Ms. Carrillo, who was detained by immigration authorities while Yeisvi was in foster care, was reunited with her daughter more than six months later, after a legal aid organization sued on her behalf. They are now living together in the United States.


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/us/migrant-family-separations-citizens.html

 

Shooters outrage is for a broken immigration system that President Trump tried to fix and despicables fought at every step (not one dime not now not ever) and your boy biden has made so much worse.

Sanctuary cities, open borders, NO effective adjudication for the MILLIONS of ILLEGAL migrants who are in this country.

Outrage for a system overloaded by the despicable policies that serve their politics and not America.
And for an American hating despicable who has yet to find the moral line he will not cross to achieve his unamerican goal.

 

Well at least you finally admitted all your screaming and wailing about the plight of kids in foster care was just a phony appeal to emotion doing what you always do. Using anything and everything to lie for, cover up for, and protect your Chosen One Traitor Trump no matter what he does.

 

Now we might get something close to the truth. Sessions and Nielsen just blatantly and repeatedly lied about the Trump child separation policy but probably won't try that in court.




Judge orders top Trump administration officials answer for family separation policy
Gabriella Ferrigine
Wed, September 27, 2023 at 11:52 AM MDT·3 min read
250



Jeff Sessions JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

• 
  

Two Trump-era administration officials have been mandated to testify as part of a lawsuit filed against the U.S. government for separating migrant children under the age of 18 from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Federal magistrate judge Kandis Westmore of California on Monday issued a decision telling the Justice Department and attorneys for the affected families to meet in order to slot depositions for former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen

.

The suit, filed in 2021 by three families from El Salvador and Guatemala, alleges that the parents were separated from their children — then ages 6, 11, and 13 — and spent several weeks in detention centers before being reunited.

Westmore in her ruling wrote that Sessions and Nielsen had "unique personal knowledge of their own intent" in enforcing such a stringent policy, adding that while the Department of Justice initially touted the zero-tolerance rule as fomented by "dozens of people," the government ultimately conceded that the duo alone had been responsible for structuring the policy as such, a fact which the judge said left her "disappointed." Records show that Sessions and Nielsen approved the documents that catalyzed the separations, according to the Washington Post.


"Such an injustice cannot stand," Westmore wrote.

MAGA officials claimed that they instituted the separation policy as a means of prosecuting parents who crossed the border illegally; however, Trump's administration neglected to organize a process for reuniting families that were broken up and instead deported hundreds of parents while leaving the children behind. The Washington Post noted that lawyers for the migrant families have indicated that many parents were never criminally prosecuted, including some of the parents in the lawsuit.

Justice Department spokeswoman Dena Iverson said in a statement, "We remain committed to achieving a just resolution for the victims of this abhorrent policy." Court records show that the agency disagreed with deposing Sessions and Nielsen on the grounds of the apex deposition doctrine, which serves to protect high-ranking officials from having to testify.

"We've got to follow the rules one way or the other," Sessions said in a statement, declining to offer further comment.

"These officials set in motion a cruel program of ripping apart migrant families. It is only right that they provide testimony under oath in this case," argued Victoria Petty, staff attorney at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. "Thousands of parents and children will endure the lasting harm of this barbaric treatment for the rest of their lives."

"We hope this order brings us one step closer to holding the United States government accountable for its officials' misconduct that deeply traumatized asylum-seeking families," she added.

Though President Joe Biden has routinely criticized border separations in the past, the Department of Justice continues to defend Trump-implemented immigration policies.

"President Biden has described family separation as a 'human tragedy,' but his administration is fighting separated families tooth and nail in federal court," said Bree Bernwanger of the American Civil Liberties Union.



https://www.yahoo.com/news/judge-orders-top-trump-administration-175250492.html

 

American hater is still butt hurt because his lies and propaganda about kids in government care were exposed.

It embarrassed him you see.

Hey hater, care to justify the biden administrations failure to even identify the 80,000 unacompanied minors who have come into the country since biden took office?
Been waiting for your outrage over those kids.

Are we wasting our time waiting?