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      'Morale has been gutted': can Biden restore the DoJ's battered reputation?

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      When Bill Barr was invited to speak at the conservative-leaning Hillsdale College, Michigan, in September, he leapt at the chance to respond to criticism that he had politicized the justice department that he led in order to benefit his political master, Donald Trump.The then US attorney general, who stepped down from the post last month , began his speech by arguing that there had to be political input at the top of the Department of Justice (DoJ) in order for it to be publicly accountable. Then he turned to his own staff and, in response to recent complaints that he had improperly overruled the decisions of career prosecutors, gave them a good tongue-lashing.“Name one successful organization where the lowest-level employees’ decisions are deemed sacrosanct,” he said. “Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it’s no way to run a federal agency.”Comparing hard-working, highly trained public servants to kindergartners might pass as motivational leadership in the Bill Barr school of management. But to many DoJ attorneys, it summed up life in the Trump era.For four years, they have watched the president trash the historic norm of the agency’s independence from White House interference. Trump has referred to the DoJ as “the Trump justice department”, and made repeated vicious attacks on top officials, including the attorney generals whom he himself appointed.Senior officials have resigned in unprecedented numbers after Trump attempted on multiple occasions to use the justice department as his own personal weapon in battles with his political enemies.The morale and the reputation of the department has been gutted because of undue political influenceBarr, who was Trump’s longest-serving attorney general, behaved in similar fashion, leaving the impression with many observers that the department under his leadership was in the pocket of the president. He sought a more lenient sentence for Trump’s buddy Roger Stone, and moved to drop the criminal case against the former national security adviser Michael Flynn.“The morale and the reputation of the department has been gutted because of undue political influence on the decisions of career staff,” Vanita Gupta, a former head of the DoJ’s civil rights division, told the Guardian. “Barr literally compared career prosecutors to toddlers.”Barr’s derisive comment is symbolic of the challenge now facing President-elect Joe Biden as he seeks to restore confidence in this battered and bruised pillar of American democracy.“The department needs to be rebuilt by new leadership committed at every turn to decisions made on the law and on the facts, and not on what the president wants,” said Gupta, who now heads the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights.The first priority for Biden as he seeks to put the DoJ back on the rails will be to show to the American people, in both word and deed, that he intends to respect the independence of the agency with respect to specific criminal cases. Where Trump stated that he had the “absolute right to do what I want with the justice department”, Biden has pledged to take a different path.In a joint CNN interview with the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, Biden guaranteed that he would avoid telling the justice department how to do its job. “Any decision should be based on the law, should not be influenced by politics,” was how Harris put it.Biden may well find his best intentions sorely tested early on in his presidency. The Trump administration has been busy planting legal landmines in his path.Last month, the US attorney in Delaware – a Trump appointee – opened an investigation into the tax affairs of the president-elect’s son, Hunter Biden. What happens to that inquiry once the new administration takes office may define just how much independence the 46th president is willing to grant his attorney general.In any case, merely abiding by the traditional norm of DoJ prosecutorial independence may be insufficient to repair the damage of the Trump era. Gupta said: “We came dangerously close to our democratic norms being undermined, so it won’t be enough to go back to the old ways – it’s going to be incumbent on the new administration to learn the lessons and act on them.”Bob Bauer, who was White House counsel from 2010 to 2011, also believes that special measures are now needed to shore up the independence of the agency. “You cannot expect everything to return to normal just because Donald Trump has left the scene,” he said.Bauer took a leave of absence as a law professor at New York University to advise Biden during his presidential campaign. Speaking to the Guardian in a personal capacity, he said that he was fearful that norms that just about survived the Trump onslaught could be shattered if a more efficient demagogue entered the White House in future.You cannot expect everything to return to normal just because Donald Trump has left the scene“Somebody could come along and execute on the threat to use the department to pursue political enemies more effectively than Trump did. Rather than wait for a more shrewd, deft, competent Trump to appear, it makes sense to deal with this as an institutional crisis that needs addressing.”In his new book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, Bauer and his co-author Jack Goldsmith set out reforms they would like to see put in place to protect the DoJ from any future authoritarian president. They include introducing a new executive rule that would overtly instruct all 115,000 employees of the justice department to “answer in all their actions not to partisan politics but to principles of fairness and justice”.The authors also propose that Congress put in writing that any prospective attorney general must satisfy the Senate confirmation process that they are a “person of integrity”. Changes would be made to the special counsel system to clarify in what circumstances presidents can be investigated, and to shield the investigators from White House efforts to remove them.Any move by the Biden administration to introduce new rules on DoJ independence is likely to face opposition. Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge who served as US attorney general under George W Bush, told the Guardian that in his view any such measures would be unnecessary and unfounded.Mukasey said that criticism that the DoJ had been politicised in its decision making within the Trump administration was inaccurate. “There have been many actions by the justice department that were directly contrary to the president’s wishes.”He pointed to the decision of Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian collusion – an action which mightily displeased the president. He also cited Barr’s lament to ABC News in February that Trump’s tweets were making it “impossible for me to do my job”. “That was hardly consistent with the White House view,” Mukasey said.In Mukasey’s analysis, attempts by the incoming administration to try to change the department either through internal procedures or legislation would be misplaced. “I think we in this country sometimes have a fascination with mechanical solutions to problems – if we tinker with this or that, we can fix things.”Instead, the focus should be on finding the right caliber of personnel to fill top jobs. “The principal lesson of the past four years is that we need good, sound people in all positions from the White House on down. If you have them you are fine, if you don’t have them, then you can have all the mechanical bells and whistles you like” but they won’t make a difference.The Biden administration will also be under pressure to restore the central role played by the DoJ in combatting police brutality and discrimination in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Under Trump, the department’s engagement in policing reform has withered on the vine.On his final day in office as attorney general, Sessions issued a memo that scrapped consent decrees – court-backed agreements that allowed the DoJ to drive through essential reforms within police forces found to be engaging in racial profiling, excessive use of force, or unjustified killing of unarmed black men.Under Barack Obama, 14 consent decrees were imposed on wayward police agencies; under Trump, there have been none.Gupta said that the Biden administration needed to withdraw the Sessions memo on day one. “The gutting of civil rights enforcement across the board has been such a setback for communities around the country, and restoring it has to be a priority,” she said.Similarly, Gupta urged the incoming Biden team to move swiftly to rebuild the civil rights division as a key defender of the right to vote. In the Trump era, that feature of the justice department’s work faded too, with Barr accommodating the president’s baseless claims of massive voter fraud in the election by allowing federal prosecutors to investigate the matter – prompting another high-profile resignation. Barr waited until well after the 3 November election to announce publicly that there was no evidence of widespread voter irregularities.“It’s high time in this country that we stopped politicizing voting rights and treat it like it is – a core value,” Gupta said. More

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      in Elections

      US Capitol stormed: what we know so far

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      A mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed Capitol Hill and clashed with police on Wednesday afternoon, apparently driven by the prospect that they might stop the certification of the 2020 federal election in favour of Joe Biden. The attack came after Trump urged a crowd of supporters to march on the Capitol and undo his November election defeat.
      A woman shot in the chest on Capitol grounds as the pro-Trump mob stormed the building died soon afterwards. Earlier reports indicated the woman was in a critical condition after being shot in the chest as the Capitol was breached. Dustin Sternbeck, a spokesman for the DC police, confirmed the woman’s death.
      The mob managed to enter the Senate chamber where minutes earlier the election results were being certified. A rioter stepped on to the dais and, according to a reporter on the scene, yelled: “Trump won that election.”
      Donald Trump praised the mob as “very special” people. The president justified the violence by citing baseless claims of widespread election fraud. In a video that Twitter has since deleted from his account, the president urged his supporters to “go home”, but also gave legitimacy to the falsehoods that fuelled Wednesday’s attempted insurrection, calling the election “stolen” and telling the angry mob, “we love you”. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have since locked the president’s accounts in order to address misinformation and the incitement of violence.
      Joe Biden called on Trump to “demand an end to this siege”. The president-elect said in a speech in Wilmington, Delaware, “It’s not a protest; it’s insurrection. The world is watching.” Former President George W Bush also used the term “insurrection”.
      Barack Obama said history would rightly remember the violence at the Capitol as a moment of great dishonour and shame for the nation. Obama said it should not have come as a surprise, and that for two months “a political party and its accompanying media ecosystem has too often been unwilling to tell their followers the truth”.
      Four hours after the breach, officials announced that the Capitol was secure. The siege was among the worst security breaches in American history. Senators were then escorted back into the Senate chamber to resume the certification of Biden’s victory. Vice-President Mike Pence opened the session, saying”: “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today: You did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins. And this is still the people’s house … Let’s get back to work.”
      The DC police chief, Robert Contee, said 13 people had been arrested so far in connection to the “riot” at the US Capitol. During the protests over the police killing of George Floyd, more than 400 people were arrested, mostly for curfew violations.
      A curfew in Washington DC went into effect at 6pm and will be in place until 6am on Thursday. As the curfew kicked in, an announcement played at the Capitol that anyone still on the grounds after 6pm would be subject to arrest.
      Representatives Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for Trump to be impeached. Omar said that she was filing articles of impeachment.
      Facebook announced it would remove all photographs and and videos posted from the protest, as well as praise for the protests or calls to bring weapons to the protest or anywhere else in the US. The posts, “contribute to, rather than diminish, the risk of ongoing violence”, it said.
      Melania Trump’s chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham reportedly resigned, effective immediately, over the violence at the Capitol. Grisham was the former White House press secretary.
      The attacks were condemned by leaders around the world and within the US, though Trump allies including Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro maintained their support. More

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      in Elections

      Teargas and shots fired as pro-Trump mob rampages through Congress

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      This article is more than 1 year old Teargas and shots fired as pro-Trump mob rampages through Congress This article is more than 1 year old Presidential handover collapses into chaos as Trump supporters break through barricades and enter building Pro-Trump mob storms US Capitol – follow live The presidential handover collapsed into chaos on […] More

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      in US Politics

      US Capitol in lockdown as Trump supporters clash with police

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      The presidential handover collapsed into chaos on Wednesday as an angry mob of Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol.
      In unprecedented scenes the building was locked down with lawmakers inside as Donald Trump supporters clashed with police, broke through barricades and entered the building.
      As a mob of Trump supporters entered the building, people working inside were ordered by local safety officials to shelter in their offices. Shots were fired, according to ABC News, and a woman was shot although the details were not immediately clear. The National Guard was called to help to secure the Capitol.
      After breaching barricades Trump supporters were seen walking through the building, waving flags and clashing violently with security. One posted pictures purportedly from House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office where her quickly abandoned laptop appeared to be still on, others took selfies inside the Senate chamber.

      Members of Congress were told to don gas masks after teargas was deployed inside the building. Outside the building hundreds of supporters barged through police lines and took over the steps of the Capitol. Video showed injured police officers and violent tussles as they stormed the building.
      The move meant that the Senate and the House of Representatives both recessed its debate over congressional certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory over Trump in November’s presidential election.
      Local media reported that Mike Pence was ushered out of the Senate and taken to a secure location. The Senate doors were closed and locked, and senators told to stay away from the doors and then evacuated.
      Trump, and his allies, have baselessly floated conspiracy theories that the election was somehow fraudulently won by the Biden, though there is no evidence to support this. At a rally before the riot began Trump falsely told supporters once more that the election had been rigged, referring to the counting of ballots in the 2020 election as “explosions of bullshit”.
      “We will never give up, we will never concede. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved,” Trump said.
      Earlier Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, had called for a “trial by combat” accusing Democrats of hiding evidence of malfeasance. “Who hides evidence? Criminals hide evidence. Not honest people,” he told the crowd.
      After Trump’s speech protestors marched towards the Capitol chanting: “Whose Capitol? Our Capitol.”
      The mayor of Washington DC, Muriel Bowser, ordered a curfew in America’s capital city that was set to begin at 6pm local time.
      The process that the protests halted was the certification of the electoral college vote which is typically a ceremonial – and largely perfunctory – affair. However, a group of Republican lawmakers – spurred on by Trump – are trying to turn the usually routine debate into Trump’s last stand and a bid to reverse his election defeat.
      President-elect Joe Biden denounced the violence at the Capitol. “At this hour, our democracy is under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times,” he said.
      Trump, who still has not conceded that he lost the election, has spent the last several weeks attempting to pressure public officials to overturn Biden’s 306-232 election win.
      As the situation worsened Republicans and Democrats called on Trump to tell his supporters to go home. “The violence and destruction taking place at the US Capitol Must Stop and it Must Stop Now,” Pence wrote on Twitter.

      Mike Pence
      (@Mike_Pence)
      The violence and destruction taking place at the US Capitol Must Stop and it Must Stop Now. Anyone involved must respect Law Enforcement officers and immediately leave the building.

      January 6, 2021

      Trump tweeted: “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”
      Ten minutes earlier he had attacked the vice-president for not having “the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” and backing his attempt to usurp the election results.

      Donald J. Trump
      (@realDonaldTrump)
      pic.twitter.com/Pm2PKV0Fp3

      January 6, 2021

      In a video Trump called on his supporters to go home but falsely claimed once more that the election had been “stolen”. “I know your pain, I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. Go home. We love you. You are very special.” More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Julian Assange's extradition ruling: relief, not victory | Editorial

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      Donald Trump is using his last days in office to pardon those who do not deserve it. Among the most egregious recipients are the Blackwater security guards responsible for the Nisour Square massacre – the killing of unarmed civilians, including children, in Iraq. The president’s deplorable decision fits a pattern: just over a year ago, he pardoned a former army lieutenant found guilty of murder after ordering his men to fire at three Afghans, and a former US army commando facing trial over the killing of a suspected bombmaker.
      There has been no such mercy shown to a man whom the US is pursuing after he cast an unforgiving light on its abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Julian Assange’s future is dependent on the decisions of British courts. On Monday, district judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that the WikiLeaks founder could not be extradited to the US, where he has been charged under the Espionage Act, including for publishing classified material.
      But she rejected defence arguments that the prosecution had misrepresented the facts and that he was being pursued for a political offence. She ruled against extradition only on the grounds that the risk of him killing himself was substantial, given his mental health and the conditions in which he was likely to be held – in isolation in a “supermax” high-security prison.
      This decision is a relief for Mr Assange and his family. But it is no cause for celebration for the defendant and his supporters, or for those concerned about press freedom more broadly. The American Civil Liberties Union has described charging him over publication as “a direct assault on the first amendment”. The ruling offers no protection to any journalist who might find themselves in Mr Assange’s position. It is no victory for the right to share material of clear public interest.
      Mr Assange’s lawyers will on Wednesday apply for bail on his behalf. Legal experts suggest that his chances are poor: he served a 50-week sentence for skipping bail after police removed him from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had fled to avoid extradition to Sweden over a sexual assault investigation that was subsequently dropped. But his prospects of avoiding extradition now appear considerably brighter; he has a family to consider; and his mental health and the physical risks posed by Covid in Belmarsh prison, where he has been held since April 2019, make the case for bail more pressing.
      Legal proceedings are likely to drag on for years – unless the US chooses to scrap these charges rather than appeal. It should do so. There is a shameful contrast between this administration’s simultaneous pardoning of men for horrific offences and the pursuit of a man who exposed war crimes. When Joe Biden takes office on 20 January, he cannot undo the damage caused by undue and unjust lenience. But he can, and should, let Mr Assange walk free. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump is trying to thwart democracy itself. But the problem is deeper than one man | David Daley

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      Democracy rots slowly. Sometimes its decay is perfectly legal, helped along by legislatures and embraced by the courts. It happens when elected officials deliberately tilt the game to their own advantage.On Sunday, the Washington Post published smoking-gun audio of Donald Trump pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to reverse the election outcome and declare Trump the winner, or face potential legal consequences. Even some Republicans have recognized that the bright line between democracy and authoritarianism had been breached.That line, however, has been melting for quite some time. It did not begin with Trump’s presidency. And it will not end when he leaves the White House. The rot runs deep inside a Republican party that has not only lost faith in democracy but bet its future on rule-rigging and minority rule. The party has subverted free and fair elections for years, in ways so ordinary that they’ve been accepted as politics as usual for far too long.Republican gerrymandering – the manipulation of electoral constituencies in favor of one party – in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin has locked in Republican control of state legislatures even when their candidates win hundreds of thousands fewer votes statewide. When Democratic governors won in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Republican-led legislatures stripped power from them in extraordinary lame-duck sessions.Republicans drew themselves similarly friendly maps for Congress and state legislatures in Texas, Ohio and Florida. Then these gerrymandered legislatures – with the blessing of a US supreme court that has gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act – have tried to make it harder for Democrats and minorities to cast their ballots, by using surgically targeted voter ID bills, shuttering voting precincts, or eliminating days of early voting.Then, when large majorities of citizens, from both parties, come together to make voting fairer for everyone, these legislatures often run right over them.When Floridians, for example, overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights to former felons in a 2018 constitutional amendment backed by almost two-thirds of voters, it was hailed as the largest expansion of the franchise since the passage of the voting rights act. An estimated 1.4 million citizens who served their time won back their voice in civic affairs.In any functioning representative democracy, that resounding vote should have been the last word. However, this is Florida where, in 2011, Republicans ignored a state constitutional amendment that banned partisan gerrymandering and locked themselves into such advantageous districts that the will of the people hardly matters at all.And so the Florida legislature not only replaced the voters’ judgement with its own, but turned the amendment on its head. If voters sought to end restrictions designed after the civil war to limit black voting power, the legislature substituted another reminder of those days: a poll tax. Republican legislators insisted that formerly incarcerated people pay all fines and fees related to their sentence – often amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars – before reinfranchisement.This is the time bomb that threatens American democracy. The threat only grows more urgent.As suppressors of the vote well know, poll taxes are extraordinarily effective. Last fall, ProPublica, the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times cross-referenced the voting rolls with a list of those released from prison over the past 23 years, and found just over 31,000 of those 1.4 million former inmates had been able to register to vote. Trump carried this perennial swing state by just 370,000 votes.This is the time bomb that threatens American democracy. The threat only grows more urgent. Republicans’ gerrymandering strategy, known as Redmap, was executed in 2010. The supreme court undid the voting rights act in the Shelby county case in 2013. These efforts came long before Trump descended a Trump Tower escalator and announced his campaign. They may even grow more virulent after Trump leaves, as 2024 presidential hopefuls such as Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, decide that doubling down on “fraud” claims is the best path to claiming the Trump vote, and as red state legislatures use those false fraud assertions to justify new voting restrictions.These efforts are already underway. In Pennsylvania, the new legislature hasn’t even been sworn in yet – but lawmakers are already seeking co-sponsors for a restrictive new voter ID bill, as well as a repeal of no-excuse absentee voting that was expanded due to Covid-19.And that’s not the only chicanery. In 2018, the Pennsylvania state supreme court struck down a congressional map so gerrymandered that Republicans consistently won 13 of the state’s 18 US House seats even when they won fewer statewide votes. Now, on the verge of the next redistricting cycle, Republicans’ gerrymandered state legislative majorities are looking to take revenge – by gerrymandering the courts, essentially creating judicial districts that can then be gerrymandered by the already gerrymandered legislature. Minority rule begets more minority rule.Texas, already one of the most restrictive states in the nation for voting, is readying a raft of new measures. In Georgia, Republican senators have indicated their support for an end to drop boxes as well as no-excuse absentee voting. A movement is also underway to require voter ID for mail-in voting. Many Republicans, meanwhile, frustrated that Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has stood up for the integrity of Biden’s win of the state, have sought to make his position one appointed by the legislature rather than elected by the people.The practice of state legislatures ignoring the will of their own voters is not limited to Florida. Several states worked to make it harder for voters to reform their government via direct democracy. Others brazenly undid the citizens’ efforts and ignored their will. In Missouri, where more than 60% of voters voted for an independent redistricting amendment, Republican lawmakers pushed, and won, a 2020 amendment that masqueraded as campaign finance reform but actually unwound the redistricting effort. Utah’s Republican legislature also worked to undermine an advisory commission that voters enacted in that conservative state in 2018. The conservative political establishments in Arkansas and North Dakota used the courts to knock qualified initiatives off the 2020 ballot that would have opened up the closed primaries that make it easier for them to maintain power.Arizona’s independent redistricting commission remains, but Republicans there stacked the appellate court personnel commission, which vets applications and selects the five finalists for its nonpartisan chair. Their selections include a lobbyist and a gun store owner whose shop hosted a Trump rally and a shooting event for the president last fall.So, yes, Trump will leave the White House in less than three weeks. Democracy teetered but held. Some Republicans played important roles in making that happen, and their bravery should be noted. But Trump did not unleash this anti-democratic fever inside the Republican party. It’s worth noting that two of the other people on that brazen audio obtained by the Post were veteran Republican election lawyer Cleta Mitchell – heard teaching Republican state legislators how to gerrymander and duck legal discovery in leaked audio from a 2019 Alec conference – and Mark Meadows, the Trump chief of staff who first won office – running as a birther who would send Obama “back to Kenya” – from one of those gerrymandered congressional districts in 2012.Trump was created, in part, by the preceding years of gerrymandering and voter suppression that put the most extreme voices in control. They’re not going anywhere. They remain in power. They have not been chastened. There will be a next time. Our democracy may not be so lucky. More

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      in US Politics

      Top US business leaders call on Congress to certify election results

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      [embedded content]
      Some of America’s top business leaders called on Congress to certify the electoral results for the president-elect, Joe Biden, in a letter Monday, arguing that “attempts to thwart or delay this process run counter to the essential tenets of our democracy”.
      The letter, signed by executives at American Express, Goldman Sachs, JetBlue, Microsoft, Pfizer and others, marks the US business community’s most public effort to date to push back against Donald Trump’s continuing attempts to overturn the election result.
      Organized by the business advocacy group Partnership for New York City, the letter states: “The incoming Biden administration faces the urgent tasks of defeating Covid-19 and restoring the livelihoods of millions of Americans who have lost jobs and businesses during the pandemic.
      “Our duly elected leaders deserve the respect and bipartisan support of all Americans at a moment when we are dealing with the worst health and economic crises in modern history. There should be no further delay in the orderly transfer of power.”
      Many leaders in the business community initially embraced the Trump administration and Trump established a high powered jobs panel to revitalize the US economy. But many of those leaders quit after his apparent support for white supremacists after a fatal rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
      Among the signatories of Monday’s letter is Jonathan Gray, the chief operating officer of Blackstone, the private equity group run by Stephen Schwarzman, one of Trump’s biggest backers. More

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      in US Politics

      'We tortured families': The lingering damage of Trump's separation policy

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      [embedded content]
      The US government’s policy of separating migrant families at the border has continued to wreak havoc and inflict suffering in the final months of Donald Trump’s presidency, with parents still missing, reunifications blocked and reunited families struggling to pick up the pieces of their lives.
      Righting the wrongs of Trump’s globally condemned separations policy is one of the most urgent and challenging tasks that lies ahead for the incoming administration. Civil rights groups that have been fighting for years to reunite thousands of families are now pushing for a bold and speedy response from Joe Biden – one that reunifies victims, grants them protection in the US, and provides restitution.
      “We tortured these families, we took their children,” said Carol Anne Donohoe, the managing attorney with Al Otro Lado, a group that has been working to reunite deported parents with their children. “Some parents and children haven’t seen each other in over three years. It’s an abomination, and we need immediate action … and accountability to ensure this never happens again.”
      A critical step, advocates say, will be a full accounting of the scope of family separations, and recognition by the government of the enduring consequences.
      The cruelty and chaos of ‘zero tolerance’
      In April 2018, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute all unauthorized crossings at the border, making no exception for asylum seekers or people with children. As a result, US immigration officials forcibly separated children from their parents and guardians, filing thousands of criminal cases against migrants who had fled violence to seek asylum in America. The parents were detained while their children were taken and treated as “unaccompanied minors”, placed in jails and shelters for migrant youth.
      “It just felt like chaos,” recalled Roberto Lopez, the community outreach coordinator with the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), who was working in south Texas courtrooms where hundreds of separated parents faced criminal charges in an assembly line. “It was a mass prosecution … There was just so much pain. Many times they were asking, ‘Do you know where my kid is? When will I see them?’ And we had to tell them again and again, ‘We don’t know.’” More