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      Trump official admits family separation policy 'should never have been implemented'

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      For the first time, a senior Trump administration official who helped implement family separation has condemned the hardline immigration policy, which made it possible for the government to take more than 3,000 children, including infants, from their parents at the US-Mexico border in 2018.In response to a damning report published on Thursday by the US justice department’s internal watchdog on the “zero-tolerance” policy, which made family separation possible, the former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein said the policy “should have never been proposed or implemented”.The justice department’s Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) long-awaited report said department leadership knew the policy would result in children being separated from their families and that the former US attorney general Jeff Sessions “demonstrated a deficient understanding of the legal requirements related to the care and custody of separated children”.“We concluded that the Department’s single-minded focus on increasing immigration prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations,” the report said.The OIG said justice department leadership “did not effectively coordinate” with the relevant agencies before implementing zero-tolerance, despite being aware of the challenges created by increasing prosecutions of adult asylum seekers under the policy.In a conference call in May 2018, Sessions told prosecutors: “We need to take away children,” according to notes taken by people on the call and provided to the OIG.Rosenstein, who publicly denounced the policy for the first time on Thursday, told the OIG he had known the zero-tolerance policy would result in family separations. He also told investigators he had not been involved with the formulation of the policy and had received reassurances about it that he now believed were wrong.In July 2020, the Guardian reported that Rosenstein had made comments in a conference call with US attorneys charged with implementing the policy that in effect meant that no child was too young to be separated from their parents.The call came after US attorneys on the south-west border had repeatedly raised concerns about how zero-tolerance was supposed to be operated. A month after the policy had been in place, to help attorneys, a list of questions was drafted for DHS and HHS, which included: “How does DHS deal with infants?”At that point, it was clear no agency had a master list of separated children.In a statement provide to the Guardian on Thursday, Rosenstein said he and his colleagues at the justice department “faced unprecedented challenges” compared with work he had done as a US attorney under previous presidential administrations.“Since leaving the Department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero-tolerance immigration policy,” Rosenstein said. “It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better.”Sessions, who resigned in November 2018, announced the zero-tolerance policy in April 2018. Facing intense pressure nationally and abroad, the Trump administration stopped mass family separations in June 2018, though asylum-seeking families continue to be separated today at a smaller scale.Family separation, which legal experts and doctors said constituted torture, was supported by multiple federal agencies.The homeland security department (DHS) separated families at the border and detained the parents, the health department eventually took custody of children separated from their parents and the justice department leadership provided the legal framework that made separations possible.The justice department OIG report confirms earlier watchdog reports from the other agencies’ monitors, which found inadequate tracking systems were in place.A January 2019 report from the health department OIG found the Trump administration might have separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border for up to a year before family separation was a publicly known practice.The lead attorney on an ongoing family separation lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Lee Gelernt, said: “This new report shows just how far the Trump administration was willing to go to destroy these families. Just when you think the Trump administration can’t sink any lower, it does.“The Biden-Harris administration will inherit the legacy of family separation, and we don’t doubt that more horrific details will continue to emerge,” Gelernt said. “We need them to act with urgency – every day without action makes it harder to find and reunite families.”Dick Durbin, a Democratic US senator from Illinois, said he would hold the justice department officials responsible to account as the incoming chair of the US Senate judiciary committee. “Those who planned and executed the zero-tolerance policy will have to live with the knowledge that their cruelty and cowardice are responsible for the scars these children will carry for the rest of their lives,” Durbin said.Despite being the driving force behind the zero-tolerance policy, Sessions refused to be interviewed by OIG investigators.The report said Sessions told US attorneys on the south-west border that families would be quickly prosecuted and reunited, even though doing so was, “in most cases, a practical and legal impossibility”. The former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has repeatedly defended her decision to enforce the zero-tolerance policy, which was announced in April 2018. More

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      '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

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      'Family detention still exists': immigration groups warn the fight is far from over

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      Few people have been as closely involved with family separation and reunification as attorney Erika Pinheiro, one of the leaders of the immigration advocacy group Al Otro Lado.And though Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election puts an end to Donald Trump’s laser focus on restricting all forms of immigration, Pinheiro wants people to understand that the fight for immigrant rights in the country is far from over.“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Pinheiro, Al Otro Lado’s litigation and policy director, said. “It’s not a given that everyone will be reunified, or families, babies are going to be let out of cages – family detention still exists.”Al Otro Lado has offices on both sides of the border, where it assists immigrants with family reunification, detention, access to healthcare, asylum, deportation and other issues.It was founded in 2011 and was volunteer run until Trump won the 2016 election on an anti-immigrant platform. The group’s leaders then committed to the work as a full-time, paying job.It has been a grueling four years. Pinheiro said the Trump administration caused her to question how she could be an attorney when laws were changing each week and the government did not seem interested in following the ones which remained. “Just the baseline of being able to do our jobs as attorneys was thrown into chaos,” Pinheiro said.There was the added factor of responding to atrocities a tired, exhausted world didn’t want to, or couldn’t, process.“It felt in many instances that it was screaming into the ether about people dying at the border, people suffering all these horrific human rights violations,” she said. “And some of it got through to the public, like family separation, but a lot of it didn’t.”With Covid, the group’s work has expanded even more.“We also have had to do emergency food assistance, quarantine housing for medically vulnerable families,” Pinheiro said. “We’ve supported a dozen shelters in getting clean water and food and PPE, we have helped raise the capacity of several medical organizations here on the border to make sure our clients would have access to any care.”The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bars asylum seekers and refugees from the US under an order called Title 42. People who attempt to cross the border are returned, or expelled, back to Mexico, without an opportunity to test their asylum claims. More than 250,000 migrants processed at the US-Mexico border between March and October were expelled, according to US Customs and Border Protection data.The situation is dire. Thousands of asylum-seekers are stuck at the border, uncertain when they will be able to file their claims. The camps they wait in are an even greater public health risk that before.Outside the border, Al Otro Lado has fought for detained migrants to get PPE and medical releases. Prisons are one of the worst possible places to be when there is a contagious disease and deaths in the custody of US immigration authorities have increased dramatically this year. They have also provided supplies to homeless migrants in southern California who have been shut out of public hygiene facilities.Pinheiro said there will be improvements with Trump out of office, but some of the Biden campaign promises to address asylum issues at the border will be toothless until the CDC order is revoked. It’s a point she plans to make in conversations with the transition team.A prime concern for advocates about the Biden administration is that it will include some of the same people from Barack Obama’s administration, which had more deportations than any other president and laid the groundwork for some controversial Trump policies.While it is a worry for Pinheiro, she has hope that the new administration will build something better. “I would hope a lot of those people, and I know for some of them, have been able to reflect on how the systems they built were weaponized by Trump to do things like family separation or detaining children,” she said.Family separation, which has left 545 children still waiting to be reunited with their parents, was a crucial issue for many voters and Pinheiro hopes that energy translates to other immigration policies.“How did you feel when your government committed the atrocity of family separation in your name?” Pinheiro said. “The next step is really understanding that similar and sometimes worse atrocities are still being committed in the name of border security and limiting migration.” More

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      More immigrant women say they were abused by Ice gynecologist

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      More women have joined an official legal petition alleging that they were medically abused by a gynecologist while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody in a move that significantly expands a case that has shocked America.The legal petition outlining these alleged abuses were filed in the Middle District of Georgia federal court late Monday night. More than 40 women have submitted written testimony attesting to claims of abuse, one attorney on their case said.These women, who have been detained by Ice at Irwin county detention center in Georgia, have alleged that they underwent invasive and unnecessary medical procedures. The women’s attorneys have also alleged that these women endured retribution for speaking out, including deportation in some cases. The petition largely echoed past legal filings and accounts by accusers.“Petitioners were victims of non-consensual, medically unindicated and/or invasive gynecological procedures, including unnecessary surgical procedures under general anesthesia, performed by and/or at the direction of [gynaecologist Dr Mahendra Amin],” the petition said. “In many instances, the medically unindicated gynecological procedures Respondent Amin performed on Petitioners amounted to sexual assault.”Officials were aware of this alleged misconduct since 2018, the petition further alleged, “but have nonetheless continued a policy or custom of sending women to be mistreated and abused by Respondent Amin … The experiences Petitioners had at the hands of Respondent Amin form part of a disturbing pattern of inhumane medical abuse and mistreatment at ICDC.”“This is an effort to protect women who have suffered horrendous medical atrocities while detained in US custody, and every effort has been made by both Ice and the contractors at this facility to cover up these medical abuses,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, a leading attorney on the case.She added: “For more than two years, both the government, and the private contractors who run this facility, have turned a blind eye to the enormous suffering and intentional harm–and intentional medical abuse – that has taken place here.”“It’s unlike anything I ever expected to see in America,” Mukherjee said.The women’s allegations emerged after a shocking whistleblower report. This report, which was submitted on behalf of a former nurse at the facility, Dawn Wooten, alleged that an alarmingly high number of hysterectomies were performed on Spanish-speaking women. Wooten and other nurses feared that these women did not understand the procedures they underwent.Wooten alleged that the doctor performing these procedures, who was subsequently named as gynecologist Dr Mahendra Amin, had become notorious for performing these operations – so much so that she called him the “uterus collector” in her whistleblower account.“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy – just about everybody,” Wooten stated in her complaint. “I’ve had several inmates tell me that they’ve been to see the doctor, and they’ve had hysterectomies, and they don’t know why they went or why they’re going.”Wooten also said that the medical center where these procedures were performed had unsanitary conditions, as well as poor safety measures against Covid-19.Amin has denied the allegations and told the Intercept that he had only conducted “one or two hysterectomies in the past two [or] three years”. He did not specify whether these procedures were performed on women in Irwin.The physician’s lawyer, Scott Grubman, said in a previous statement: “We look forward to all of the facts coming out, and are confident that once they do, Dr Amin will be cleared of any wrongdoing.” Ice contended that its records indicate just two referrals for hysterectomies at Irwin.The accusations have spurred comparisons with the US’s disturbing history of eugenics. From 1907 to 1937, two-thirds of US states passed laws that permitted involuntary sterilization – resulting in the sterilization of more than 60,000 people.An increase in federal funding for reproductive health procedures in the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, resulted in “tens of thousands” of women of color undergoing sterilizations. Though forced sterilization was made illegal, it has continued. From 1997 to 2013, approximately 1,400 inmates were sterilized in California prisons. More

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      Trans women in Ice custody already suffered sexual harassment and abuse. Then came Covid-19

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      [embedded content]
      It was August, and Katalina stood sobbing in the middle of the cell at the La Palma immigration detention center. She tried not to touch anything – she had seen guards escort out a man who was coughing and trembling just minutes before.
      It felt like punishment. Shortly before, she had reported being sexually harassed by another detainee in a male unit of the La Palma correctional center in Arizona where they were being held. Now, she was standing in an isolation cell.
      Katalina was worried about contracting Covid-19. The cell she had been placed in hadn’t been cleaned. After standing in the room for five hours, she withdrew her complaint. She had heard that other detainees had spent weeks in segregation after speaking up. It was a risk she wasn’t willing to take.
      When a detainee grabbed her arm and left a bruise a few months later, Katalina didn’t say anything either.
      Covid has torn through immigration detention centers across the United States. Since the start of the pandemic, at least 7,202 people held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) have been infected with the virus, and at least eight have died. LGBTQ+ populations in immigration custody have echoed the stories of other detainees who have complained that Ice has failed to institute adequate protocols to curb the spread of the virus and has not provided ample protective equipment and medical care. But LGBTQ+ people in La Palma say the pandemic has created further challenges, making it harder for them to escape the gender-based harassment and violence many of them have long faced while locked up. More

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      'Heal the damage': Activists urge Joe Biden to move beyond ‘border security’

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      As Joe Biden prepares to take office, activists say the president-elect must not only take meaningful action to stabilize the US-Mexico border, but also reckon with his own history of militarizing the border landscape and communities.
      Biden has promised to end many of the Trump administration’s border policies, but has yet to unveil the kind of bold immigration plan that would suggest a true departure from Obama-era priorities. Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s top immigration adviser who memorably defended the administration’s decision to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants, was recently added to Biden’s transition team.
      Biden has stated that he will cease construction of the border wall, telling National Public Radio in August that there will be “not another foot of wall”, and that his administration will close lawsuits aimed at confiscating land to make way for construction. His immigration plan will also rescind Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” on the southern border, which the Trump administration has used to siphon funds from the Department of Defense to finance construction, circumventing Congress in an action recently declared illegal by an appeals court.
      Some lawmakers along the border find these developments heartening, after Trump’s border wall construction has devastated sensitive ecosystems, tribal spaces, and communities, and has been continuously challenged in court.
      “I very much expect a Biden administration to cancel construction contracts and instruct DoJ to close eminent domain lawsuits,” says the congressman Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who represents the south Texas district of Laredo, where plans for construction have been met with stiff resistance from locals who say it is unnecessary and would damage their community. “My constituents feel hopeful, because they know a Biden administration is not going to waste money on a useless, destructive wall.”
      Since January 2017, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) say they have spent $15bn on “400 miles of new primary and secondary border wall system”, the vast majority of it financed by funds from the Department of Defense. Most of this consists of replacing or building on older barriers, not building on land where none existed before.
      But while weary border activists see a potential ally in the Biden administration, many say that, while his electoral victory brought them a sense of relief, they are hoping for more than a return to the status quo.
      “Stopping construction isn’t enough,” says Dror Ladin, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “There has to be planning to dismantle particularly harmful sections of this wall in a responsible way and help heal the damage that has been done, both to communities and natural spaces.”
      Donald Trump is not unique in his goal of militarizing the border, but his administration has tested the limits of executive authority in ways his predecessors did not. On 25 to 30 occasions, the Trump administration has invoked an obscure provision of the 2005 Real ID Act, which allows the secretary of homeland security to continue barrier construction without paying heed to any law that would stand in the way of expeditious construction efforts. The Trump administration has used it to bypass protections like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act. By comparison, the George Bush administration invoked the provision to waive laws five times. More

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      'Truth and lies have eroded': why an artist took over a billboard at the US-Mexico border

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      The artist Stefan Brüggemann woke up at his London apartment last Wednesday to Donald Trump declaring he had won the presidency. It was, of course, a lie. “The second I turned on YouTube, I saw him and Mike Pence declare victory,” Brüggemann says.It was a moment that epitomized the political climate in which the Mexican-German artist had launched his latest project, which tackles the interchangeability of fact and deception. On the day of the US election Brüggemann unveiled two neon words – “Truth” and “Lie” – perched on a billboard at the US Mexico border.At six feet height and beaming in red, white and blue, Truth/Lie can be read in two ways. When viewed from San Diego towards Tijuana, Baja California, it spells “TRUTH”; when viewed from Mexico, the word “LIE” is framed against the backdrop of a mountainous American landscape.Brüggemann, whose career spans several decades, seeks to highlight how the meaning of two seemingly straightforward words has been diluted in an era of political polarization and ideological chaos. More

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      Why Democrats lost Latino voters along Texas border: 'They relied on loyalty'

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      While Democrats aggressively pushed to turn Texas blue this election cycle, they were banking on help from people like Barbara Ocañas, a highly educated, 37-year-old Latina voter from the Rio Grande valley.
      But, after Donald Trump faced backlash for using the word “coyote” to describe human smugglers, Ocañas was turned off by liberals focused more on semantics than the actual realities of the migrant crisis affecting her home. As the daughter of a Mexican émigré, she believes that undocumented immigrants are “just people, like you and me”.
      However, when it comes to earning US citizenship, “there is a right way and a wrong way to do it”, she said.
      She also fears what Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s administration could mean for people she knows who rely on jobs in refineries or hauling crude oil. So, faced with a ballot and a choice, Ocañas decided she preferred four more years with Donald Trump in the White House.
      “Not all of us take it to heart when we’re called rapists and bad hombres,” she said. “We have tough skin.”
      In Texas border towns with chronically low voter participation, residents did actually show up to the polls this election, exceeding county turnouts from 2016. But when results rolled in Tuesday night, Biden’s overall success was nowhere near Hillary Clinton’s slam dunk four years earlier, revealing Democratic vulnerabilities among a key bloc whose votes had largely been taken for granted.
      “Democrats have just assumed and relied on this historical loyalty by people in the valley to the Democratic party,” said Natasha Altema McNeely, an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. “And that assumption, I think, is very dangerous for the Democrats if they expect to continue to help the valley remain blue.”
      Biden still won Ocañas’s Hidalgo county, but with a fraction of the margin. In Starr county, which Clinton had dominated in a 60-point landslide, voters swung for Biden by just five points. And, after Democrats squandered a nearly 33-point advantage from four years ago, Zapata county flipped to deliver Trump a stunning victory.
      That erosion of Democratic support took place even after high-profile Biden surrogates descended on the US-Mexico border ahead of election day. Jill Biden, Joe’s wife, campaigned in El Paso on the first day of early voting, when – amid buzz that Texas might be in play – she told her audience that a win in the state would mean that “we are unstoppable”. More