‘Horrible deja vu’ in continued family separation

NEW YORK (AP) — In the first couple of months after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration last year to stop separating most parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, the number of children sent to New York fell.

Then, advocates say, the children started coming again in a steady stream, many too young to understand their circumstances or how to find their parents. “It’s just been this horrible sense of deja vu,” said Anthony Enriquez, director of the unaccompanied minors program for the Archdiocese of New York’s Catholic Charities Community Services. The organization is among the advocacy agencies around the country that have joined in a filing from the American Civil Liberties Union that says more than 900 children were taken from parents in the year after the judge issued the injunction.

It’s “the same problem that we had over a year ago prior to the injunction that we hoped against hope would be stayed by the court,” he said. “But the government seems to not care about the court’s order, frankly.”

The 911 children were separated from 844 parents between the court order issued on June 26, 2018, and June 29 of this year, according to the ACLU’s analysis of government records it received under the judge’s supervision. The Justice Department declined to comment. More than half, or 481 children, were under 10. And 1 in 5, or 185 children, was under 5. Thirteen were less than a year old. The median age was 9. Nearly 3 of 4 children, or 678, were separated on grounds of a parent’s criminal conduct, but only half of those cases indicated a conviction in records produced by the government, according to the ACLU analysis by data specialist Brooke Watson.