An irreversible monstrosity

To live under the Trump presidency is to endure more reports of wrongdoing than the human capacity for outrage can reliably accommodate. This week offered a reminder of an atrocity that faded from the headlines — succeeded by so many other scandals and transgressions — even as it continued to wreak its devastation on hundreds of families.

Lawyers appointed by a federal court revealed in a court filing Tuesday that they have been unable to reach the parents of 545 immigrant children who were taken from their families during the first year of President Trump’s administration. In just under half the cases, the parents have been located but not successfully contacted; in the remainder, they have not even been found, raising the prospect that hundreds of families separated by the U. S. government may never be reunited.

This mass statesponsored displacement springs from the Trump administration’s decision to separate migrant parents from their children for criminal prosecution as a means of punishing them for legally seeking asylum in the United States and thus deterring others from following suit. The government compounded this cruelty by obscuring the details of the earliest separations for years, hampering and perhaps defeating any effort to put the families back together.

In 2018, a federal court in San Diego ordered the reunification of some 2,700 families separated as part of the administration’s socalled zero tolerance policy. What was not clear until a Department of Health and Human Services inspector general report last year was that officials had separated more than 1,500 families who sought asylum along a portion of the border in a 2017 pilot program before the policy was officially adopted the following year. The administration resisted disclosing information about those families until the court compelled it in June 2019.

The children separated from their parents under the official zero tolerance policy in 2018, most of whom remained in detention, were reunited with their parents through extensive efforts by lawyers and advocacy groups. But by the time the same efforts began for the families separated the prior year, the children had been released to relatives or foster families and the parents had been deported to Mexico or Central America. The administration, having no apparent plans to facilitate the reunification of the families even though 200 of the children were under 5, often had little information to assist the search.

The revelation that hundreds of these families may have been permanently ripped apart comes weeks after a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general revealed the extent to which thenAttorney General Jeff Sessions and other top administration officials orchestrated the family separations for punitive purposes, contradicting their claims that separations were incidental to other policies and not the government’s goal. Both in 2017 and 2018, before and after family separation became official policy, the report found that officials in Washington ordered it over the objections of federal prosecutors along the U. S. Mexico border. One prosecutor wrote of authorities “taking breastfeeding defendant moms away from their infants” to face illegal immigration charges; another recalled Sessions asserting that “we need to take away children.”

This was not the federal law enforcement it claimed to be but rather a purposeful violation of U. S. and international law protecting asylum seekers as well as an affront to human rights and decency. For too many who made the grave error of seeking America’s protection and mercy, the consequences cannot be redressed or reversed.