States, immigrants’ supporters demand reunifications now
LOS ANGELES — Seventeen states, including New York and California, sued the Trump administration Tuesday to force it to reunite the thousands of immigrant children and parents it separated at the border, as the legal and political pressure mounted to reconnect families more quickly.
“The administration’s practice of separating families is cruel, plain and simple,” New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in a statement. “Every day, it seems like the administration is issuing new, contradictory policies and relying on new, contradictory justifications. But we can’t forget: The lives of real people hang in the balance.”
The states, all led by Democratic attorneys general, joined Washington, D.C., in filing the lawsuit in federal court in Seattle, arguing that they are being forced to shoulder increased child welfare, education and social services costs.
Separately, immigrationrights activists asked a federal judge in Los Angeles to order that parents be released and immediately reunited with their children.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the multistate lawsuit. It had no comment on the Los Angeles filing.
In a speech before the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Los Angeles, Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administration A clergy member is arrested during a protest in front of the federal courthouse in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Immigrant-rights advocates asked a federal judge to order the release of parents separated from their children at the border as demonstrators decried the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown at a rally ahead of a Los Angeles appearance by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
for taking a hard line on illegal immigration and said the voters elected the president to do just that.
“This is the Trump era,” he said. “We are enforcing our laws again. We know whose side we are on — so does this group — and we’re on the side of police, and we’re on the side of the public safety of the American people.”
More than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in recent weeks and placed in government-contracted shelters — hundreds of miles away, in some cases — under a now-abandoned policy toward families caught illegally entering the U.S.
Amid an international outcry, President Donald Trump last week issued an
executive order to stop the separation of families and said parents and children will instead be detained together.
At a Texas detention facility, immigrant advocates complained that parents have gotten busy signals or no answers from a 1-800 number provided by federal authorities to get information about their children.
Attorneys have spoken to about 200 immigrants at the Port Isabel detention facility near Los Fresnos, Texas, since last week, and only a few knew where their children were being held, said Simon SandovalMoshenberg of the Legal Aid Justice Center in Virginia.
“The U.S. government never had any plan to reunite these families that
were separated,” SandovalMoshenberg said, and now it is “scrambling to undo this terrible thing that they have done.”
A message left for HHS, which runs the hotline, was not immediately returned.
Outraged by the family separations, immigrant supporters have led protests in recent days in states such as Florida and Texas.
On Tuesday, police arrested 25 demonstrators at a rally ahead of Sessions’ address.
Outside the U.S. attorney’s office, protesters carried signs reading “Free the children!” and “Stop caging families.” Clergy blocked the street by forming a human chain. They were handcuffed by police and led away.