Dems slam ‘stain’ of border policy
Committee member calls separations ‘child abuse’
The Trump administration received its first official tongue-lashing Thursday by a Democratic-led committee over the “zero tolerance” policy that has led to thousands of migrant family separations along the southern border.
One by one, Democratic members labeled the policy, announced last year by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and implemented by the Department of Homeland Security, as shameful, abhorrent and a “stain on the conscience of the U.S.”
“I really think that what we’re talking about is state-sponsored child abuse, and I would go as far as to say kidnapping of children,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., during the hearing of the Committee on Energy and Commerce’s oversight subcommittee.
Further enraging those members was the admission from a Department of Health and Human Services official and several government investigators that the practice of family separations actually started a year before Sessions’ public announcement in April 2018 and that it continues to this day, albeit in smaller numbers.
Since the administration has not completed a process to identify and track all separated families, it’s unknown how many children were separated and are still being separated.
Cmdr. Jonathan White, who oversaw the care of minors for HHS, said he raised concerns about the mass separation of families as far back as February 2017 when he noticed an increase in the number of separated children entering the system.
He told the committee he warned his superiors that a family separation policy would lead to psychological trauma for the children and would overwhelm the ability of the department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which takes custody of migrant minors, to care for those children.
White said he was told in 2017 that no such policy existed. “I was told family separation wasn’t going to happen,” White said. Then, in April 2018, he saw Sessions announce that policy on TV.
“Neither I nor any career person in ORR would ever have supported such a policy proposal,” White said. “Separating children from their parents poses significant risks of traumatic psychological injury to the child. The consequences of separation for many children will be lifelong.”
The family separation practice was supposed to end after a public outcry prompted President Donald Trump to sign an executive order overturning it. A few days later, a federal judge ordered that all separated families must be reunited. “Of the 2,816 children that we were able to identify as separated, only six remain who might potentially still be reunified,” White said Thursday.
Ann Maxwell, assistant inspector general for HHS, said families can be legally separated if the parent is deemed to be a danger to the child. She said Homeland Security agents give “limited information” about the separations when they hand children over to HHS.