El Paso: The fate of 2,300 children wrested from their parents at the US border with Mexico remained unclear on Friday two days after Donald Trump ordered an end to migrant family separations, as the president accused Democrats of spinning “phony” tales of suffering for electoral gain.
While the US leader bowed to global outrage over the splitting of families, conflicting messages were contributing to a sense of chaos in the handling of the crisis.
Government agencies were unable to say what would happen to the children already sent to tent camps and other facilities spread across the country while their parents were charged with immigration offenses.
Having been forced into a climbdown on the hot-button issue of immigration, Trump swung back into fighting mode — insisting he remained committed to the “zero tolerance” policy that aims to deter the flow of migrants from Central America. In a possible indication of the scope of the crackdown the Trump administration envisions, Time magazine reported that the US Navy is preparing plans to build detention centres for tens of thousands of immigrants on remote bases in support of the “zero tolerance” policy.
The administration remained under siege amid continued accounts of parents unable to find their children and no system in place for reuniting them.
Lawyers working to reunite families said they were struggling to navigate a labyrinthine process.
“It’s very difficult to reunite children with their parents because these government agencies were not prepared, and they’re not designed, for family separation,” said Efren Olivares, a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project that represents 381 migrant parents.
Near Washington, protesters shouting “Shame!” demonstrated early on Friday outside the home of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, two days after Trump announced her department would take over the handling and processing of families at the border. Some reunifications were taking place, though it was unclear whether they involved the 700 children taken from parents between October and April, or the 2,300 since the mandatory prosecution of illegal border-crossers, whose children were taken away as a result, began in early May.
Others remained in painful limbo.One woman, Cindy Madrid from El Salvador, repeatedly dictated her US-resident sister’s phone number to her six-year-old daughter before she crossed the border and the family was separated.
The child was one of those heard crying out — and reciting the number — in an audio recording reportedly made inside a detention center, which galvanised opposition to the separations.
“It’s maddening because at every moment I ask myself, ‘How is she? Has she eaten? Are they taking care of her? Do they shower her?’” Madrid told CNN on Thursday from a detention centre in Port Isabel, Texas.
The crisis has exposed bitter divisions on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers accused one another of political grandstanding — and at least one used the ProPublica audio recording to hammer his point home.
As Democratic congressman Ted Lieu derided the separations as “a functional equivalent of kidnapping,” he played the audio into a microphone, to a startled House chamber.
“I think the American people need to hear this,” he said. Tens of thousands of people from impoverished Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador and parts of Mexico have crossed the US border since last year requesting asylum. Trump’s crackdown hasn’t deterred them, at least not yet.
— AFP
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