President Trump tried to get people to think the family separation crisis at the border was over when he rescinded his original order instituting the practice after a national outcry.
The order, however, only applied to actions going forward and did nothing to solve the issue of the thousands of children who had already been torn from their families arms and shipped off to detention camps.
Now, seventeen states, including all of the West Coast states and most of the NorthEastern states, have filed a joint suit against the Trump administration to force them to reunite the immigrant families it has ripped asunder, according to an article in The Washington Post.
All of the states involved — Massachusetts, California, Delaware, Iowa, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington — have Democratic Attorneys General, and they joined Washington, D.C. in filing the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Seattle in the first litigation by states over this Trump immigration scheme.
“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.”
Around 2,300 children have been separated from their families by Trump immigration officials in the past few weeks, and many are housed thousands of miles away from their parents.
Trump initially falsely accused Democrats of responsibility for the zero tolerance family separation policy that he himself initiated and said that Congressional action was the only solution, before finally issuing an executive order to end it late last week.
However, according to The Washington Post:
“…the states say his order is riddled with caveats and fails to reunite parents and children who have already been torn apart. They accuse the administration of denying the parents and children due process; denying the immigrants, many of whom are fleeing gang violence in Central America, their right to seek asylum; and being arbitrary in applying the policy.”
In addition to the joint suit by the states, a federal judge in San Diego is also determining whether to order the Trump administration to reunite the separated families through an injunction sought by the ACLU.
Whichever legal suit is adjudicated first, let’s hope that the federal judges involved act swiftly to reunite the families that Trump’s draconian immigration policies have intentionally torn apart to serve as a deterrent warning for other potential asylum-seekers thinking about crossing the southern border.
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