source: WOLA
”Mass deportation” and human rights
Family separations
A multi-author investigation from CNN found over 100 cases of U.S. citizen children, “from newborns to teenagers, who have been left stranded without their parents,” whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported without giving them adequate time to make arrangements for their kids’ care.
ICE’s “Detained Parents Directive,” revised on July 2 with weaker protections for undocumented parents, calls for agents to give parents time to make arrangements for U.S. citizen children if they choose not to be deported with them. “Yet, some detained parents have alleged they were not given such accommodations,” CNN found.
This echoes allegations that WOLA and Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) heard repeatedly in interviews with people who receive deported migrants in Honduras and Guatemala in late July. “This is the new family separation crisis,” Zain Lakhani of WRC told CNN. (We discuss these separations with Lakhani in an August episode of WOLA’s Podcast.)
The report includes accounts of children being abruptly left with teenage siblings, acquaintances, or even strangers who are now grappling with how to care for them. CNN reporters found many of the families through GoFundMe pages for the children’s new guardians.
An ICE spokesperson said: “CNN is trying to obscure the fact that each of the illegal alien parents they are defending willingly chose to break our nation’s criminal and administrative laws and as a result of those choices, are responsible for what happens to their children—just as any U.S. citizen parent who breaks the law is when they are taken to jail.”
