More than 200 migrant children, separated from their parents under the government of former United States President Donald Trump, have been reunited with their families according to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.
“So far, we have reunited more than 200 children separated from their parents and it is estimated that there are approximately 1,000 more children who remain separated,” he said.
The Task Force for Family Reunification “has contacted more than 500 parents and nearly 400 children are now in the process of reunification,” Mayorkas told the House Judiciary Committee.
The Department of Homeland Security continues to contact NGOs to contact families “but one of the biggest obstacles we have (…) is to overcome the distrust that the previous administration planted through its cruel policies, and many are still afraid because of the trauma they experienced,” he added.
Under the “zero tolerance” policy applied by Donald Trump from 2017 to January 2021, thousands of children were separated from their families to discourage the massive arrival of migrants, mostly from Central America, but many were already reunited during his mandate.
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A human approach
When current President Joe Biden arrived at the White House, he promised a more “human” immigration policy and created a group to reunite children who were still separated from their parents.
“We are allowing them to meet here in the United States and we are giving them a humanitarian permit so that they have a certain level of stability for a period of three years, which is renewable depending on the circumstances of each case,” explained Mayorkas, who this week attended different House committees to discuss its department’s budget for the next fiscal year.
He remembered a conversation he had with a mother. “It was incredibly heartbreaking to hear a mother talk about how despite her physical reunion there was a distance between her and her teenage daughter, who was still suffering from the trauma of separation,” he told the congressmen.
Biden supports compensation for separated migrant families, but his administration abandoned negotiations with lawyers who filed lawsuits on behalf of some of them.
The plaintiffs, who are seeking compensation for what they consider psychological damage, announced that they will continue with the lawsuits.
Throughout his appearances this week, Mayorkas insisted that the solution to the migration crisis on the border with Mexico involves addressing the causes of migration and legislation.
“We have to fix our broken immigration system and … it is broken in many ways,” he reiterated Thursday.
When he arrived at the White House, Biden proposed a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants in a country that has not had a law of this type for 35 years, but it was never voted on.
By: AFP
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