A new report provides the most comprehensive look yet at the impacts of the first Trump administration’s family separation policy at the border in 2017.
Under the so-called zero tolerance policy, border officers referred adults they apprehended to be criminally prosecuted and sent their children to separate facilities.
Michael Garcia Bochenek, report co-author and senior counsel with the children’s rights division at Human Rights Watch, says the impacts of the policy are outlined in a report out this month called "We need to take away the children."
“[Then] Attorney General Jeff Sessions said we need to take away the children in a meeting, in a really early meeting in 2018, with federal prosecutors who were working along the U.S.-Mexico border. It was his marching orders to them,” he said. “What really makes this policy different, what really makes it stand out is that separation was deliberate, it wasn’t as though it was a side consequence of uniformly enforcing the law, or neutrally enforcing the law.”
The report uses internal documents obtained from government agencies tasked with managing immigrant children, along with the latest numbers from a Biden administration-crafted task force to reunite families.
They found at least 4,600 children were separated. Some 1,300 are still not accounted for today.
