The ACLU said Thursday that the government dropped off a mother, recently separated at the border from her children per Trump administration policy, “alone at a bus stop with her children, one of whom was six months old,” without providing proper notice to lawyers suing to force the reunifications.
As a result, reunified families are not receiving legal assistance and support services, according to the ACLU, which complained that it is having trouble tracking the reunifications.
The allegations came in a joint status report filed by the ACLU, representing families separated by Trump administration policy, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The filing largely covered what one ICE and one Health and Human Services official told reporters on a conference call earlier Thursday — that of the 103 children under 5 years old who a court ordered be reunited with their parents by Tuesday, 57 had been reunited by Thursday.
The government gave somewhat more detailed explanations in the court filing for the 46 children who remained separated from their parents, including listing the charges or convictions of 11 parents whose criminal backgrounds ICE said excluded them from the court order.
The ACLU pushed back on a number of fronts, starting with what it said was a lack of information from the government about those newly excluded from the lawsuit.
“Plaintiffs have not yet received any specific information about most of the 23 individuals who Defendants claim have dropped out of the class or are ineligible for reunification,” the ACLU’s portion of the joint filing read. “Plaintiffs have therefore not been able to verify whether those parents are, indeed, Class Members eligible for reunification at this time. Plaintiffs have also not been able to determine whether any criminal convictions those parents have render them a danger to their children—and therefore not entitled to reunification at all—or merely not Class Members.”
ICE did list some information in the court filing Thursday, listing things like “Robbery conviction” and “Wanted by El Salvador” as reasons certain adults had been excluded from the class deemed eligible to be reunited with their children.
The ACLU also said it hadn’t received any “independent verification” of the families ICE claimed had been reunited.
And, as evidenced by the mother left alone with her children at a bus stop, the civil liberties group asserted that ICE had broken an earlier pledge to “provide Plaintiffs’ counsel with notice of the time and place for each reunification, so that Plaintiffs’ counsel could arrange for private and NGO service providers to assist the families and verify reunification.”
“This did not happen,” the filing said plainly. Noting the mother and her six-month-old, the ACLU said that “through a series of phone calls between the Class Member, her attorney, and another advocate, the Class Member finally obtained a bus ticket on Tuesday around midnight.”
Referring to parents who’d been deported without their children Thursday morning, Matthew Albence, executive associate director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, told reporters that ICE was “working with the consular officials in the foreign governments to provide information that would help facilitate” their reunification with their children.
The ACLU said in Thursday’s filing that its lawyers were “not aware of any specific steps Defendants have taken even to locate these 12 [deported] Class Members.”
Finally, in an effort to avoid similar missed deadlines for the next category of children — those aged 5 and up — to be reunited with their parents, the ACLU proposed a series of benchmarks for the government to meet in advance of the July 26 deadline, in addition to asking the court that the government be forced to set aside money for mental health counseling for the children.
Read the joint status report below:
I just want to point out that this deliberate cruelty was carried out at some point by those “just doing their jobs” ICE agents, the ones we are supposed to be thinking of while tut-tutting the calls to abolish the agency.
Obviously someone is laughing about thumbing their nose at the court; at the fact that not a single one of the reunifications included the kind of heads-up to lawyers and care organizations that was pledged by the agency and that was in any case a matter of bare human decency. I’m sure you could follow the responsibility trail up the bureaucratic ladder all the way to some vague hand-waving of Trump’s to “make them suffer”, but that’s not the point. The people who abandoned these women and children alone, with nothing, with no one, with no resources and no assistance, committed deliberate acts of cruelty
Sorry folks, I’m just about done with thinking there’s a good Nazi in there. At some point those low-level ICE workers need to privilege humanity over their jobs.
So yeah, this agency has lately showed nothing but cruelty and incompetence. Whatever you want to call it, reorganization or restructuring or reassigning or whatever, ICE needs to go.
And of course they are following up on these “Robbery conviction” and “Wanted by El Salvador” cases to make sure they don’t just have the wrong person, same name. Right?
Not to mention…wanted by your country of origin on bogus charges is on of the reasons people seek asylum, no?
I agree with this. There should come a point where a person placed in this position can no longer keep doing something that is illegal, immoral or inhuman. I’m not sure abolishing ICE will solve this, but something has to happen.
Masha Gessen (I think) advised those stuck in an authoritarian regime “if you cannot be brave, at least be kind”
I too originally thought that calls to abolish ICE were overkill. However. This agency cannot follow a court order. It cannot ensure that it exercises its authority with constitutional bounds. It has not even demonstrated that it provided its staff with properly formulated policies and lawful orders. And now it appears not a goddamn one of its front line employees can muster basic human decency.
This is an agency that is rotten top to bottom. new senior managers will not fix this. ICE to be abolished, its responsibilities handed over to another agency and everyone of its employees needs to go back through the hiring and training process-the ones that don’t wind up in prison that is.