Child welfare has always been a challenging profession; state and local agencies across America make difficult decisions every day to separate children from their parents. But those agencies have ways of minimizing the trauma that aren’t being employed by the Trump administration in separating immigrant families at the Mexican border…
Read MoreThe president, the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security have used lots of figures and interpretations of recent history to explain recent policy changes. Not all of it has been accurate.
Read MoreAn undocumented immigrant from Honduras sobbed as she told an attorney how federal authorities took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center, where she was awaiting prosecution for entering the country illegally.
Read MoreA recent study by state regulators has found 150 instances of health violations in more than a dozen shelters in Texas where immigrant unaccompanied children are housed after they are detained for trying to enter the United States illegally — or after they are separated from their families.
Read MoreAside from the few standout cases that make the news, we seldom hear about child-removal proceedings, which take place behind closed doors and affect almost exclusively the very poorest among us. But it’s worth looking at how the system works to understand just how extraordinary the government’s current actions have been in these cases.
Nearly 1,800 immigrant families were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border from October 2016 through February of this year, according to a senior government official, as President Donald Trump implemented stricter border enforcement policies.
Read MoreThe proposed Department of Homeland Security rule, which is expected to go into effect after the public comment period ends on Thursday, would allow immigration authorities to examine the criminal background and legal status of anyone who steps forward to sponsor unaccompanied migrant children — usually parents or close relatives already in the U.S. — as well as any other adults living in their home. The rule would also allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to collect biometric data, such as fingerprints, of the sponsors and other adults in the home.
Read MoreThe United Nations human rights office called on the Trump administration Tuesday to “immediately halt” its accelerating policy of separating children from their parents after they cross the U.S. border with Mexico, insisting there is “nothing normal about detaining children.
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