A federal judge on Monday ruled that the Trump administration has been within its power to continue tearing additional migrant families apart at the southern border, The Washington Post reports.
The decision came after the American Civil Liberties Union returned to court last year in response to alarming findings that the administration had continued to separate as many as 1,000 families since Judge Dana Sabraw’s June 2018 court order blocking widespread separation. Some of these additional families, advocates said, had been torn apart by U.S. border officials “for the most minor crimes,” and for reasons as petty as a dirty diaper.
But The Washington Post reports that in his decision this week, “Sabraw indicated he was uncomfortable second-guessing government decisions to separate children on grounds that parents were considered unfit or dangerous, or in other limited circumstances like criminal history, communicable diseases and doubts about parentage. He found no evidence that the government was abusing its discretion.”
Advocates certainly haven’t seen it that way. “Lawyers wrote that one migrant lost his daughter because a U.S. Border Patrol agent claimed that he had failed to change the girl’s diaper,” The Post reported. In another instance, officials ignored an asylum-seeker’s plea to conduct DNA testing on him and his three-year-old daughter to prove they were related. By the time officials agreed and proved the dad right, he’d already agreed to be deported because he couldn’t stand being detained any longer. This, as advocates have long said, has been state-sanctioned kidnapping.
This decision is no doubt a setback in the fight to keep families together, and even a part of Sabraw’s ruling in favor of these families could turn into something very concerning. “In a partial victory for the ACLU, the judge said the government must settle any doubts about parentage before separating families by using DNA tests that deliver results in about 90 minutes,” The Post continued. That could no doubt prevent more cases like that of the deported asylum-seeker and his daughter, but a worry is that this administration will abuse that as well, and DNA test more people than they need to.
Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the ACLU, told The Post that “The court strongly reaffirmed that the Trump administration bears the burden if it attempts to separate families based on an accusation that the adult is not the child’s parent. We are evaluating the decision to determine next steps on how to ensure that children are not separated from their parents based on minor infractions.” It’s going to require all of us to keep being vocal, and vigilant, about these families as well.