THE LATEST:
July 31, 2018
Today top government officials testified before the Senate on Trump’s inhumane family separation policy. Despite being warned of the significant traumatic impact his policy would have on children, Trump implemented it anyway. Now, hundreds of children remain separated from their parents, many of whom may never be reunited. Here’s the latest:
The Trump administration was warned for months that family separation has “significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child.” Trump enacted his policy anyway.
Top HHS Official: “There is no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child.”
The Trump administration failed to give any warning to key government agencies before enacting their family separation policy.
NBC News: “Top officials from key government agencies told a Senate committee Tuesday that they first learned of the Trump administration's ‘zero tolerance’ policy, which led to the separation of migrant children from their parents, when the Attorney General announced the policy publicly in April.”
The Trump administration’s intentionally cruel policy and failure to plan are why hundreds of children remain separated from their parents, the majority of whom have been deported and yet to be tracked down.
Senator Durbin: “It's hard to imagine, isn't it? The United States of America says, 'We're going to start separating kids forcibly from their parents. We're not going to set up a system of tracking those kids so we can find them or match them back up with their parents. We're just going to separate them.’”
Senator Feinstein: “Top Judiciary Committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California said she was concerned that Trump’s ‘deeply immoral and haphazard’ policy ‘may essentially orphan hundreds of immigrant children’ if children still in government custody aren’t reunited with their parents.”