Courtesy of Pam Martens
Juan Sanchez, CEO of Southwest Key Programs
Southwest Key Programs first gained national media attention when Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon traveled to Brownsville, Texas on June 3 and attempted to enter one of its Federally-funded facilities to check on the immigrant children who had been forcibly taken from their parents under a Trump administration policy called “zero tolerance.” Southwest Key called the police on Merkley and denied him entry.
Under the policy that was fully implemented in early May by the Trump administration, even immigrant parents fleeing violence in Central America, with a previous lawful right to seek an asylum application in the U.S., were being incarcerated and having their children and infants as young as three months old forcibly taken from them. Over 2,000 children currently remain separated from their parents as a result of this policy.
After enormous public outcry and medical professionals stepping forward to call this emotional trauma to children a form of child abuse, Trump signed an Executive Order on June 20 reversing his child separation policy. He left the zero tolerance policy in place, meaning that asylum seekers will continue to be criminally charged.
What civil rights attorneys have discovered over the past week is that the Trump administration had no concern about how the immigrant parents would ever find their children after separation. The kids were shipped all over the United States with no agency coordinating which child belonged to which parent and where each were located. Indeed, babies and toddlers too young to communicate could offer no assistance as to the name of their parent. Adding to the horror, children who had come across the border with a parent were now being labeled by this system as “unaccompanied,” making it appear that they had traveled alone to the United States and thus removing the urgency of reuniting them with a parent. The final cruelty is that some of the parents have already been deported back to their country of origin, with the child left in an unknown location in the U.S.
As MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff Tweeted on June 24, “We can track our @FedEx packages down to the *second* if we want to. Why can’t the United States government figure out how to reunite 2,000 *kids* with their parents? Because there was no plan.”
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