When the ACLU filed Ms. L v. ICE exactly two years ago, it was clear what was going on at the border was shocking and unprecedented: A Congolese mother and her six-year-old daughter had been torn apart by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for seemingly no reason at all. ICE sent them to detention sites thousands of miles away from one another, where for four months they had hardly any contact and didn’t know whether they’d ever see each other again. It was an act of senseless cruelty — a seemingly exceptional case that later turned out to not be so unusual after all. 

What ICE did to Ms. L and her daughter was hard enough to grasp on its own, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. There were thousands of Ms. Ls in detention sites across the country, separated from their children with no explanation, and what happened wasn’t a random act of cruelty but part of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. 

After months of litigation and a court order to stop the official practice, the Trump administration admitted that it had separated more than 2,700 children from their parents. But they didn’t tell the whole story. What they left out were the children they separated who had already left government custody at the time of the court’s order. When the judge demanded the full picture, the government disclosed an additional 1,556 children separated since 2017. In all, that means the Trump administration separated over 4,200 children from their parents. 

The ACLU has managed to reunite over 2,000 families since the injunction in 2018. But the fight to stop separations and reunite families continues. The administration is using loopholes to continue separating some families with excuses including dirty diapers, expired driver’s licenses, and other minor offenses that would never justify separation under any U.S. child welfare laws. Today, the ACLU is fighting to stop these separations and locate every last family that remains separated. 

How ICE and CBP used fear and misinformation to deport parents

ICE and CBP showed no mercy when they separated children from their parents. Border agents took one young boy with a vision impairment from his parents without letting him take his glasses case, which he needed to protect the glasses his family had saved up to afford. Several other separated kids had disabilities, including a deaf girl taken from her father.           

After separation, border authorities used a pattern of fear and misinformation to deport parents without their children. They often told parents they had no right to asylum and that they had two options: get deported with their child, or alone. Ultimately, hundreds of parents were deported without their children. 

Some parents knowingly chose to leave their children in the U.S., believing it was the child’s only chance to get asylum and protect them from the danger they originally fled in their home countries. These parents were forced into making an unbearable decision between protecting their child and staying together. 

Many parents were deported without understanding what they had agreed to, forced into signing papers in a language they couldn’t read. At times ICE and CBP agents told parents that their child would be waiting for them on the plane. When two parents learned that this was a lie — that their children would not be coming with them — officials had to physically force them onto the plane. 

One mother, Belen, fled to the U.S. in fear for her life, only to have her son taken away as soon as she arrived at the border. A survivor of sexual abuse, Belen pursued asylum after passing a credible fear hearing. Border officials later threatened her by telling her that pursuing asylum would only prolong separation from her son, so she abandoned her case. In the end, Belen returned to the country she fled, even though she had a strong case for asylum as an abuse survivor. 

Tracking down untracked parents in Central America

The reckless way that ICE and CBP deported parents makes reunification difficult and in some cases nearly impossible. Border authorities deported hundreds of parents, and in many cases didn’t bother to keep any meaningful contact information, like a proper address or working phone number. In 2018, when a federal judge ordered the government to reunite all the families, the administration tried to shift the responsibility onto the ACLU instead. 

Reuniting these families is of course the responsibility of the people who separated them. But the Trump administration wasn’t acting fast enough, and the families were understandably reluctant to trust them again. That summer, the ACLU formed a steering committee to locate and help parents, along with partners at Kids in Need of Defense, the Women’s Refugee Commission, Justice in Motion, and the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. 

One of the reunited families was that of Ricardo and Luna, a father and daughter from Guatemala who were separated near McAllen, Texas in December 2017. Border officials sent three-year-old Luna to a Texas shelter and deported Ricardo, tricking him into believing she would soon join him. But Ricardo returned to Guatemala City with just a sheet of paper containing his daughter’s alien registration number. He was given a toll-free phone number to call for information about Luna, but each time he called, the operators told him they had no record of her in the system. 

“When I saw her, I felt my soul ache. She was skinny and sad for all the time she hadn’t seen us. It was a sad but at the same time very joyful moment.” — Ricardo

Luna was part of the class of children under age five prioritized by the court order for reunification. But it wasn’t until a month after the reunification deadline that she was finally returned to her father. By then, the length of her detention was among the longest of any child affected by family separation. 

Seeking damages for lifelong trauma

After months of separation, Ever Reyes-Mejia was reunited with his three-year-old son, Sammy. But Sammy seemed to have trouble recognizing his parents. Their difficult reunion was captured on video, showing us how separation causes trauma that reunification alone can’t fix. 

The trauma of separation will cause lifelong trauma for whole families, but children under the age of five, like Sammy, will feel the effects the most. To hold the Trump administration accountable, the ACLU filed another lawsuit last year seeking damages for these families, as well as the creation of a fund to pay for professional mental health services.

At shelters in the U.S., children have been hospitalized for behavioral health issues that arose during detention, including suicide attempts. And like Sammy, children are showing signs of trauma even after reunification. One young boy would cry whenever his father left the room because he thought he was going to be abandoned again. 

Parents also face an increased risk of developing mental health disorders. Belen was described by a former asylum officer as “one of the most traumatized and vulnerable persons that I have ever interviewed.” During her separation from her son, she was in such distress that part of her face would become paralyzed for days at a time. She has since been reunited with her son, but due to the trauma of separation, she won’t leave her house unaccompanied.

Detention itself is traumatic. Ricardo’s daughter Luna was held in a shelter plagued by sexual abuse allegations, and there is a well-documented history of CBP abusing children in its custody. Facilities are often overcrowded, with scarce food and water and no way to bathe or brush teeth. At several shelters, parents staged hunger strikes to protest the refusal of ICE and CBP officials to provide any information about their children. 

“I did not know what was happening and I had no idea where my son was.” — Eduardo

These traumas will stay with families for a lifetime, and it’s the Trump administration’s fault. A July 2019 House Oversight staff report concluded that those responsible have “not been candid with the American people” about the horrors families faced, and that the separations were “more harmful, traumatic, and chaotic than previously known.” 

Where we stand two years after Ms. L

Ms. L and her daughter had traveled across ten countries and three continents seeking safety here, only to be traumatized with separation. Her daughter had to spend her seventh birthday in a detention cell, alone, not knowing whether she’d ever see her mother again. But they were among the fortunate ones: soon after the lawsuit filed on their behalf, Ms. L and her daughter were reunited. 

Family separation is just one of the ways the Trump administration has deliberately tried to stop people from seeking asylum here. The administration has also tried to gut asylum protections for immigrants fleeing domestic violence and gang brutality, ban people from applying for asylum outside of formal ports of entry, force asylum seekers into Mexico to await far-off court dates in the U.S., and bar asylum seekers who have passed through other countries without first applying for asylum in those countries. Poor infrastructure and instability in many countries in the region makes it incredibly difficult to live in safety, let alone go through the asylum process. The administration is trying to make the asylum process so torturous that people will continue to live in danger rather than seek safety. 

Denying protection for people fleeing danger is a violation of the law and basic human rights. The U.S. government must treat them with humanity and uphold their right to seek asylum. 

NOTE: All names have been changed to protect identity and safety.

Leila Rafei, Content Strategist, ACLU

Black History Month is meant to be a celebration of the achievements of Black Americans, in spite of our country’s history of blatant, intentional racism. Despite that intention, the American narrative surrounding the enslaving of Black Americans has always attempted to rewrite our past, generating a kinder, gentler image of slavery.

President Trump and his appointees are the embodiment of that attempt to rewrite Black history. Recently, President Trump and his appointee, Philadelphia U. S. Attorney William McSwain, mocked the history that serves as the foundation for Black History Month. While a kinder interpretation of their actions might say that their understanding of past and current U.S. history is limited, their distortion of Black history during this month brings to mind an Orwellian warning — who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past. 

For example, U.S. Attorney McSwain spoke this month in defense of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies. During his remarks to about 500 people, McSwain compared so-called sanctuary cities, which have policies designed to protect immigrant communities, to the Southern secessionists who enslaved Black Americans:

“What an amazing concept – one that would have elated those who opposed the desegregation of lunch counters in the Deep South, or those who told Rosa Parks to go to the back of the bus, or those who stood in the schoolhouse doorway to prevent African American children from entering. 

And this concept would have absolutely thrilled Southern slave owners. A sanctuary from federal law, where they could continue their practice of human bondage … The secessionists who defied federal authority during our nation’s Civil War are gone but not forgotten. They did not fight in vain. No, their spirit lives on, right here in Philadelphia, in the Cradle of Liberty. Their spirit lives on in the hearts and minds of those who declare Philadelphia a ‘sanctuary city.’”

McSwain is attempting to compare the slaveholders who defied federal authorities when they seceded from the Union to local governments that decline to collaborate with federal immigration authorities in the deportation and detention of their community members. But McSwain’s focus on “obeying the law” crumbles under even a minimum amount of scrutiny.

“Obeying the law” leaves out the fact that slavery was legal in America in both colonial and post-Constitutional days for almost a quarter millennium – 246 years. To those who say America did not begin until the Constitution was ratified, realize that America had a chance to reject the colonial notion of slavery. Instead, our founding fathers doubled down and gave specific protections to slave owners in the Constitution. Separate but equal was law in America for 89 years after the civil war. Those who opposed the desegregation of lunch counters weren’t mad at a social convention that prevented them from living regular life. They protested the fact that it was statutorily legal to segregate lunch counters under federal law for decades – just as it was legal to segregate travel, education, and all other forms of Black existence.

McSwain’s logic sees no difference between the students who sat at lunch counters to protest segregation and those who wanted to disobey the law when segregation was outlawed. It finds no difference between those who worked with Harriet Tubman on the underground railroad and those who wanted to keep slavery once the war ended. This logic divorces morality from the analysis. It can, and has, justified atrocities. 

The commonality that links enslaving people with the immigrant justice movement is that in both cases people acted in defense of human dignity, against policies that rejected that dignity for people with Black and brown skin. McSwain’s faulty logic is a vile contradiction to the true principles of Black History Month. The man who appointed McSwain went even further. 

During the State of the Union speech at the very beginning of Black History Month, President Trump gave Rush Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom. That medal is intended to recognize an “especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace, or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”

Trump said that Limbaugh fit that criteria because of his voice on important issues. A few quotes from that same voice include:

• “Holocaust? Ninety Million Indians? Only four million left? They have all the casinos — what’s to complain about?”
• “The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.”
• “If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it’s Caucasians.”
• “The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without weapons. There, I said it.”
• “They are 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?”

Honoring Black contributions to America — the foundation of Black History Month — is completely inconsistent with honoring Rush Limbaugh for his racist rhetoric. 

Limbaugh and Trump are singing from the same hymnal. To Limbaugh, Black NFL players are similar to street gangs like the Bloods and Crips, to Trump they are “sons of bitches.” Trump says his ancestors tamed a continent, won’t apologize for America, and Limbaugh agrees, saying Caucasians are guilt-free for enslaving Africans. Limbaugh thinks that the NAACP, Rosa Parks’ employer, should get a liquor store and practice robberies, while Trump bemoans the “rapists, drug dealers and murderers” and “shithole countries” populated by Black and brown people. 

Make no mistake, Limbaugh, McSwain, and Trump are all singing the same tune. It is not the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,”but rather an ode to hateful rhetoric that contradicts the very foundation of Black History Month.

Jeffery Robinson, ACLU Deputy Legal Director and Director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality