Washington, DC – The Houston Chronicle reported yesterday that Texas has started to separate families at the border over the past month:
“Since the early days of Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative, state troopers arresting migrants along the Rio Grande have been told to keep families together and send them to federal authorities to make their asylum claims.
But in recent weeks, officials from the Texas Department of Public Safety have broken up at least two dozen families by detaining fathers on trespassing charges, while the other members — including small children — are transferred to Border Patrol agents, according to spouses and attorneys representing those migrants. In many of those cases, the attorneys told Hearst Newspapers, the fathers remain in state custody and have not seen their families since.”
The following is a statement from America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas:
“As if recent revelations about pushing migrant children back into the Rio Grande and denying water to mothers wasn’t enough, we now are learning that Gov. Greg Abbott is reinstituting family separations and forcing us to revisit one of the darkest chapters of recent American history.
The American Academy of Pediatrics called the family separation policy of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller ‘torture’ for good reason. When confronted with the horrible details, Americans across the political spectrum spoke out and said ‘never again’ and ‘not in our names.’
Now Texas and Gov. Abbott are challenging that notion as part of their relentless, dehumanizing and politically motivated cruelty toward immigrants. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Gov. Abbott is following in Trump’s footsteps or thumbing his nose at basic human decency and American values. And defending it all by doubling down on the same white nationalist conspiracy theory, that there is a literal “invasion” occurring along the border, that motivated the mass-murderer who attacked El Paso four years ago today.
But America and Americans are better than this. In 2018 and still today, we condemn the cruelty of the separation of families as a matter of deterrence policy and dehumanizing political theater. The Biden administration should challenge this latest outrage from Texas and Americans across the political spectrum should again speak out to denounce what is happening in our country and in our name.”
