Trump has refused to rule out reinstating the ‘zero tolerance’ policy that ripped 5,500 weeping children from the arms of parents. More than 1,000 remain separated to this very day
The Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy in 2018 that resulted in the deliberate separation of 5,500 wailing and traumatized children, including nursing infants and toddlers, from their parents and guardians remains one of the ugliest chapters in modern U.S. history. More than six years after a federal judge ordered Donald Trump and his administration to begin the reunification of these children, many remain deeply traumatized and fearful that a potential second Trump term will resurrect this human rights disaster from coast to coast.
Last week, the Harris-Walz campaign provided a platform for some of these children to publicly share their harrowing experiences, hosting a press event featuring three kids who were separated from their parents under the policy. Billy was just nine when U.S. immigration officials separated him from his father, initially telling him that they would be apart for the day because his dad had to go to court. Billy would not see his father again for 40 days.
Children ripped away from their parents under Trump speak out for the first time: “I suffered a lot of trauma… I go to a therapist, but I still have the fear of Trump being reelected… I don't want other kids to go through what I did” pic.twitter.com/O5YTsZfBLs
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 16, 2024
“We didn’t know that we were going to suffer the pain that we did. We thought we had a better future planned ahead of us coming to this country,” Billy said during the event. During a subsequent interview with Spanish-language news program Despierta America, he described in further detail how he was taken thousands of miles away to New York, where he says he was told that he was going to be put up for adoption and “was never going to see my mom and dad again.”
“His father, meanwhile, was detained without knowing anything about his son,” Despierta America reported.
More than a month would pass until Billy and his dad, Charly, would get to hug again. Charly told Despierta America that he didn’t understand why he was being punished. He was simply trying to give his son a better life. “After I went and ran to my dad, I hugged him, and I told him I did not want this to happen ever again. And he promised me that he would not ever leave me again,” Billy said during the press event. But despite the court-ordered access to mental health services, the trauma of his horrific separation still painfully lingers for many of these children.
“And after that, we still fear. We — I go to therapists, but I still have the fear of Trump being reelected, and that same thing happening to me or other kids ever again,” Billy said. “Kamala Harris helped us be together again, and she helped us be a family again. And I don’t want this to happen to any more kids. I was separated, and a lot more kids were separated, too.”
Trump has refused to rule out reinstating the zero-tolerance policy should he win the 2024 election, but all indications point to its return should he again occupy the Oval Office. Trump recently confirmed that Thomas Homan, a former acting ICE director considered the “intellectual ‘father’ of the idea to separate migrant families as a deterrent,” will be “on board” if he wins next month. Chad Wolf, the unlawfully appointed former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, testified to Congress last year that family separation “should be on the table” in a second Trump term.
And in one of the most disturbing examples of the GOP’s descent on immigration, Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna earlier this year downplayed the traumatic effects of the policy and unequivocally stated that “we want family separation.”
Not only are Trump allies eager to reinstate the horrific and failed policies from the first administration, but their mass deportation would also be a vast expansion of family separation extending to US citizen children with undocumented parents.
CHILDREN AND PARENTS WERE TOLD THEY’D NEVER SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN
It wasn’t just Billy and Charly who heard those terrifying words after seeking safety in the United States. Some parents said their children were separated from them “under the guise of being given baths” and “weren’t told where their sons and daughters were or when they would see them again,” The Washington Post reported in 2019. “Others were held in chain-link holding pens. Some were babies. Many were lost in the system.” One separated dad, Wilbur, said in a lawsuit that when he and other fathers asked about the whereabouts of their children, officers “insulted them and threatened to punish them for making eye contact … When officers entered the cell, they often asked Wilbur and the men detained with him why they were trying to invade the United States.” In a lawsuit filed on behalf of four families in 2022, one Guatemalan mother was told her child would be put up for adoption. “They told M.S.E. to forget about her son,” documents said. Two months would pass before the two would be reunited. In their 2020 report, Physicians for Human Rights described one Salvadoran mom being told by U.S. officials that her daughter would be adopted out to an American family and that she would never see her again.
“Nine of the 17 parents reported to PHR clinicians that immigration authorities abruptly separated them from their children and that they were prohibited from saying goodbye or consoling them.” PHR said that in all cases documented by their experts, “there was a period where parents were unaware of their children’s whereabouts, could not contact them and had no assurance of, or timeline for, eventual contact or reunification,” and were kept in the dark for weeks and even months at a time. PHR concluded that the actions of the Trump administration constituted “enforced disappearance,” “which occurs when state agents conceal the fate or whereabouts of a person who is deprived of liberty.”
This term has usually been associated with human rights abuses in dictatorial regimes in Chile and Argentina, where authorities “disappeared” political dissidents. Most of the families interviewed by PHR were separated for at least a month, and some for as long as 70 days.
‘HARM TO THE CHILDREN WAS A PART OF THE POINT‘
Children were intentionally traumatized by a Trump administration that was warned by career officials of the damaging consequences of family separation but proceeded anyway. In a 2021 study published in the PLOS ONE medical journal, PHR said that some children continued to meet the criteria for PTSD two years following their reunification with loved ones. “The evaluating clinicians noted that the children exhibited reactions that included regression in age-appropriate behaviors, such as crying, not eating, having nightmares and other sleeping difficulties, excessive parental attachment, clinging to caregivers, urinary incontinence, and recurring feelings of fear following reunification with their parents,” experts said in the peer-reviewed medical journal.
The Trump administration knew exactly what was coming. More than a year prior to then-Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III stepping in front of cameras to formally announce that it would be the official policy of the U.S. to tear children from their parents, Jonathan White of the Health and Human Services Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and others had warned their superiors that such a policy “would cause harm for the children,” Government Executive reported in 2019. That same year, the HHS watchdog said that inspectors who visited facilities found inconsolable children who believed that their parents had abandoned them. Others expressed terror at the sight of well-meaning workers, unable to “distinguish facility staff from the immigration agents who separated them from their parents,” the report said.
“Harm to children was part of the point,” White says in “Separated,” a new documentary based on NBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s devastating book of the same name. “They believed it would terrify families into not coming.” White called Scott Lloyd, an anti-choice fanatic who led HHS during the family separation crisis, “the most prolific child abuser in modern American history.” Of course, he’s not alone. “We need to take children away,” Sessions is reported to have said in private. Noted white nationalist Stephen Miller, who was also Sessions’ former aide in the Senate, reportedly wanted to take as many as 25,000 children. Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s Homeland Security secretary, lied about the existence of a family separation policy when in reality it bore her signature.
MORE THAN 1,000 CHILDREN ARE STILL SEPARATED
Trump has refused to rule out reinstating family separation despite the fact that more than six years after the policy’s official implementation, as many as 1,400 children remain separated from their loved ones due to his administration’s cruelty, incompetence, and indifference. One hurdle encountered by the Biden administration task force that has been steadily working to reunite these families “was the total disorganization with which ‘zero tolerance’ had been implemented,” New York Magazine reported in February. As numerous reports eventually confirmed, there was no “central database” linking separated children, despite then-HHS Sec. Alex Azar’s claims that he could “with just basic keystrokes, within seconds … find any child in our care for any parent.” The chaotic disorganization only delayed reunifications. “We give you a luggage tag for your luggage,” Gisela Voss, a former board member of Together & Free, told New York Magazine. “We separated parents from their kids and didn’t give them, like, a number.”
“There was no intention of reuniting families, and so they didn’t design the system to be able to keep track,” said Nan Schivone, Justice in Motion’s legal director.
For hundreds of others, reunification remains out of reach due to the fact that the Trump administration quickly deported their parents back to Central America without them, including several instances where moms and dads begged U.S. officials to let them be deported together, CBS News reported in 2021. “Therefore, at least some of ICE’s removals of parents without their children were intentional, and not just inadvertent incidents resulting from human error or inaccurate records,” the Department of Homeland Security inspector general said. This incalculable trauma was evident immediately after a court ordered the reunification of families in June 2018. In a video of one reunification, a toddler is shown rejecting the embrace of his grief-stricken mother. “I’m your mommy,” she cried to the child.
Father and son separated under Trump admin speak out
The Harris-Walz campaign held an event with families separated under the Trump administration.
A father and son who were separated under the Trump administration join @jdbalart to share more on their "terrible" experience. pic.twitter.com/dYCPwK94r7
— MSNBC Reports (@MSNBC_reports) October 16, 2024
In a bilingual interview with MSNBC’s José Díaz-Balart following their remarks at the Harris-Walz event, Billy and his dad Charly said that they never expected to be ripped apart from each other after fleeing to the U.S. for safety. Charly said he remembers being told by U.S. immigration officials to bathe Billy, believing that it was an indication that they would soon be released together. But they then “literally ripped him from my arms,” Charly told Díaz-Balart.
The dad said that if he would say one thing to Donald Trump, it would be to not “be so cruel with the children, with the parents that come protecting our children.”
“We come fleeing persecution. We bring evidence and everything,” Charly said. “Please try not to treat us the way that we were treated. We in this detention center, how they would scream at us. ‘Our President Trump is going to send you back, and you will not see your child ever again.’ It was something that the truth be told, it was racism that I sensed, that I saw against us. And it’s something that I can’t—no one can tell me. I lived it myself. And I would tell him, ‘Donald Trump, don’t you have children? Why? Why do you treat us so inhumane? And why these policies so difficult, tough against our Latino, our Central Americans that come here fighting to protect our children?’”
As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer famously wrote in his 2018 piece, the cruelty is the point. And they want more of it. Trump and Project 2025 seek to carry out a mass deportation effort that would rip apart American families from coast to coast. Homan, the intellectual father of the family separation policy and a Project 2025 author, has said that if Trump comes back in January, “I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen … They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.” Miller, who is also allied with Project 2025, has already been previewing this agenda by using the anti-immigrant judicial pipeline to separate American families. Believe them.
And while Soboroff correctly noted that nobody in the Trump administration “has been held accountable for a policy Biden has called ‘criminal,’” we have the power of accountability through the ballot box, which we collectively leveraged in 2020 to fire Trump and his family separation accomplices from the White House. This has directly resulted in the reunification of nearly 800 children, thanks to the Biden administration’s task force and advocates.
In 2024, we have the power to continue this effort and to stop the resurrection and expansion of this unspeakable chapter in our history. Billy and thousands of children demand it. Our nation requires it. Family separation of millions of American families is on the ballot. We must vote like it.
