The following is a statement from Pili Tobar, Managing Director of America’s Voice, following a groundbreaking OIG report:
The draft memo released yesterday confirms what we’ve suspected all along. The Trump administration devised a comprehensive plan to deliberately harm children and families to deter their parents from seeking asylum in the United States. They separated more families than we knew, and there are still children lost in the system and parents who don’t know how to get them back. And the administration isn’t done yet. The report makes clear the administration’s intentions to get rid of the Flores Settlement that prohibits the indefinite detention of children, gut the TVPRA that ensures unaccompanied minors from Central America are given a meaningful opportunity to apply for protection.
This is a humanitarian crisis, and the way to solve it is not by building a wall. The Trump administration needs to be held accountable, the separation of children from their parents needs to be thoroughly investigated, every single child who has been taken from their parents needs to be reunited with their families, and the administration’s malevolent plans need to be stopped before another child is victimized. Rather than shutting down the government and hurting federal workers and American families to appease President Trump’s temper tantrum over a made up crisis, the administration should reopen the government, do their job, and get to work on solving the humanitarian crisis they created themselves.
