Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Tell DHS: Stop separating families at the border


The petition to Department of Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen:
“Separating families at the border is inhumane and unnecessary. Stop this cruel practice immediately.”
Add your name:
Sign the petition ►

Donald Trump and the racists who are implementing his dangerous immigration agenda are doing everything they can to instill fear in immigrant communities. Right now, they are ramping up their attacks on families by ripping children from their parents at the border.

This cruel and inhumane policy is a choice, one made by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen with back-up from Trump's notoriously anti-immigrant Attorney General Jeff Sessions.1


Ripping children away from their parents in extremely stressful and traumatic circumstances can cause lifelong damage to a person’s health and well-being. But since October of last year, Nielsen's DHS has separated more than 700 children, including at least 100 under the age of four, from their parents.2 The ACLU recently obtained nearly 30,000 pages of records from DHS and Customs and Border Protection that document systemic neglect and abuse of migrant children during President Obama's administration.3

Emboldened by Trump's racism and xenophobia, Nielsen and Sessions have given CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents even more permission to terrorize immigrants. We have to push back now or there will be more and more cases like these where deportation agents have separated:

A Honduran mother from her 18-month-old child for more than 3 months after they presented themselves as asylum seekers to CBP.4

Mother and daughter asylum seekers fleeing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For months, ICE held the 7-year-old daughter in a youth shelter more than 2,000 miles away from where it detained her mother.5

A mother and her two children fleeing gang violence in El Salvador. ICE jailed the 11-year-old and 3-year-old children in a facility built to house unaccompanied minors. Immigration enforcement refused to give the mother any information about her children’s whereabouts for more than a month.6

A father and infant son asylum seekers from El Salvador. ICE claimed that the family lacked identifying documents establishing their relationship even though the father showed agents his passport and son’s birth certificate.7


The news of the increased cruelty of family separation is compounded by recent reports that Trump officials have lost track of 1,500 unaccompanied minors who entered the country without adult family members and by CBP's recent murder of Claudia Gonzalez, an immigrant from Guatemala. That's why we're joining with our friends at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, MomsRising, United We Dream, the ACLU and MoveOn for a massive day of action this Friday, June 1, in support of immigrant families. The more voices we have on this campaign, the more powerful our message will be. Click the link below to sign the petition demanding that Nielsen stop separating families at the border:


- Heidi Hess, CREDO Action
Add your name:
Sign the petition ►
  1. References:
  2. Aric Jenkins, "Jeff Sessions: Parents and Children Illegally Crossing the Border Will Be Separated," TIME, May 7, 2018.
  3. Caitlin Dickerson, "Hundreds of Immigrant Children Have Been Taken From Parents at U.S. Border," The New York Times, April 20, 2018.
  4. CBS News, "ACLU report: Records claim border agents neglected, abused migrant kids," May 25, 2018.
  5. Jamil Smith, "Trump's Separation of Children and Families Is What You Voted For," Rolling Stone, May 29, 2018.
  6. Ibid.
  7. Michael E. Miller and Jon Gerberg, "'Where’s Mommy?': A family fled death threats, only to face separation at the border." The Washington Post, March 18, 2018.
  8. Kate Morrissey, "Asylum-seeking fathers separated from children by ICE," San Diego Union Tribune, Dec. 4, 2017.

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