Human Rights Watch: US: Lasting Harm from Family Separation at the Border
As many as 1,360 children have never been reunited with their parents six years after the U.S. government separated them at the U.S./Mexico border, and U.S. government efforts to help separated families have not adequately addressed the severe harm inflicted on them, Human Rights Watch, the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School said in a report released today.
The report, “‘We Need to Take Away Children’: Zero Accountability Six Years After ‘Zero Tolerance,’” finds that the U.S. government refused, in many cases for days or weeks, to disclose the circumstances and whereabouts of separated children to their parents, which meets the definition of an enforced disappearance. Forcible family separations may also have constituted torture, the intentional infliction of severe suffering for an improper purpose by a state agent. Even a single instance of enforced disappearance or torture is a crime under international law.
KJ