By Maribel Velazquez
The immigration policy promoted by the president donald trump came under scrutiny again following a report estimating that more than 145,000 American children have suffered the detention of at least one of their parents since the beginning of his second term. Behind the strategy the name of Stephen Millerconsidered one of the main designers of the most severe measures against immigrants.
According to an analysis published by the research center Brookings Institution and taken up by the British newspaper The Guardian, the current immigration raids have caused a wave of family separations that experts describe as one of the most aggressive in recent years.
The return of family separations
Stephen Miller had already been singled out during Trump’s first term for promoting the politics of “zero tolerance” on the border between the United States and Mexico. That measure led to the separation of more than 5,000 immigrant minors from their parents, including babies.
Although Trump signed an executive order in 2018 to officially stop this practice, civil organizations and analysts maintain that separations continue under other mechanisms, mainly through mass detentions and expedited deportations within the country.
The new report estimates that, among the minors currently affected, more than 22 thousand were left without any of their parents at home after the arrests. Furthermore, some fifty-three thousand children would be under six years old.
“There is no systematic approach to protect the children of people detained by ICE”warns the report.
The figures that alarm immigration defenders
The aforementioned media maintained that ProPublica investigations also revealed that Arrests of immigrant parents practically doubled during the first months of the second Trump administration, compared to the Joe Biden administration.
The outlet also documented an increase in deportations of mothers with US citizen childrena trend that human rights organizations consider especially worrying due to the emotional impact on minors.
Kelly Kribs, Young Heart’s lawyer, assured in statements reported by The Guardian that the current crisis “It is causing the same trauma we saw in 2018, but now at a speed and scale never seen before.”
Meanwhile, Miller has publicly defended immigration actions of trump and he recently assured in an interview with Fox Files that he feels supported by the followers of the Republican president.
Keep reading:
- ICE has detained more than 6,200 children in the Trump generation; warn of psychological damage
- Trump’s immigration policy would leave immigrant doctors without jobs
