Unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Chad Wolf took a break from using his government position to campaign for impeached president Donald Trump’s reelection to finally address the family separation disaster. No, he wasn’t announcing he was dropping his appearance at Trump’s stupid wall to help reunite families torn apart under the administration’s policy. He was instead saying that families are separated only because they chose to be separated.
Parents, Unlawful Chad claimed to CBS News on Tuesday, “have chosen to have their kids remain here in the United States while they remain back in their home countries. They have chosen. They themselves have chosen to separate their children from themselves,” the report said. When then asked if he “had any regrets” about helping implement the state-sanctioned kidnapping of children at the southern border, Unlawful Chad “said he did not.”
Advocacy group Families Belong Together tweeted that this coiffed mini-fascist “baselessly claimed that the families separated under the family separation policy are choosing to remain apart from their children. Here’s what he left out. Chad Wolf claimed that these parents want their children to remain in the US without them. What he didn’t mention is that these parents aren’t allowed to reunite with their kids in the US, where they are safe. If they want to see their children, they risk putting them in danger.”
That is if they can even be found. Hundreds of children taken from parents in 2017 remain without their parents because it was the Trump administration that made the decision to separate them when they shouldn’t have been separated, and then deported parents when they shouldn’t have been deported. They didn’t choose any of that. It was done to them by the administration.
Then, much like the “binary choice” for detained families in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, the government has given some parents who have been located a choice that’s actually no choice at all. If we can even find you, sure, you can reunite with your kid. But they’ll need to leave the U.S. first.
”Responding to Wolf's comments, Lee Gelernt, the top ACLU attorney in the family separation court case, said his group has not yet stated that any of the 485 located parents want their children brought back to Central America because ‘overwhelmingly those families want to reunite with their child in the U.S,’” CBS News continued. “He added that the preference of the ‘unreachable’ parents is unknown since they have not been located.
"The fundamental point is that the Trump administration is trying to suggest that these parents do not want their children. Nothing could be further from the truth," Gelernt continued to CBS News. "The administration is forcing families into the horrible choice of potential permanent separation or bringing a child back to danger, when what should happen is that parents should be allowed to rejoin their child in the United States. That is the simple and humane way to deal with the horrific problem created by this administration."
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said this week that should he win the presidency he will on day one of his new administration sign an executive order creating a federal task force to help reunite these families. They must be reunited—and those reunifications must happen in the U.S. with families put on a path to citizenship as part of righting the wrong done to them by our nation.
“No parent wants to be ripped away from their child,” Families Belong Together continued. “And no parent wants to choose between being with their child and their child’s safety. Wolf’s claims are false, misleading, and heartless.”
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