Los Angeles AFP :
Several US states are suing the Trump administration over its “zero tolerance” policy that led to thousands of migrant children being split from their families on the US border with Mexico.
Although President Donald Trump reversed course, signing an executive order on Wednesday to end the practice following domestic and international outrage, Washington State on Thursday said it will lead a coalition of states legally challenging “the policy of forced family separation on the US southern border.” Despite Trump’s order, there was no immediate plan in place for family reunification. “We have no way to predict from one day to the next what this president’s policies or intentions are,” Washington state Governor Jay Inslee said in a statement. “These cruel policies and this executive order are un-American and create chaos, fear and uncertainty. Washington continues to stand ready to ensure this president is held accountable.”
In an effort to staunch the flow of tens of thousands of migrants from Central America and Mexico arriving at the southern boundary every month, Trump in early May ordered that all those crossing the border illegally would be arrested, and their children held separately as a result. Nearly all of the arriving families, and many others, have officially requested asylum, citing the incessant violence in their home countries. Trump’s executive order “does nothing to reunify families already torn apart by the Trump Administration’s policy,” the Washington state attorney general’s office said. “Second, the order is riddled with so many caveats as to be meaningless,” it said in a statement. The states’ lawsuit, which was expected to be filed Thursday, will allege the Administration “has violated the constitutional due process rights of the parents and children by separating them as a matter of course and without any finding that the parent poses a threat to the children,” the attorney general’s office said.
It also called the federal policy discriminatory because it only targets the southern border, and says the administration has violated US asylum laws by turning people away at ports of entry. Ten states and the District of Columbia are so far set to join Washington State in the suit.
The northwestern state of Washington has been one of the most aggressive, along with California and New York, in taking legal action against Trump’s administration, including over its effort to block migrants from several Muslim-majority countries. Trump’s administration has in turn taken California to court challenging its legislation that restricts local police and businesses from cooperating with immigration authorities.
Meanwhile, the UN on Friday acknowledged Trump’s decision to stop separating migrant families at the US-Mexico border but insisted that detaining children with their parents was not the solution.
“Children should never be detained for reasons related to their or their parents’ migration status,” UN rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva.
“It is never in the best interest of the child for them to be detained,” she said. Her comments came two days after US President Donald Trump, in a stunning about-face, ordered an end to his administration’s widely criticised policy of separating families at the border. Images and recordings of wailing children detained in cage-like enclosures has ignited global outrage, forcing the abrupt change of tactics. Trump’s executive order would keep families together but in custody indefinitely while the parents are prosecuted for entering the country illegally.
The president’s order also suggests the government intends to hold families indefinitely by challenging a 1997 court ruling known as the Flores Settlement, which places a 20-day limit on how long children, alone or with their parents, can be detained. Shamdasani slammed this solution, insisting that Washington “needs to explore non-custodial alternatives to detention, bearing in mind first and foremost the human rights of these migrants, in particular where families and children are involved.”
“Irregular migration should not be a criminal offence. These people should not be treated as criminals,” she said.
The UN, she said, is calling for the “US to just overhaul its migration policies, urging the country to find “community-based alternatives to detention for children and families.” The UN children’s agency UNICEF also vehemently opposes the policy, spokesman Christophe Boulierac told reporters. “We oppose two things:
We oppose separating children from their families for the purposes of migration control but we also oppose to detentions,” he said. He lamented that the United States was among some 100 countries around the world that detain children for the purpose of migration control.
“We are working with governments to change that,” he said, insisting that there are “alternatives which are working,” including appointing community members who can guarantee that a child will show up in immigration court.
