President Biden recently signed an executive order directing immigration authorities to reunite children orphaned by Trump under his "zero tolerance" policy for illegal border crossings, but the administration is going much further than that.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced today that they will bring their parents back into the United States and pay for certain accommodations they may need while they're here.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States could pay for transportation, healthcare, legal services, and career and educational services for migrants separated under former President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” border strategy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Monday. [...]
The Biden administration will also consider bringing deported parents back to the United States, an option outlined in Biden’s Feb. 2 executive order creating the family reunification task force.
“We are dedicating our resources throughout the Department of Homeland Security and the federal government, and bringing our full weight to bear, to reunite children who were cruelly separated from their parents,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a written statement.
The usual suspects are going to complain about this, of course, but I think it's the least we can do.
We took children away from their parents and deported the parents halfway across the world. And it's been years since this first started. Some of them probably thought they would never see each other again. That's what I would think.
There are many moral, economic, legal and logistical reasons why Trump's anti-immigration policies need to be dismantled and Congress needs to pass comprehensive immigration reform, but the primary reason is to end human suffering.
We ought to treat people the same way we would all want to be treated if we were forced to flee our homes and seek refuge in another country. There were a handful of times, primarily in Trump's last year when he threatened to use the military to squash public dissent, when I personally considered what I would do if the unthinkable happened.