When President Trump signed his executive order on family separation on Wednesday, he proclaimed, “We are keeping families together and this will solve that problem.” But while the order may stop the prolonged, forcible separation of children from their families going forward, it by no means solves the problem.

More than 2,300 children have been taken away from their parents and sent to shelters, facilities and foster families all across the country, with seemingly no clear tracking mechanism. The executive order does not say anything about the plan to reunite these families, and the administration confirmed that it will not be making any special efforts to do so. We will be monitoring the administration’s actions to see if family separations really stop. 

Some of the parents of these children have already been deported. Some of these children are too young to talk, and may not even know what countries they are from or what their parents’ names are. Most don’t speak English and some don’t speak any languages that are widely used in this country.

The trauma that has been inflicted on these families is irreparable, and it is going to be a logistical nightmare to undo it. And the saddest part is that it didn’t need to happen.

Trump's Family Separation Crisis: How to Help

This was a crisis the Trump administration chose to create, and it was supported by many of his political allies as a means of pushing through his cruel, anti-immigrant agenda.

Wednesday’s executive order, while purporting to stop future family separation, calls for families to be detained together, which was this administration’s goal from the get-go. The Trump administration would have liked to simply detain everyone who crosses the border, children or otherwise, but was unable to because the United States has protections in place that prevent the prolonged detention of children.

In April, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced his “zero tolerance policy,” calling for every adult who crosses the border anywhere other than a port of entry to be prosecuted, the administration said it was forced to separate children from their families.

As the crisis mounted, President Trump falsely blamed the Democrats for creating it, and falsely claimed he had no choice but to separate families.

Fact-Checking Family Separation

Only after our lawsuit — and when more than 2,300 children, many of them infants and toddlers, were torn from their parents, prompting an explosion of national outrage that included grassroots mobilizations, every living first lady, airlines, corporate CEOs, the pope, evangelicals, the bishops, every major medical group and children’s group in the country — did the president back down and issue an executive order calling a halt to the practice.

But with it, he paved the way to begin a massive internment of families who come to the United States seeking asylum. There are numerous pieces of legislation on immigration moving in Congress that would remove protections for children in detention. We plan to fight them every step of the way. If the president thinks placing families in jail indefinitely is what people have been asking for, he is grossly mistaken.

Call Your Representative: Stop Speaker Ryan's Anti-immigrant Bill

A federal judge this week struck down Kansas’ severely restrictive voter registration regime, ruling that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s pet law violates the Constitution and the National Voter Registration Act.

Chief Judge Julie Robinson’s judgement is not simply a verdict on the Kansas law. It is a verdict on Mr. Kobach himself and his record of distortions and fabrications about the myth of noncitizens registering, voting, and swinging the results of elections.

The decision comes after a three-week trial where the American Civil Liberties Union faced off against Kobach over a 2013 Kansas law that required Kansans to produce a document proving citizenship, such as a passport, before registering to vote. 

The court found that the law imposed serious burdens on “tens of thousands of eligible citizens [who] were blocked from registration.”

Kobach is one of the most outspoken public figures on the supposed threat of voter fraud, having served as the vice-chair of President Trump’s now-defunct commission on election integrity. This trial was his shot to produce actual evidence in a court of law showing the existence of a problem he’s devoted much of his career to solving. He came up woefully emptyhanded.

Kobach lobbied for the passage of the law in the Kansas legislature based on little more than xenophobic rumors that, for instance, a group of “Somali nationals” had allegedly voted in Missouri or that a Kansas poll worker had purportedly seen a “Muslim lady” with an accent asking whether she could vote twice. These reports were thoroughly debunked, but the damage was done. The law went into effect, and as a result, more than 12 percent of total voter registration applications in Kansas — over 30,000 people — were blocked between 2013-2016.

At trial, the court carefully and thoroughly reviewed evidence from Kobach spanning two decades and found that there was virtually nothing to support his claims of rampant voter fraud. “The Court finds no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote” before Kobach’s law went into effect, Judge Robinson ruled. 

Here are the hard numbers: Between 1999 and the present day, Kobach could only identify 39 instances where noncitizens successfully registered. By any measure, these instances are a microscopic fraction of the 1.8 million voters currently registered in Kansas and of the 9 million votes cast for the highest statewide office between 2000 and 2016. The court further noted that even these few cases could “largely [be] explained by administrative error, confusion, or mistake,” for instance, where noncitizens had been put on the rolls even when they identified themselves clearly as ineligible and asked to be removed. 

Without any solid evidence, Kobach sought to amplify these numbers at trial, offering expert testimony purporting to estimate from the handful of identified cases much larger numbers of registered noncitizens. But Kobach learned that the untested exaggerations and speculation he was used to propounding in sympathetic media bubbles collapsed under the evidentiary scrutiny applied in a court of law. The court rejected the analysis of Kobach’s experts as patently misleading, biased, unfounded, and methodologically unsound. 

Ultimately, the court concluded, there isn’t a risk of noncitizens corrupting the electoral process in Kansas, but rather it is Kobach who has eroded confidence by disenfranchising voters with needless barriers to voter registration. The Kansas “law disproportionately impacts duly qualified registration applicants, while only nominally preventing noncitizen voter registration,” the decision reads. “If eligible Kansans’ votes are not counted despite believing they are registered to vote, it erodes confidence in the electoral system.”

When weighing 30,000 citizens disenfranchised since 2013 against 39 instances of noncitizen registration from 1999 to 2018, the calculus is clear:  Mr. Kobach is the far greater threat to the integrity of American elections. 

The law struck down in Kansas is one among many voter suppression measures being challenged by the ACLU and other advocates. In permanently blocking the law, Judge Robinson rightly concluded “that the magnitude of potentially disenfranchised voters impacted . . . cannot be justified by the scant evidence of noncitizen voter fraud.”

There is a long history of elected officials, like Kobach and the president himself, propagating the myth of voter fraud to undermine American democracy and political participation. The clear-eyed analysis in Fish v. Kobach provides the perfect antidote.

The avoidable tragedy of people dying in immigration prisons across the country is bad and getting worse. More people died in fiscal year 2017 than in any year since 2009. 

There have been 75 deaths since 2010, including one at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona just last week. It’s the latest death in a detention system that is notorious for its inadequate medical care, repeated failures in accountability, and delays in the investigations into deaths.  

On Wednesday, the ACLU and our partners released “Code Red: The Fatal Consequences of Dangerously Substandard Medical Care in Immigration Detention,” a report reviewing 15 deaths that occurred in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention between December 2015 and April 2017. With the help of medical experts, the report concludes that in more than half of those cases, substandard medical care — including unreasonable delays, botched emergency responses, and poor practitioner care — contributed to the deaths.

Read the report: Code Red

One of the needless fatalities documented in the report is that of Thongchay Saengsiri, who suffered from clear symptoms of congestive heart failure for 15 months while detained at the privately-run LaSalle Detention Facility in Louisiana. One of our independent physicians with expertise in correctional health noted that “medical staff continued to alternately miss the diagnosis and grossly mismanage it.”

In New Mexico, Rafael Barcenas Padilla died from bronchopneumonia after being detained for 1 ½ months at the Otero Processing Center. Despite exhibiting severe symptoms, he was not immediately transferred to the hospital but instead remained detained for three additional days while his health deteriorated.    

In another case, Igor Zyazin repeatedly notified officers of his pre-existing heart condition and the medications he was taking. After he alerted officers that he was having chest pain, they decided to transfer him three hours away to another jail instead of sending him to the hospital. He died at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, more than a day after he first complained of chest pain.     

Unfortunately, this is not the first time we or our partners have reported on deaths in immigration detention. In 2016, we issued a report with Detention Watch Network and National Immigrant Justice Center titled “Fatal Neglect: How ICE Ignores Deaths in Detention.” It revealed that violations of medical standards played a prominent role in eight deaths in immigration detention between 2010 and 2012. Significantly, the report also revealed that despite deficiencies documented by ICE, the jails and prisons in which these deaths occurred continued to pass inspections and operate.  

As the Trump administration moves forward in its efforts to terrorize immigrant communities with the threat of deportation and attempts to eliminate legal protections for the most vulnerable — including asylum seekers, children, and families — it has also been ramping up the immigration detention apparatus. This system of over 200 jails and prisons across the country has had a devastating impact on immigrants, their families, and communities, including long-term residents and asylum seekers.

Every day, thousands of people suffer in immigration jails because they do not receive the medical care that they need and that the government is obligated to provide. We have documented cases where pregnant women suffering pain and bleeding are ignored, where people do not get the life-saving medication they need for chronic conditions, and where individuals with serious mental illness are thrown into solitary confinement.  

Yet, rather than maintain existing standards for the operation of these facilities, the administration has made clear its intention to decrease oversight. Given the utter cruelty of this administration toward immigrants and what we already know about immigration detention, we should be seriously alarmed at the potential for more people needlessly suffering because of inadequate medical care and inhumane conditions.         

Our new report includes recommended steps that all levels of government must take to protect the lives of people who are being detained.

Congress should immediately reduce the number of people who are detained and ensure accountability for abuses by reducing funding for immigration prisons and requiring ICE to abide by its own rules. Lawmakers should also appoint an independent medical oversight board with jurisdiction over the quality of medical care in ICE detention.

There are many steps that ICE itself should take, such as addressing the many known problems with medical care and monitoring. The agency should also increase transparency by releasing more information about investigations into deaths.

State and local governments can also increase oversight, especially over local jails that hold ICE detainees, and refuse to contract with ICE and private prison companies to expand immigration detention capacity.

The deaths documented in our reports tell the story of a detention system that has grown out of control and without necessary oversight. These consistent, systemic failures must be fixed before more lives are lost.

Trump's Family Separation Crisis: How to Help