The Honduran asylum-seeker who was nearly ripped away and separated from her newborn by Customs and Border Protection agents last month will be allowed to stay in the U.S. while her infant recovers from health complications in the hospital, The San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
Officials had reportedly planned to take the baby and send the mom to Mexico to wait out her case under illegal and deadly anti-asylum policy, until immigrant rights advocacy group Al Otro Lado and individual advocates publicly condemned the planned separation. The mom will, for now, be able to remain here while her baby, who was immediately placed in ICU following birth, continues to recover. It’s welcome news for mom and baby—but the report also confirms that this type of separation has in fact been far more rampant than this one family.
“The woman’s near separation from her U.S.-citizen newborn is not uncommon for those seeking asylum in the United States, according to information provided by San Diego County Child Welfare Services,” The Union-Tribune continued. “According to the agency, hundreds of U.S.-citizen children have been taken from their asylum-seeking parents in San Diego in recent years.”
Border officials have taken U.S.-born kids from detained asylum-seekers to place with relatives or other sponsors since at least 2014, when the agency began to track these separations. The number of kids taken from their parents, “which fluctuated between about 50 and 100 a year since 2014,” reportedly jumped to 130 in 2018, the same year the Trump administration officially implemented the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy.
San Diego County Child Welfare Services said that those kids, however, aren’t considered a part of the thousands of the kids who were taken from their families as part of the administration’s state-sanctioned kidnapping. Margo Fudge, deputy director of Child Welfare Services, “said of the hundreds of cases since 2014, the county agency has only once filed a petition in court to place a child into the foster care system,” The Union-Tribune continued.
But none of these kids should have been taken from their parents, because kids not only need their families, asylum-seekers don’t have to kept locked up in detention in the first place. An Obama administration program humanely kept families out of detention, which was far cheaper than keeping parents locked up, and saw nearly all families make their Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-ins and immigration court dates. The Trump administration, however, canceled it in 2017.