Blir barnen traumatiserade av Trumps nya politik? [Mod]

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested an asylum seeker during his actual asylum interview in San Francisco last week—something his lawyer says is completely unprecedented.

Ansly Damus has been locked up for one year, four months, and counting. Held behind bars by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he has not been outside for more than a year. His crime? In October 2016, Damus fled violent, political persecution in Haiti. When he arrived in the U.S., he presented himself to immigration authorities and applied for asylum. He passed his “credible fear” interview. And then a judge granted him asylum — not once, but twice.

Damus committed no crime, and yet the U.S. government has put him behind bars. He’s not alone — thousands of other asylum seekers are also being held in jails across the country.

CLAIM
A "law to separate families" was enacted prior to April 2018, and the federal government is powerless not to enforce it.

...There is no federal law that stipulates that children and parents be separated at the border, no matter how families entered the United States. An increase in child detainees separated from parents stemmed directly from a change in enforcement policy repeatedly announced by Sessions in April and May 2018, under which adults (with or without children) are criminally prosecuted for attempting to enter the United States...

...On 7 May 2018, CNN reported that until April 2018, immigration officials used discretion to handle families or unaccompanied minors entering the United States without documentation...

...The rumors correctly suggested that “family detention” as a whole came before the Trump administration, but as of August 2015 intact families at the border were rarely separated. Other iterations of the rumor held that the Obama administration separated more children from their parents than the Trump administration, a claim stemming from an inaccurate retelling of the fact that an influx of unaccompanied minors from Latin America crossed the border in from 2014 onward. In those instances, minor children primarily traveled without their parents...

...Claims that the “law to separate families” was passed in 1997, those claims originated with a February 2018 Department of Homeland Security statement referencing “[l]egal loopholes [that] are exploited by minors, family units, and human smugglers.” The DHS statement claimed existing immigration policies “create a pull factor that invites more illegal immigration and encourages parents to pay and entrust their children to criminal organizations.”