Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
1,556 More Kids Were Separated From Families Than Previously Reported, ACLU Says
The Associated Press: Tally Of Children Split At Border Tops 5,400 In New Count
U.S. immigration authorities separated more than 1,500 children from their parents at the Mexico border early in the Trump administration, the American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday, bringing the total number of children separated since July 2017 to more than 5,400. The ACLU said the administration told its attorneys that 1,556 children were separated from July 1, 2017, to June 26, 2018, when a federal judge in San Diego ordered that children in government custody be reunited with their parents. (Spagat, 10/24)
The Wall Street Journal: Number Of Family Separations At U.S. Border Higher Than Previously Known
The watchdog report found that the government hadn’t properly accounted for the number of children separated from their parents before the same court ordered them to stop the practice in the summer of 2018. Government investigators also found that federal agencies didn’t have a system to identify children who had been taken from adults throughout the implementation of the “zero tolerance” policy. The government initially resisted calls to locate the additional children cited by the watchdog report, and told the court it would take two years to pull together a list. The court instead gave the government six months. (Hackman, 10/24)
The Washington Post: ACLU Says 1,500 More Migrant Children Were Taken From Parents By The Trump Administration
The ACLU said the Justice Department disclosed the final tally — which is in addition to the more than 2,700 children known to have been separated last year — hours before a federal court deadline to identify all children separated since mid-2017, the year President Trump took office. U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw in San Diego gave the Trump administration six months in April to disclose the names to the ACLU, which is trying to track down all the families and learn whether they have been reunited. (Sacchetti, 10/24)
CBS News: Family Separation: 1,556 More Migrant Families Were Separated Under Trump Than Previously Known
Although some detained migrant families were separated under previous administrations — mostly when officials determined the parents posed a danger to their children — the Trump administration utilized different tools, including the policy of "zero tolerance" that led to the criminal prosecutions of border-crossing parents, to systematically separate thousands of families in the span of months. (Montoya-Galvez, 10/24)
In other news on the immigration crisis —
The Guardian: She Raised Her Niece Like A Daughter. Then The US Government Separated Them At The Border
The six-year-old girl on the other end of the line tells Alexa she fears they will never be together again. In another 15-minute phone call, she questions if Alexa still loves her. She asks Alexa to pick her up from the family she’s staying with in New York. Alexa hears the girl say the words in Spanish: “You are my mom, I want to be with you.” Alexa wishes she could go get her. But Alexa’s locked up 2,400 miles away, at an immigration detention center in Arizona. (Fernandez and Joffe-Block, 10/25)
US News: Trump Administration’s Immigration Policies Violate Civil Rights, Government Agency Says
The Trump administration's immigration policies appear to violate the due process and civil rights of migrants and have created an unnecessary crisis at the southern border, a government agency said in a scathing report released Thursday. The report, written by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, raises grave concerns about the Trump administration's asylum policies, detention practices and previously widespread use of family separation. It echoes and references a number of issues raised in other government watchdog reports and media accounts. (Hansen, 10/24)
NPR: U.S. Travel Ban Disrupts The World's Largest Brain Science Meeting
When Sepiedeh Keshavarzi was getting her medical degree in Tehran, she often read research papers by prominent scientists in the U.S. "It was my dream at some point when I was much younger to do research in the States," she says. Not anymore. (Hamilton, 10/24)
