Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
From Trafficking Concerns To Unwieldy Bureaucracy, Reuniting Children With Parents Proving To Be Herculean Task
The New York Times: Parents And Children Remain Separated By Miles And Bureaucracy
Yeni González emerged into the warm evening air in Eloy, Ariz., her hair braided by the other women in the detention center. We’re braiding up all your strength, they had told her in Spanish. You can do it. Ms. González, who had been released on a bond, was meeting her lawyer on Thursday and would soon join the volunteers who were driving her to New York City to find her three young children — Lester, Jamelin and Deyuin — who had been taken away from her more than a month before at the southern border. (Correal, 6/30)
The Associated Press: Separations At The Border Didn’t Worry Some Trump Officials
The government’s top health official could barely conceal his discomfort. As Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar was responsible for caring for migrant children taken from their parents at the border. Now a Democratic senator was asking him at a hearing whether his agency had a role in designing the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that caused these separations. The answer was no. (Long and Alonso-Zaldivar, 7/2)
The Wall Street Journal: How To Teach Legal Rights To Migrant Children: Games And Coloring
At the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, advocates are faced with explaining legal rights to hundreds of children who have been separated from the adults they were traveling with when they illegally entered the U.S. The group is providing legal services for about 350 children, most of whom are 10 years old or younger and can’t fully comprehend the legal choices in the group’s “Know Your Rights” training. (West and Campo-Flores, 7/1)
Los Angeles Times: 'We Beg You To Help Us.' Immigrant Women In Detention Describe Their Treatment, Share Fears About Their Children
The words appear on a scrap of paper, scrawled in pencil by an immigrant mother held at a detention center: “We beg you to help us, return our children. Our children are very desperate. My son asks me to get him out and I’m powerless here.” In another letter, childish print on notebook paper, a mother spoke of her son: “It’s been a month since they snatched him away and there are moments when I can’t go on.… If they are going to deport me, let them do it — but with my child. Without him, I am not going to leave here.” (Hennessy-Fiske, 7/2)
Reveal: Judge Orders End To Policy Requiring Director’s Approval To Release Migrant Children
The federal agency that houses migrant children may no longer require its director’s signature before releasing children from secure detention facilities, according to an order recently issued by a federal judge. The ruling involves the same agency that has been responsible for housing thousands of children separated from their parents at the border in recent weeks. (Michels, 7/1)
Reveal: Lawsuit: The Forced Drugging Of Migrant Children Is Illegal
A new class-action lawsuit filed today on behalf of five immigrant children says the U.S. government is violating their rights by placing them in jail-like detention and forcibly drugging them with powerful psychotropic medication. The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in California, argues that the Office of Refugee Resettlement is running afoul of a 1997 court order known as the Flores Settlement Agreement that requires immigrant children to be quickly released from government detention and placed in the least restrictive and appropriate setting as long as they remain in federal custody. (Harris, 6/29)
