During the previous administration, the government arrested and deported thousands of persons–mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Brazil–who had illegally entered the United States. Many of those illegals had with them minor children, who could not by law be taken into custody. Those minors were turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services, which typically sent them to live in America with a relative or family friend.
Now, instead of sending the children back to their parents in their native lands, the new administration has created the “Family Reunification Task Force,” which intends to seek out and return the deportees to the United States, which they had earlier broken the law to enter.
“We recognize that we can’t make these families completely whole again,” says Michelle Brané, executive director of the Task Force. “But we want to do everything we can to put them on a path towards a better life.”
In other words, the law be damned.
To assist in this bizarre recovery work, the Task Force has enlisted the aid of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an inter-governmental organization whose explicit mission is to facilitate migration, legal and otherwise.
(In fact, the IOM eschews the word “illegal” in favor of “irregular.” In its document “The Human Rights of Migrants,” it refers to “the now widespread categorization of persons as ‘illegal migrants’. . . .[T]his categorization renders such human beings simply outside the applicability and protection of law, contrary to the inalienability of human rights protection. . . .The practice directly contradicts two fundamental human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. . . .”)
According to the Boston Globe, the IOM will help track down the deportees in their native countries, provide them with passports, and fly them back to the United States. There they will receive work permits, residency for (at least) three years, and support services.
These now-undeported will also receive our nation’s heartfelt apology for having enforced its laws, along with a promise to never let anything like that happen again.
For more, the Boston Globe.