Who Initiated The Practice Of Separating Children From Their Illegal Immigrant Parents?

Critics of the U.S. government policy that separates children from their parents when they cross the border illegally from Mexico protest during a “Families Belong Together” event. In 2018, over 5,500 children of immigrants were separated from their parents at the border under the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy. Since early May, 2,342 children have been separated from their parents after crossing the Southern U.S. border, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The Justice Department and border authorities began prosecuting every adult who crossed the southwest border illegally in May, causing more than 2,300 cases. Two proposed methods of achieving family separations are administratively placing children and parents in separate detention centers or via criminal prosecutions.

The American Civil Liberties Union files a federal lawsuit in the US District Court of Southern California alleging that officials at the border had forcibly separated. President Donald Trump has repeated his assertion that he inherited and ended a policy from President Obama that separates children from parents who cross the US-Mexico border. The United States family separation policy under the Trump administration was presented to the public as a “zero tolerance” approach intended to deter illegal immigration. Undocumented asylum seekers were imprisoned, and any accompanying children under the age of 18 were handed over to the U.S. Department of Justice.