Editorial Updates: June 25, 2018. Over the weekend the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted a fact sheet that the agency and Health and Human Services (HHS) now have a process “to ensure that family members know the location of their children and have regular communication after separation to ensure that those adults who are subject to removal are reunited with their children for the purposes of removal.” At present, DHS indicates that Customer Border Patrol “has reunited 522 Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) in their custody who were separated from adults as part of the Zero Tolerance initiative.”
June 22, 2018. Yesterday Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner asked organization and property owner to discontinue plans to use a former homeless shelter to house migrant children detained at the U.S. border. Houston city departments “will conduct meticulous permitting inspections of the unused building ‘once we know who is going to be there’ to see if the building can be used to house children,” according to the announcement from the mayor’s office.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Mayors of cities from across the United States have begun to gather at Texas’ border with Mexico to condemn President Trump’s treatment of immigrant families under a zero-tolerance policy for people who cross into the United States illegally.
Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber arrived Wednesday in El Paso, Texas, to join more than a dozen mayors in demanding that families who were separated while trying to enter the United States illegally be immediately reunited.
Trump has signed an executive order ending the process of separating children from families after they are detained crossing the U.S. border illegally.
Webber said the Trump administration cannot easily repair the emotional trauma inflicted on immigrant children and that the president’s executive order doesn’t fix a racist approach to immigration policy.
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
The Department of Health and Human Services said it is waiting on further guidance from the federal government, according to Vox. “Our focus is on continuing to provide quality services and care to the minors in HHS/ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] funded facilities and reunifying minors with a relative or appropriate sponsor as we have done since HHS inherited the program,” according to a DHS statement today on Twitter.
HHS sort of walks back earlier comments about not taking special steps to reunify families (https://t.co/2R601hawQa) and also seems to be suggesting here that reunification is the responsibility of some other agency. pic.twitter.com/9Lr7WjbNGE
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) June 21, 2018
U.S. Conference of Mayors released a statement by its president Columbia, South Carolina, Mayor Steven Benjamin, who indicated the mayors are addressing the federal government from Tornillo, Texas.
Mayors are now here calling for the unification of children and their families. #MayorsStand4All #KeepFamiliesTogether pic.twitter.com/GWuXQ8Smei
— U.S. Mayors (@usmayors) June 21, 2018