One of the enduring questions of family separation has been what long-term psychological effects it will have on the separated children and parents. 

A new report from the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights says many parents and children who were separated under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy are exhibiting “pervasive symptoms and behaviors consistent with trauma,” including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.

“PHR finds that the U.S. government’s treatment of asylum seekers through its policy of family separation constitutes cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment,” the report reads, “and, in all cases evaluated by PHR experts, rises to the level of torture.”

Between July 2018 and August 2019, volunteers with Physicians for Human Rights, a nonprofit of medical professionals who investigate human rights abuses, conducted medical screenings for 37 families.

The volunteers found that nearly every adult and child they assessed had developed symptoms consistent with trauma, including insomnia, lack of appetite, nightmares, heart palpitations and panic attacks.

The report is the latest study to explore the effects of family separation since the public first learned about the Trump administration’s crackdown in summer 2018. Other studies have concluded that children and adults experience long-lasting psychological effects and recommend that families have access to mental health services.

But the Physicians for Human Rights report goes a step further, calling the trauma inflicted on the families “torture.” According to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, the report points out, torture is an act that causes physical or mental harm and is done intentionally by a state official for the purposes of intimidation, punishment or coercion.

“In the cases that PHR documented, U.S. officials intentionally carried out and condoned unlawful actions causing severe pain and suffering,” the report says.

In most of the cases the group evaluated, parents and children were separated for 60 days, while some were split up for 90 days. Trump officials later admitted that they were unprepared to take in thousands of separated children. 

A new report by the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general’s office released Thursday found that officials at the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement warned that the policy would inflict trauma on families and that the government lacked the bed capacity to accommodate the large influx of children. 

Read the Physicians for Human Rights report here.
 

UPDATE ON ‘THE DISAPPEARED’

A week after my colleague Aura Bogado’s investigation about disappeared children in the immigration system, Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, wanted answers. 

Sitting across from a panel of senators during a Feb. 25 hearing was Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care of unaccompanied children. Before the hearing, Merkley said, his staff had shared the story of the girl featured in Aura’s report with Azar’s office.

The girl had been separated at the border from family members when she was 10. Now 17, she’d become a long-term resident in what’s supposed to be a short-term system. And that’s even though she had family members ready to take her in. Her family didn’t know what had happened to her for years until Aura came along.

Merkley recounted some of the details of Aura’s reporting, including that the girl recently asked a judge to send her back to Honduras and that she also had no idea family members in North Carolina wanted her to live with them.

“Many things about this bother me,” Merkley said. “Six years in detention has an incredible impact on a child. It’s a whole childhood disrupted and destroyed.”

“Would you be willing,” the senator continued, “to take a close look at this case and try to make sure that we get some really high-level attention and fair treatment for this child?”

“Absolutely,” Azar said. “I will dig in on that personally.” Merkley asked for weekly updates.

The girl now lives in a shelter in Oregon.

“She thought her family abandoned her,” Aura tweeted in a thread about Merkley and Azar’s exchange at the Senate hearing. “Her 94-year-old grandmother in North Carolina wants to see her before she dies.”

Read the story here, and listen to the show here.
 

3 THINGS WE’RE READING

1. The FBI is investigating the disappearance of $500,000 from the coffers of the Border Patrol union that represents about 20,000 agents. (ProPublica)

In 2018, rumors began circling among the ranks that thousands of dollars in union funds were missing. During a gathering with several agents in November, union President Brandon Judd acknowledged that $352,389 had been misappropriated and that another $150,035 that was allotted as tax money was not properly paid to the IRS. “Somebody pocketed it, just up and walked away,” Judd told the agents. 

The kicker: The unfolding financial scandal in the El Paso sector, one of the busiest and most important in the country, is likely to raise fresh questions about the integrity of the agents tasked with policing the southern border. Staffed and run largely by active-duty agents, the El Paso local represents the interests of more than 1,400 Border Patrol employees stationed across west Texas and New Mexico.

2. The Trump administration has publicly opposed the regime of Venezuelan socialist leader Nicolás Maduro. But it’s turning away asylum seekers from that country. (The Washington Post)

Venezuelans are among the thousands of asylum seekers that have been forced to wait in Mexico for their court dates in the U.S. This story follows the case of a father and daughter who fled Venezuela in 2018 and arrived at the border, only to wait seven months for a determination on their cases. The father was granted protection. But the daughter, 18, was denied entry, effectively separating the family.

The kicker: Trump is “caught between two different narratives,” said Geoff Ramsey, assistant director for Venezuela at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nongovernmental organization that promotes human rights and social justice. “We hear a lot of talk about solidarity, but it seems this solidarity ends when Venezuelans leave their border.”

3. A Florida school district provides schooling and other resources to children of undocumented migrant workers. (Miami Herald) 

Dozens of migrant families have made their home in a cluster of trailers tucked between nursery farms in south Miami-Dade County. When schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho learned that their children were not going to school because of fears that the families might be reported to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, his district stepped in. Now, a bus arrives each morning to take the children to class, where they eat breakfast and lunch and learn English. “They have a right to an education,” Carvalho said.

The kicker: Despite the migrants’ fears of apprehension and deportation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Carvalho has vowed to protect the kids – and he is backed by federal law. The Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act prevents schools from releasing student records to federal authorities, including immigration status, without parental consent except under exceptional circumstances. That’s because a landmark 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision out of Texas, Plyler v. Doe, ruled that states could not deny free public education to undocumented children.
 

Your tips have been vital to our immigration coverage. Keep them coming: [email protected]. 

– Laura C. Morel

Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.