Fighting family separations at the US border
The FT's Ben Marino visits Tucson, Arizona, and meets a whistleblower and a lawyer who are fighting to end the separation of families caught crossing the US-Mexico border illegally.
Filmed and produced by Ben Marino. Additional footage by Reuters.
Transcript
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Those are the fences they've built on top to - after three kids ran away, they doubled up the height of the fences over there. Over the last six weeks that I was there we went from having about five of these quote unquote - they're called "tender age" kids under 12 to closer to 70. And that's something that you really noticed particularly because these are crying and screaming five and six-year-olds and you are - it's really hard to forget that or get that out of your mind.
Antar Davidson worked in a privately run shelter contracted by the government to house immigrant children in Tucson, Arizona. Some 2,000 children have been separated from their parents and are currently held in dozens of shelters across the US. They were separated from their families after the Trump administration instituted a zero tolerance policy to illegal border crossings.
I resigned as a conscientious objector to what they were doing to immigrant - to unaccompanied minors and migrant children separated from their families. The organisation's response to these kids was to start restraining them more, to put more holds on them. This is how you do the CBI hold, this is how you hold them and grab them by the arm. This is a six-year-old by himself, these kids - the majority of them are Guatemalan kids from indigenous - they're indigenous Guatemalan kids from very rural areas.
Since resigning in June, Mr Davidson went public with what he saw while working at the children's shelter. When contacted by FT, a Southwest Key spokesperson said the company does not comment on human resource matters. And its staff are trained in verbal de-escalation strategies and use of non-violent crisis intervention techniques.
The administration was forced to really change their commentary and narrative on the project. I think everyone remember the tweets: there are no family separations period. In eight days there was an executive order ending it.
My name is Gabby Corrales and I'm an attorney with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. The children we meet have not been able to talk to their parents. So the fact that there are still so many children who are not able to speak to their parents really goes to show that there could have been more to open those lines of communication. When the executive action went into place, again, children have not been reunited with their parents. And so I think that those policies speak for themselves. So many are worried that these children will never see their parents again because they are now in a completely separate legal track from their mother.
On June 26 a federal judge in California issued an injunction halting family separations and giving the Trump administration 30 days to reunite separated families, but many expect it will take months of agonising wait before their children are reunited with her parents. Ben Marino, Financial Times, Tucson, Arizona.
