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July 13, 2018 12:32 pm PDT

A stunning amount of red tape is keeping detainee families from reuniting

The Trump administration totally has a plan for reuniting immigrant families torn apart at Americas southern borders. Unfortunately its a shitty one. The Texas Tribune reports that an Honduran asylum seeker, who prefers to only be known as Mario, was forcibly separated from his 10-year old daughter for a month, as part of the governments Zero Tolerance immigration policy. This past Tuesday, Mario was finally reunited with his daughterfor about an hour. The pair were separated once again. The reason: The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cant pull their collective act together.Mario knows where is daughter istheyre both in El Paso, Texasbut hes not allowed to see her. Before they have the opportunity to permanently come back together as a family once again, the U.S. governments got a ton of hoops that they want Mario to jump through. The common thread: he needs to prove that hes his daughters father. Last month, Mario and his legal representative were working to get his passport back from the FBI, as it had been taken from him when he was taken into custody at the border. This week, hes waiting to be fingerprinted. That each step of the process to get his daughter back is being handled by a different government organization only serves to slow things down. Similar stories are playing out with other families as well. Claudia Muoz, is the immigration programs director for Grassroots Leadership, an Austin-based group that opposes for-profit immigrant detention centers. From what she told the Texas Tribunes Julin Aguilar, the level of red tape that detainees are having to cut through in order to get back their kids is at a level where one has to start to wonder whether the government actually wants families to be reunited. HmmmmFrom the Texas Tribune:
Claudia Muoz, Grassroots Leaderships immigration programs director, said shes accompanied three Central American mothers to the region where theyve been told their children are being held. But each one has had to deal with different challenges in order to be reunited with their children for longer than the daily hour-long visits they are allowed.They had asked [one] mother for a proof of address for the past 30 days, like a utility bill or something, but she was just released from detention, so she didnt have that, Muoz said.Another mother was told she had to start the complete sponsorship process that guardians of unaccompanied minors go through to be reunited with her child a process Muoz said could take up to six weeks. A sponsorship packet Muoz provided to the Tribune requestseverything from a sponsors naturalization information to their child's immunization records.
This was never going to end well.Image via Wikipedia Commons

Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/OD-qeoKirZk/a-stunning-amount-of-red-tape.html

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