Attorneys for two immigrant children kidnapped by U.S. government agents from their parents on the U.S./Mexico border and brought to Connecticut appeared in federal court in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on July 11. The lawyers are seeking a judge’s ruling that the children – a 9-year-old boy from Honduras and a 14-year-old girl from El Salvador – be immediately released from a group home detention facility in eastern Connecticut and be reunited with their parents. These children are just two of an unknown number of minors who have been separated from their parents when they crossed the border seeking asylum.
Trump administration officials initially said the separated children numbered about 2,000, but then indicated the actual number was closer to 3,000. A federal judge in California gave the government two weeks to reunite children under 5 with their parents and a month to reunite all the children. But that first deadline passed with only 54 of 102 so-called “tender age” children returned to their parents.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus attended a press conference on July 6 at the Yale University Law School in New Haven, Connecticut, where attorneys and top state officials spoke about these cases involving immigrant children, and the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown on immigrants fleeing violence in Mexico and Central America. Joanne Lewis from Connecticut Legal Services began by describing the children’s situation, followed by Connecticut’s senior U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
Law students and professors from the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School are also representing the two children in the lawsuit. Find more information on Connecticut Legal Services at CTLegal.org and the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School at law.yale.edu/wirac.
