- The Washington Times - Wednesday, December 15, 2021

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is trying to win massive payments for illegal immigrant families separated under the Trump administration, announced a new ad campaign Wednesday to pressure President Biden to “repair” the damage done to the families.

The Biden team is pondering payments to the families — reportedly about $450,000 per person — but those plans have proved wildly unpopular among most Americans.

The new ACLU ads seem designed to combat that public sentiment.

“We are now officially putting the Biden administration on notice: Thousands of little children were separated from their parents and remain without justice,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said.

He said Mr. Biden must do something for them or it will “soon become Biden’s badge of shame.”

One ad features families who were separated, and who describe some of the trauma. Another features actors Mandy Moore and Jason George, who say parents have a collective responsibility to the families.


SEE ALSO: Immigrant from the Bahamas charged with casting illegal ballots in North Carolina


The ACLU said the “seven-figure” ad campaign, to run online and on local cable around the nation’s capital, will also include videos demanding more attention to abortion rights, and warning of a world in which the federal constitutional guarantee of abortion disappears.

That seems aimed at the possibility that the Supreme Court will chip away at, or even overturn, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established the constitutional right to abortion.

Mass family separations were a result of the zero tolerance policy, which was the Trump administration’s response to the migrant caravans of Central American families that surged to the border in 2018.

Before zero tolerance, parents with children would have been caught and quickly ousted or released. The Trump administration was seeking a stronger deterrent, so it decided to prosecute the parents for illegal entry, a misdemeanor.

There are no family detention facilities in federal prisons, so when the parents were prosecuted their children were removed from their custody and placed into government-run shelters.

But the administration had no system in place to reunite the families once the parents’ sentences were completed, usually in just a few days.


SEE ALSO: DHS removes roadblocks to save time for some refugees who want to come to the U.S.


Documents released later suggest administration officials saw the separations themselves as part of a deterrent to migrants coming.

As mass separations sparked a furious public outcry, President Trump in June 2018 put an end to the practice and a federal judge ordered the government to work to reunite the families. Three years later, that process is still ongoing.

The Biden administration last week announced plans to try to write new regulations that would severely limit family separations in the future.

And the Biden team has a task force in place to try to reunite still-separated, including bringing back some parents who were deported without their children.

That task force is also involved in the negotiations over the payments

Republicans on Capitol Hill have written legislation to halt the payments, saying it sends the wrong message to pay illegal immigrants for the consequences of their actions.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.

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