Recently, reports of widespread Sexual Violence and Abuse towards Migrant children at the border have added to this growing humanitarian nightmare. On America’s southern border, migrant women and girls are the victims of sexual assaults that most often go unreported, uninvestigated and unprosecuted. Even as women around the world are speaking out against sexual misconduct, migrant women are essentially excluded from any benefits of the #MeToo movement. According to The New York Times, dozens of documented cases were identified through interviews with law enforcement officials, prosecutors, federal judges and immigrant advocates around the country, and a review of police reports and court records in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. The review showed more than 100 documented reports of sexual assault of undocumented women along the border in the past two decades, a number that most likely only skims the surface, law enforcement officials and advocates say. Experts say the actual number of sexual assaults is almost certainly much higher than those documented by prosecutors and the police, because most attacks are never reported. And such attacks don’t end at the border. Perhaps even more troubling, is that women have reported being assaulted in immigration detention facilities, and the federal government over a recent four-year period has received more than 4,500 complaints about the sexual abuse of immigrant children at government-funded detention facilities.
Migrant children torn from parents at the border continues to cause huge problems. Twenty-nine parents from across Central America who were separated from their children by U.S. immigration agents last year returned to the U.S. border on Saturday, demanding asylum hearings that might allow them to reunite with their children. The group of parents quietly traveled north over the past month, assisted by a team of immigration lawyers who hatched a high-stakes plan to reunify families divided by the Trump administration’s family separation policy last year. The 29 parents were among those deported without their children, who remain in the United States in shelters, in foster homes or with relatives. Although the Trump administration’s family separation policy has prompted congressional hearings, lawsuits and national protests, the parents have for nearly a year suffered out of the spotlight at their homes in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Now, they will pose a significant test to the American asylum system, arguing that they deserve another chance at refuge in the United States, something rarely offered to deportees.
If you or any friends/family have suffered from a family separation, please contact our office so we can seek out alternatives for you.
