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The El Paso Experiment

November 02, 2020 (1 min read)

Melissa del Bosque, The Intercept, Nov. 1, 2020 - A Public Defender’s Lonely Fight Against Family Separation

“Can you imagine having your child taken away from you in the middle of the night?” Garcia wondered aloud to his wife over dinner after being assigned the case in late October. He had a daughter from his first marriage, and Jayne had three children, whom Garcia helped raise and thought of as his own. His wife, whose Midwestern pragmatism he’d always admired, put down her fork and looked at him with an expression of alarm. “If somebody took away my children, I would be destroyed,” she said. “I would not let it happen.” But as Garcia sat in the courtroom with his clients, not even the judge could get any information from the federal prosecutors about where the five children had been taken."