Yale Law Clinic and Partners Publish Report on Family Separations at U.S. Border

Yale Law, Dec. 16, 2024

"As many as 1,360 children have never been reunited with their parents six years after the United States government forcibly separated them at the U.S. border, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Efforts by the U.S. to help separated families have not adequately reckoned with the severe harm inflicted on them, Human Rights Watch, the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School said in a report released today. The 131-page report, “‘We Need to Take Away Children’: Zero Accountability Six Years After ‘Zero Tolerance,’” finds that the government refused, in many cases for days or weeks, to disclose the circumstances and whereabouts of separated children to their parents. This conduct meets the definition of an enforced disappearance, according to the authors. Forcible family separations may also have constituted torture, the intentional infliction of severe suffering for an improper purpose by a state agent. Even a single instance of enforced disappearance or torture is a crime under international law. FULL REPORT: ‘We Need to Take Away Children’: Zero Accountability Six Years After ‘Zero Tolerance’  “It’s chilling to see, in document after document, the calculated cruelty that went into the forcible family separation policy,” said Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior children’s rights counsel at Human Rights Watch and an author of the report. “A government should never target children to send a message to parents.”