US: Nearly a third of families separated at border never reunited

The 135-page report from Human Rights Watch, the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School accuses the US government of carrying out enforced disappearances and torture from 2017 to 2021.

It finds that the government refused, in many cases for days or weeks, to disclose the circumstances and whereabouts of separated children to their parents, which the authors say meets the definition of an enforced disappearance.

Forcible family separations may also have constituted torture, the intentional infliction of severe suffering for an improper purpose by a state agent, it adds.

The US government separated more than 4,600 children from their parents between 2017 and 2021. The 1,360 children who remain unaccounted for amount to nearly 30 per cent of children separated during the first administration of President Donald J. Trump.

Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior children’s rights counsel at Human Rights Watch and an author of the report, said: “It’s chilling to see, in document after document, the calculated cruelty that went into the forcible family separation policy.

“A government should never target children to send a message to parents.”

Danny Woodward, TCRP staff attorney, added: “Temporary status and short-term access to services are nowhere near adequate remedies for intentionally tearing apart families.

“Acts of torture and other serious wrongs require comprehensive redress.”