Muhammad
“As the Trump administration attempts to make good on the president’s campaign promise to enact mass deportations and expel 1 million people each year, legal aid groups and immigration experts say that it appears to be using the threat of separation as one of many aggressive strategies to speed up the removal of migrants from the country.” – The Guardian
A father has been separated from his wife and children and detained in an immigration prison for over six months.
“I feel like I am alone and nothing of my future is within my control,” he wrote in a sworn declaration.
Muhammad, a 24-year-old father of four and RAICES client, fled Afghanistan for the U.S., believing it was the safest place to raise his children and provide them with the life they deserved. His family was forced to leave Afghanistan after receiving death threats from the Taliban because of his wife’s human rights work and their family’s ties to the military. If they ever returned, they would face certain death.
Muhammad’s story was highlighted on the front page of The Guardian website as part of an investigative report highlighting the heartbreaking reality of family separations under the Trump administration, a tactic used to ramp up its mass deportation efforts.
The only active family detention center in the U.S. is in Texas, and RAICES has served 250 families since the practice restarted earlier this year — approximately 10% of whom have experienced separation while in ICE custody. Just this year, nearly 2,350 children, including 36 infants, have been booked into detention centers across the country.
Many of these children are being used as leverage by ICE to pressure parents into making an impossible choice: agree to be deported back to the country they fled, or have their children taken away. As a result, fathers like Muhammad aren’t only being torn apart from their families. Kids are being separated from their parents and shuffled across the country — making it nearly impossible to know if they’ll ever see one another again and forcing lawyers on a wild goose chase to find them.
The likely outcome? Compounded trauma, not to mention the very real possibility of indefinite or permanent separations. (Remember, the first Trump administration lost track of parents and children, leaving many’s fate still unknown.)
This is a tactic to punish people. It’s a tactic to get immigrants to relent, to agree to self-deport. It is a punitive measure for not acquiescing, for demanding access to legal counsel, and for asserting their right to apply for asylum.
Our attorneys and advocates show up at the sites where our country inflicts the most pain, and where that pain remains hidden from the public: detention centers. This access means that we have a moral responsibility to alert the American public to the reality and cruelty of the current assault on immigrants — and the rights that protect all of us.
