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Trump Administration ‘Quietly Resumes’ Family Separations at the Border, Says Report

ProPublica finds evidence kids are still being separated from their parents.

The Trump administration has “quietly resumed” separating migrant families at the border, according to ProPublica, just months after the president signed an order to keep parents and kids together. Lawyers at Catholic Charities, which provides legal services to immigrant children in government custody, have discovered at least 16 new separation cases over the past three months. Jodi Ziesemer, a supervising attorney at Catholic Charities, said: “It’s so disheartening. This was supposed to be a policy that ended.” However, immigration officials are reportedly finding spurious excuses to continue separating kids from their families. “If the authorities have even the most specious evidence that a parent was a gang member, or had some kind of blemish on their record,” said Neha Desai, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, “anything they can come up with to say that the separation is for the health and welfare of the child, then they’ll separate them.” In an email to ProPublica, a CBP official admitted that immigrant families are still being separated, but said the separations had “nothing to do with zero tolerance.”