July 5, 2018

Last Saturday, on June 30, in cities and towns across the United States, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the immigration policies of the administration of U.S. President Donald J. Trump. Targeting the administration’s separation of young children from families attempting to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border, people flooded more than 700 “Families Belong Together” marches nationwide. Protesters shouted slogans and carried signs imploring the administration to stop the separation policy, which has outraged people throughout the country and around the world.

People take part in the Families Belong Together march in New York City on June 30, 2018. Credit: © Christopher Penler, Shutterstock

The largest Families Belong Together protests on Saturday took place in such cities as Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., but protesters also gathered in more conservative-minded areas such as Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, and Wyoming. Protesters massed near a border patrol station in McAllen, Texas, where a detention center was holding migrant children in cages. People also protested near Trump’s golf resort at Bedminster, New Jersey, where the president was spending the weekend. Two days earlier, on Thursday, June 28, some 600 women were arrested in a preliminary immigration protest at the U.S. Capitol.

Credit: © Families Belong Together

The Trump administration treats migrants caught illegally crossing the border as criminals, regardless of their potential status as asylum seekers. (In international law, asylum is shelter and protection given by a nation to a person who is fleeing another nation. The United States has a long history of granting asylum to people fleeing danger and oppression in other countries.) Migrant parents are crowded into federal prisons to await trial, and because kids cannot be held with parents in federal jail, the “unaccompanied alien children” are sent to border holding camps or juvenile centers elsewhere in the United States.

Previous administrations varied on their treatment of families caught crossing the border illegally, but in most cases parents and children were held together in immigration detention or released to await a court date when a judge would grant asylum or deport them as unauthorized immigrants. Most families trying to cross the border are fleeing violence, persecution, or economic hardship in their home countries.

The Trump administration began enforcing its hard-line immigration policies in 2017. Family separations greatly increased in April 2018 after the Department of Justice instituted a so-called “zero-tolerance policy” that no longer excluded adults with children from criminal prosecution. From the middle of April to the end of May, the Department of Homeland Security reported that 1,995 children were taken from 1,940 adults. Overall, the Trump administration has separated some 2,700 immigrant children from their parents.

After drawing the ire of human rights groups, politicians, Pope Francis, the United Nations, and many foreign governments, the Trump administration backed down on the separations in June. A few hundred kids have since been reunited with their parents, but most remain isolated and far from their families. The administration’s immigration stance has not changed, however. Families trying to illegally cross the border continue to be arrested and detained indefinitely, but the administration claims that children are no longer being forcibly separated.