Zero Tolerance Policy
Migrants and Human Rights under the Trump Administration
The Trump Administration, Migrants and Human Rights: Under the presidency of Donald Trump asylum seekers and undocumented residents and their children suffered.
Children were removed from their parents at the border under a bizarre effort to “deter” migration by delivering cruelty at the hands of border cops and immigration and customs enforcement. He ended the DACA program.
He allowed ICE to terrorize workplaces and neighborhoods with unannounced raids, followed by swift deportations.
The worst aspects of the anti-immigrant hostilities emerged in 2018 with the Zero Tolerance Policy which had a devastating impact on the human rights of asylum seekers. Donald Trump’s order to close the border to all migrant asylum seekers led to the separation of hundreds of children from their parents or caretakers upon arriving at the border. In late 2020, over 500 children have yet to be reunited.
The Impact of Zero Tolerance
In 2018 Donald Trump ordered the border closed. He ordered the Attorney General to implement a Zero Tolerance Policy in an effort to deter migrants from coming to the U.S. to seek asylum.
The policy extended even to those persons fleeing terrorism and gender violence in their home country, migrants who ask for refuge and protection under International human rights/asylum law.
Migrants were arrested and presumed criminals and their children separated at the time of detention. The policies authorized aggressive ICE raids in workplaces and the use of racial profiling on workers. ICE even went after immigrants with legal residence.
Children have been removed from families and placed in special shelters, including tent cities.
In August 2018 punitive practices included a retaliatory re-separation of children from parent detainees at Karnes detention center.
Human Rights Groups Fought Back
In Ms. L. v. ICE (2018), the ACLU sued on behalf of a mother and her 7-year-old daughter who fled violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and then were separated by Trump’s Zero Tolerance Policy.
The mother was detained 2000 miles away from her child. A federal judge issued a nationwide injunction to stop the child separations.
