A heartrending audio recording surfaced on Monday of immigrant children crying inconsolably for their parents at a detention centre as a defiant President Donald Trump and his officials continued to defend the policy to separate them from families crossing into the United States illegally.
They asked for their “papi (Spanish for father)”, “mami (mother)” or a relative and some had telephone numbers that they pleaded with consular officials to call.
ProPublica, an investigative news publication that obtained the recording, called one of the numbers.
“It was the hardest moment in my life,” the relative, an aunt, said. “Imagine getting a call from your six-year-old niece. She’s crying and begging me to go get her. She says, ‘I promise I’ll behave, but please get me out of here. I’m all alone’,” the aunt added.
The nearly eight-minute recording shook a nation already reeling from images and news reports about children, some as young as two, being ripped from their parents and taken to detention centres, which are beginning to be described by critics as “cages”.
The recording played in White House’s news briefing room — by one of the reporters — before the start of the daily briefing at which Kirstjen Nielsen, head of the department that oversees immigration and border security, aggressively defended the policy and flatly denied what was happening to these children amounted to “child abuse”.
“We have high standards. We give them meals and we give them education and we give them medical care. There are videos, there are TVs,” Nielsen, secretary of the department of homeland security, said.
MELANIA TRUMP ‘HATES’ TO SEE FAMILIES SEPARATED AT US-MEXICO BORDER, CALLS FOR END TO SEPARATION
First lady Melania Trump “hates” to see families separated at the border and hopes “both sides of the aisle” can reform the nation’s immigration laws, according to a statement Sunday about the controversy over separation of immigrant parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Mrs. Trump didn’t refer specifically to the Trump administration’s “no tolerance” policy, which was leading to a spike in children being separated from their families. Government statistics indicate that nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May.
A spokeswoman for the wife of President Donald Trump issued the statement after several days of images of crying children appearing on television and online.
“Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform,” said Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Trump. “She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.”
While the statement suggested the matter was an issue for Congress, Democratic lawmakers and others have pointed out that no law mandates the separation of children and parents at the border. A new Trump administration policy, which went into effect in May, sought to maximize criminal prosecutions of people caught trying to enter the U.S. illegally. More adults were being jailed as a result, which led to their children being separated from them.
