main detention center for unaccompanied alien children in the Rio Grande Valley run by the US Customs and Border Protection on March 30, 2021. Photo by Dario Lopez-mills / Getty Image
Forbs staff writer Anna Kaplan, citing the Wall Street Journal which broke the story Thursday (Oct. 28), reported that the Biden administration is in talks to offer illegal immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration around $450,000 a person in compensation for what their advocates say is “lasting psychological trauma.”
Kaplan quoted the Journal’s reliance on unnamed “people familiar with the matter,” that several agencies are at work to resolve lawsuits filed on behalf of parents and children who say the government subjected them to traumatic stress during the Trump administration.
The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments that could amount to close to $1 million a family, though the final numbers could shift, the people familiar with the matter said. Most of the families that crossed the border illegally from Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S. included one parent and one child, the people said. Many families would likely get smaller payouts, depending on their circumstances, the people said.
It is unclear how many people will be eligible for the settlement, but about 940 families have reportedly filed claims to date.The illegal immigrant families were separated after crossing the border from Mexico to claim asylum in 2017 and 2018 as part of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), among others, have filed lawsuits against the government alleging that the thousands of children and parents impacted by the policy have mental health effects from the prolonged trauma. The Journal reports that lawyers representing families and the government are continuing to negotiate the settlement and aim to reach an agreement by the end of November.
During Biden’s first weeks in office, he vowed to reunite the families that had been separated by the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy. Starting in 2017, the Trump administration tried to prosecute all immigrants who illegally crossed the border, resulting in children who arrived with their parents being sent to shelters and border facilities.
Lawyers representing the children in lawsuits allege that children were subjected to malnutrition and provided little medical attention at these facilities. The ACLU identified approximately 5,500 children who were separated from their parents after illegally crossing the border in 2017 and 2018, according to court documents. Not all of the children have been reunited with their parents, as governmental investigations found that the Trump administration did not create ways to track the parents and the children who had been separated.Approximately 1,000 families have yet to be reunited, Family Reunification Task Force leader Michelle Brané said in an interview earlier this month. She noted that there could be more as it’s “very hard to know because there’s no record.” She said the task force has reunited at least 52 families since Biden assumed office.
~ Grif cross posted in CoDA
Hope the 81 million (cough, cough) people that voted for Ol’ Creepy Joe are pleased with themselves.
Illegals have won the lotto…
Those who voted for Biden don’t know about this because they get their news SOLELY from the whore MSM.
The insane are in charge of the asylum, & the American tax payers” elected” them & are paying up for it, but so, too, are those equal numbers who did NOT elect them. Creepy Joe & his ilk in Congress do NOT have a mandate to “essentially transform America” into THEIR narrow vision, though this is how they are thinking & acting. For example, our immigration laws are not “broken” as they will proclaim in an unending oral loop, they are just not being enforced by the executive branch of our government, whose job it is to enforce the laws on the books that were passed by the legislative branch. Thus, you have this untenable, ignorant situation where, if you violate our laws to come into this country, & pay the consequences provided by our laws, you think you can sue the USA (& do so w/your shameless ambulance-chaser counsel) for the stress of paying the consequences of the law….BECAUSE, you know we have an executive who not only goes along with it, but is ready to pay you off a half million each (does that mean each parent AND each child…which could mean millions per family). It just boggles my mind. Does that mean that when anyone separated from family by consequences paid due to breaking the law, any law, in the USA, & thus separated from their family as a result due to jail time or other ‘stress” …can sue for a half million due to the stress of separation? I guess in these crazy days of emptying the jails without qualification, defunding the police without alternative systems or plans, the schools calling out the FBI to keep parents from speaking out about public school curriculum & rapes in bathrooms (btw, aided by the stupid policies that I won’t even go into now…we have them at MY SCHOOL, too), this could ONLY make perfect sense if these are the things you espouse & wish upon our country, our citizens.
A new concept break the law during Trump administration and get rewarded by the Trump haters. Break a minor infraction at a school meeting under the biden and they send the DOJ and the FBI on the parents for complaining how their children are being taught in school.
Fuck Joe Biden.
Where are the lawyers representing us, the taxpayers?
Just compare this “bonanza” with the fact that the family of a member of the United States military who is “killed in action” only receives $100,000. The news of this major B/S is beyond belief. The very fact that people who break our laws get this kind of payoff is just beyond belief. Everyone should be spreading the news of this action on the part of Creepy Joe’s administration far and wide.
That money won’t fix any damage allegedly done to them-it’ll just make them anti-Conservative AND “rich”.What in God’s name is this Badministration THINKING??