Two immigrant children who were being detained in Connecticut are being reunited with their parents after the government separated them at the U.S.-Mexico border. Last week, a federal judge in Bridgeport ruled the separation unconstitutional.
The children are a 14-year-old girl from El Salvador and a 9-year-old boy from Honduras. They’ve been staying in a group home in Groton, Connecticut. Their parents watched a court hearing last week through a teleconference link from a detention center in Texas.
Andreas Martin, a child psychiatrist at Yale University, diagnosed the children with post-traumatic stress disorder and said at a press conference last week that was due to the separation from their parents.
“These are children who have been traumatized repeatedly, but the separation is traumatic. There’s no disagreement that the children need to be reunited as expeditiously as possible.”
U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said the Trump administration was to blame for the mental stress the children have gone through.
“The Department of Justice’s cruel and inhumane policy of separating children from their parents has meant that these two children in Connecticut have endured unimaginable trauma and tragedy in their lives.”
The parents are part of a class action case in California in which a judge required the government to reunite families by July 26. A U.S. attorney said the case had been expedited and the parents have been paroled from federal custody.
Blumenthal says he doesn’t know if the federal government still plans to move both parents and children into detention centers in Texas after July 26, but he says that would be as bad as separating them.
“We have no idea how those tent cities are going to be run. We know that they have all the characteristics of a prison. I’ve seen them. They have fences, barbed wire, 20 people to a tent, no privacy, and virtually no real education or contact with the outside world.”
Another hearing is scheduled for this Wednesday. Blumenthal said he expects both the parents and the children to be present.
