Babies Torn From Immigrant Parents End Up In Michigan

GRAND RAPIDS, MI — As many parents around the nation watch in horror as parents and children are separated at the border, the issue has come a little closer to home for Michiganders. Overnight, two baby boys arrived in Grand Rapids after being taken from their immigrant parents at the southern border several weeks ago, according to reports. One of the children is 8 months old, the other is 11 months.

According to the Detroit Free Press, they are now among the youngest of a group of some 50 immigrant children who have wound up in foster homes in the western Michigan region under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance border policy. The average age of these kids is 8, according to the report.

RELATED: Listen To Voices Of The Children Separated From Parents At Border

"These kids are arriving between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. Not only are they being separated from their family, they are being transported to a place that they don't know in the middle of the night," Hannah Mills, program supervisor for the transitional foster care program at Bethany Christian Services, said in the Freep article. "We have found on many occasions that no one has explained to these children where they are going."

Many of the children have now gone a month or more without talking to their parents because they can't be located, the report noted.

The Trump administration has maintained that its goal is to protect the nation's borders, enforce immigration laws and send a strong message to immigrants that if they cross the border unlawfully, they will be prosecuted and their kids taken away. There is no federal law that mandates children and parents be separated at the border, though. The practice has led to nearly 2,000 kids being misplaced in the past six weeks, triggering a lot of controversy.

The government's policy for reuniting separated families is murky. Children who have been separated from their parents awaiting criminal prosecution are placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is under the Department of Health and Human Services. The government has provided a short flyer in both English and Spanish that tells immigrant parents charged with illegally crossing the border how they can locate their children but it doesn't provide any clear direction on reunification.

"HHS and ICE can take steps to facilitate family reunification for purposes of removal, consistent with federal law where the parent or legal guardian is capable of providing for the physical and mental well-being of the child and comports with the wishes of the parent or legal guardian," a fact sheet posted to the DHS website on June 15 says.

Condemnations of the policy have been swift and sharp, including from some of the administration's most reliable supporters. It has united religious conservatives and immigrant rights activists, who have said that "zero tolerance" amounts to "zero humanity." Democratic and Republican members of Congress spoke out against the administration's enforcement efforts over the weekend.

Former first lady Laura Bush called the administration's practices "cruel" and "immoral," and likened images of immigrant children being held in kennels to those that came out of Japanese internment camps during World War II. And the American Association of Pediatricians has said the practice of separating children from their parents can cause the children "irreparable harm."

Still, the administration had stood by it. President Donald Trump blames Democrats and says his administration is only enforcing laws already on the books, although that's not true. There are no laws that require children to be separated from their parents, or that call for criminal prosecutions of all undocumented border crossers. Those practices were established by the Trump administration.

RELATED: Department Of Homeland Security Head Booed At Mexican Restaurant

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has cited passages from the Bible in an attempt to establish religious justification. On Monday, he defended it again saying it was a matter of rule of law, "We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws." A Border Patrol spokesman echoed that thought in a written statement.

Image via Shutterstock

Subscribe to Detroit Patch for more regional news and real-time alerts.