WASHINGTON - The Biden administration pulled out of negotiations with lawyers representing families separated at the border that would have provided them with financial compensation, the American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday.
There is no explanation for not settling these cases other than the Biden administration is unwilling to use literally any political capital to help the young children who have been deliberately abused by our government, said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants Rights Project.
Gelernt said that the Biden administration will now be in court not just defending the United States but also the individual federal officials responsible for family separation. These families had been separated by the Trump administration at the border.
NBC News previously reported that the administration had been in talks to offer separated migrant parents and children hundreds of thousands of dollars per person.
The lawyers for these migrants claimed that the families experienced harm when they were separated from each other in a number of cases.
The White House directed requests for comment to the Department of Justice, citing active litigation. Under President Donald Trump's zero tolerance policy in 2018 and a similar pilot program in 2017, more than 5,600 children were separated from their parents because their parents crossed the border illegally with them. The zero tolerance program was ended by the Biden administration earlier this year.
The Trump administration didn't have a system to reunite the families it separated.
More than 1,000 families were estimated to still be separated from each other by the end of October, according to the White House at the time. In many cases, parents were deported back to their home country while their children were still in the U.S. More than 300 parents of separated children have not been found, according to court records.