In a conference call with ACLU attorneys on Thursday, Biden Justice Department officials informed the group that they were pulling out of negotiations over paying damages to some 5,500 children brought into the United States illegally in 2018.
The ACLU saw a chance to hurt the Trump administration by joining with other groups in suing for damages, claiming that the families whose children had been separated from their parents while those parents served time in jail for entering the country illegally were harmed. They suffered from separation “trauma,” said the ACLU, after they were “forcibly” separated from their parents. ABC News called it an “abhorrent” policy instigated by the Trump administration to discourage other families from entering the United States illegally.
In fact — as ABC News no doubt knows, and knew at the time — there are no “family detention facilities” available in federal prisons and so the children were moved into government-run shelters until their parents had served out their sentences. After the parents had served their time, efforts were made to reunite them with their children. However, as evidence that many of those children were used as pawns by illegals, the “parents” of hundreds of those children are yet to be located.
Initially the ACLU demanded $3.4 million for each family but under negotiations that have been going on for months, the group reduced its demand to $1 million, or about $450,000 per family member.
It wasn’t until the Wall Street Journal reported about the “reparations” that pushback began. Republicans called the reparations “insanity,” “unacceptable,” and a “slap in the face.”
When Biden was quizzed about the proposed settlement he claimed that he knew nothing. When Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked him about the proposed settlement, Biden declared flatly, “It ain’t gonna happen,” adding, “you guys [over at Fox News] keep sending that garbage out. But it’s not true.”
But it was true. Uncle Joe wasn’t in the loop. After being briefed, he changed his tune, declaring that those settlements were justified:
If, in fact, because of the outrageous behavior of the last administration, you coming across the border, whether it was legally or illegally, and you lost your child — you lost your child.
It’s gone [and] you deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstance. What that will be, I have no idea.
Republicans in Congress mounted an effort to keep the DOJ from paying out the $450,000 in reparations, but Democrats quashed the move. It wasn’t until Thursday that the DOJ withdrew from those negotiations.
It was now ACLU’s time to be outraged. Said its lead attorney Lee Gelernt:
It’s hard to understand DOJ’s decision other than it was influenced by political considerations.… Little children were deliberately abused by our government [under Trump], yet the Biden administration is now going to defend [Trump’s] practice in court. This is shameful.
Let’s recount: Some 5,500 children crossed the southern border of the United States in 2018, many accompanied by their parents, others accompanied by strangers seeking to use them as pawns to get into the country and then abandoning them, others accompanied by traffickers. To ensure that the children were kept out of harm’s way, and to ensure they were placed with actual family members, they were held in special facilities away from adults.
This caused those families “trauma.” Even though they were here illegally, the ACLU and other groups such as the American Immigration Council claimed that the American taxpayer somehow owed them reparations for their alleged trauma, pain, and suffering because of the separation.
Lest readers celebrate prematurely, the DOJ told the ACLU that while it is withdrawing from negotiations en masse, the Biden agency is prepared to press for payments on a “case by case” basis, thereby spreading out the negotiations for years and keeping any settlements out of the public eye.
The DOJ said:
While the parties have been unable to reach a global settlement agreement at this time, we remain committed to engaging with the plaintiffs and to bringing justice to the victims of this abhorrent policy.
So, the American taxpayer will be paying reparations. He just won’t learn about it from the mainstream media.
