SAN DIEGO — While President Joe Biden had promised to end the practice of separating migrant families at the border, a new study finds that it is continuing.
Under the Trump administration, those family separations were part of a deliberate "Zero Tolerance" policy, during which more than 5,000 families were forcibly separated at the border.
A new report out of UCLA Law School shows that, under Customs & Border Protection policy, it is still happening.
"I will not demonize immigrants saying they are poisoning the blood of our country.... I will not separate families," Biden said at his State of the Union address earlier this year.
The new report from UCLA's Center for Immigration Law & Policy shows that family separations are continuing, However, it points out that under Trump's' Zero Tolerance' policy, "Trump explicitly encouraged CBP to separate families as a way to deter, punish, and inflict cruelty on migrants."
"We've seen the desperation in the eyes of the children and the eyes of the parents," said local immigrant-rights advocate Enrique Morones, founder of Gente Unida, a human rights border coalition. He has witnessed first-hand the harm caused by these separations.
"It is really devastating," Morones told CBS 8. "They are tricked into the separation, sometimes they just tell them, we're just going to take the kid's picture or something like that, and they never see the children again."
This new report finds that while the Biden administration has taken steps to reunite children separated from their parents under Trump's Zero Tolerance policy, Customs & Border Protection still continues to separate families: most often spouses, pregnant women separated from their partners, and young adult children separated from their parents.
Here in San Diego, between September and December of last year, the immigrant rights group Al Otro Lado documented more than 1,000 family separations.
Morones pointed out it would take congressional action to fundamentally change CBPs policies.
"We really got to practice what we preach," he added. "We should not be separating families: these are not criminals."
CBS 8 has reached out to Customs and Border Protection for comment on this new report but has not yet heard back at the time of publishing this story.
To check out the full report for yourself, click here.
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