'Mothers could not stop crying': Lawmaker blasts Trump policy after visiting detained immigrants
By Amy B Wang
June 10 at 6:14 PM
A group of lawmakers and public officials in Washington state denounced the Trump administration Saturday for a policy that is resulting in the separation of immigrant families at the Mexican border, accusing the administration of causing undue trauma to children and parents who might be legally seeking asylum in the United States.
Although Seattle is some 1,500 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, the debate over family separations hit closer to home for the Evergreen State after dozens of immigrants were transferred last week to the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Nearly all of those immigrants — 174 out of 206 — were women, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who spent about three hours Saturday morning meeting with the recently moved detainees at the SeaTac facility.
Most of them were from Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, she said, but there were also immigrants from as far away as Eritrea. Many spoke of fleeing threats of rape, gang violence and political persecution, Jayapal said.
The women were in three separate concrete pods when she visited, and Jayapal said she and an interpreter first asked them to respond to questions by raising their hands. She asked how many were mothers who had been forcibly separated from their children: More than half of the women raised their hands. Some said that their children had been as young as 12 months — and many no longer knew where their children were being held.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/06/10/mothers-could-not-stop-crying-officials-blast-trump-policy-after-visiting-detained-immigrants
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