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WASHNGTON. – New York state plans to sue US President Donald Trump over his treatment of immigrant families along the US-Mexican border.
The lawsuit was announced by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, a long-time opponent of Donald Trump.
“The Trump administration’s policy to tear apart families is a moral failing and a human tragedy,” Cuomo’s statement said.
“We will not tolerate the Constitutional rights of children and their parents being violated by our federal government,” the statement continued.
On Twitter, Cuomo said at least 70 children are being held in detention centres in New York, a number expected to increase.
The state is basing its suit on a 1997 legal settlement in which basic standards were set for the treatment of children detained for immigration reasons.
The suit alleges those standards are not being followed by Trump.
US border agency, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has come under heavy criticism for its treatment of families at the US-Mexican border.
Last week, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesman said that nearly 2,000 minors were separated from 1,940 adults who crossed the US border without documents between April 19 and May 31.
Administration officials have claimed they are forced to break up the families to follow the law, but according to the Washington Post, “These claims are false” – there are no statutes that mandate separating children from families at the border.
Critics point out that the administration can simply end the “zero-tolerance” approach.
Rights groups accuse Trump of using the issue as a way to pressure Democrats into pushing through immigration reform legislation that includes funding for his border wall on the US-Mexico border.
Trump’s policy has been condemned by human rights groups and US politicians, both Democratic and Republican.
Amnesty International has called the policy “nothing short of torture”.
On Tuesday, audio from one of the camps where children are being held was released by ProPublica, a non-profit media organisation.
In the seven-minute-long recording, children can be heard crying and asking for their parents.
According to ProPublica, the clip was obtained from prominent civil rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury, who was given the audio by an unidentified individual who recorded the children in a detention centre.
Meanwhile, Trump said yesterday he would sign an executive order to keep migrant families together at the border with Mexico, amid an escalating uproar over the separation of children from their parents.
Heart-rending scenes and sounds of crying children taken from their families have aroused a firestorm of opposition to Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
After long insisting that Congress alone could solve the problem, the Republican president seemed ready to take the matter into his own hands.
“We are signing an executive order in a little while,” Trump said at the White House, noting that he hoped it would happen in parallel with legislation passed by Congress.
“We are going to keep families together. But we have to maintain toughness, or our country will be overrun by people, by all of the things that we don’t stand for,” Trump said at a meeting with cabinet members and Republican lawmakers.
The US House of Representatives is due to consider a bill on the issue today.
Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said yesterday the legislation will resolve multiple issues in dealing with the high flow of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers, including the practice of separating families.
More than 2,300 children have been taken from parents since May 5 under the current policy.
Trump blamed the past administrations of George W Bush and Barack Obama for not doing more to resolve the problem on their watch.
“This has been going on for many, many years. We’ll see if we can solve it. This is not something that happened just now,” he said. – AFP/Al Jazeera
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