Joe Biden Pledges Effort To Reunite The 500+ Immigrant Children Separated From Their Parents
Biden has pledged to sign an executive order to establish a federal task force that would search for the parents of 545 children who were separated from their families at the U.S.- Mexico border, if elected president.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden pledged to issue an executive order creating a federal task force that would focus on reuniting hundreds of migrant children with their parents, if elected president.
Earlier this month, lawyers reported that the parents of 545 migrant children separated by the Trump administration at the U.S.-Mexico border could not be found. According to an ACLU lawyer, at least 360 children are also unaccounted for.
In a new ad from the Biden campaign, the former vice president promised an executive order on his first day in office to create a task force that would reunite the parents and children.
The ad also shows a clip from the last presidential debate where Biden called the administration’s treatment of the children “criminal.”
"Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated, and now they cannot find over 500 of the sets of those parents, and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It's criminal. It's criminal," Biden said at the debate.
According to CNN, the ad is airing in key battleground states including Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.
In 2018, the Trump administration separated approximately 2,800 families at the border under a “zero tolerance” policy, prompting outrage and widespread protests to “Keep Families Together” across the country.
Biden’s prospective immigration plan if elected also involves reversing many of the policies Trump has implemented in office — including stopping construction on the border wall, halting family separation at the U.S. border, and ending travel bans on individuals from designated Muslim-majority countries.
Biden’s running mate, vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris visited McAllen,Texas on Friday afternoon — a border town and one of the prominent locations where Trump administration border protection officials and ICE agents enforced their child separation policy.