?Rep. Cárdenas: We must step up for separated children
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Last year, the humanitarian crisis of family separation shocked Americans across the country. Today, Republicans want to focus on how inconvenient it is to reunite these families. But we cannot talk about children in the same way we talk about returning sweaters to a lost and found – these are human beings who will live with this trauma for the rest of their lives. They may not all be American children, but they are children all the same.
I appreciate the efforts of certain people at the Department of Health and Human Services for sounding the alarms on this harmful policy. But the fact of the matter is, HHS should never have had to deal with all of these separated children in the first place. Trump created an unnecessary crisis, and while the harm is great, this administration has an obligation to reunite these children with their parents as quickly as possible.
That is the reason that today I joined a hearing of the House Energy & Commerce Committee on the failures of the Trump administration’s family separation policy. There is a mental health emergency for these children, and we must do EVERYTHING we can to make sure these children are reunited with their mothers and made whole again.
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