The US government has deliberately adopted immigration policies and practices that caused catastrophic harm to thousands of people seeking safety in the United States, including the separation of over 6,000 family units in a four-month period more than previously disclosed by authorities, Amnesty International said.
Those policies and practices have included, among others:
(1) mass illegal pushbacks of asylum-seekers at the US–Mexico border;
(2) thousands of illegal family separations, through which the Trump administration has deliberately and purposefully inflicted extreme suffering on families, ill-treatment which rose to the level of torture in some cases; and
(3) increasingly arbitrary and indefinite detention of asylum-seekers, without parole, constituting cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (ill-treatment) which is absolutely prohibited in international law.
In this report, we take a look at the recommendations the United States has received on the subject of migration in the Universal Periodic Review sessions. The US has always received recommendations on migration among other 55 subjects, and it seems that the number of recommendations in this regard will increase in the future because the situation has deteriorated sharply. Two UPR sessions for the country were in 2010 and 2015, and the third will be in 2020.
In the first cycle, 280 recommendations were given to the US and 29 of them were on “migrants” (about 10 percent) among 55 issues, and in Second cycle the total number of recommendations were 388 and 31 of them were on “migrants” (about 8 percent).
These numbers lead us to a conclusion that the migration should be a matter of concern in the USA and its importance should be taken under consideration by the policy makers. But not only the migration and refugee situation became worse than before but also policies are in breach of human rights and children rights.
Furthermore, in UPR sessions most of the recommendations on the subject of migrants emphasis on ratification and adoption of significant international human rights instruments such as the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In practice, the US did nothing about it.
According to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child all children have the right to a family which allows children to be connected to their history, and it offers a protective perimeter against violation of their rights. Children separated from their families become easy victims of violence, exploitation, trafficking, discrimination and all other types of abuse.
In the past several months, More than 2500 children were separated from their parents at the borders amid a zero-tolerance policy on people entering the US illegally. It is the reality of a policy that was in place that resulted in large numbers of families being separated without forethought as to reunification and keeping track of people. Donald Trump believes the administration's move to separate migrant children from parents was an effective deterrent to illegal crossings.
But the extreme suffering US authorities purposefully inflicted by separating families constituted ill-treatment and in some cases torture. “The Trump administration is waging a deliberate campaign of widespread human rights violations in order to punish and deter people seeking safety at the US–Mexico border,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International.