40 Jacqueline Bhabha attention, family separation continues.22 The new version of the policy, so-called For Cause separation, has affected thousands of children, including very young ones. This policy involves separation of children from nonparent relatives – grandparents, older siblings, and other relatives. A few reported cases describe separations from supposedly “unsuitable” parents – in one case a father whose only disqualifying feature was a shoplifting conviction, in another, a parent who was HIV-positive.23 Once these children are separated from their relatives – allegedly to guard against abuse or the risk of trafficking – they are placed in facilities that have attracted strong criticism. A particularly searing indictment was offered by an experienced and widely respected Columbia Law School expert. In her testimony before the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform, Elora Mukherjee included the following account: In June 2019, a small team of lawyers, a doctor, and I met with nearly 70 immigrant children detained . . . in Texas . . .. The children . . . were dirty and distressed, held for days and weeks without access to soap, showers, toothbrushes, clean clothing, adequate nutrition, or adequate sleep. Over the past year, at least seven children are known to have died in federal immigration custody or shortly after being released. These tragedies occurred after nearly a decade of no reported child deaths. Every day, children are ripped apart from their family members at our borders and detained without access to their loved ones. These separations leave young children isolated for days, weeks and months without their parents, grandparents, aunts, siblings and other familial adult caregivers.24 The lawyer’s testimony to Congress included searing quotations from some of the children interviewed. A typical excerpt: “I started taking care of [a five-year-old girl] . . . after they separated her from her father. I did not know either of them before that. She was very upset. The workers did nothing to try to comfort her. I tried to comfort her and she has been with me ever since. [This five-year-old girl] sleeps on a mat with me on the concrete floor. We spend all day every day in that room. There are no activities, only crying” (age 15, female).25 The rollout of “zero humanity” immigration policies by the Trump administration continues. Indeed it is accelerating, building on the grim foundations laid very early on by this administration – the incoherent executive orders banning Muslims,26 the elimination of the Central American minors’ program designed to 22 S. Pierce, Immigration-Related Policy Changes in the First Two Years of the Trump Administration (Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2019), p. 2. 23 Personal communication from ACLU counsel to author at Harvard University conference on November 13, 2019. 24 Hearing on the Trump Administration’s Child Separation Policy: Substantiated Allegations of Mistreatment before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, 116th Congress (2019) (statement of Elora Mukherjee, Professor, Columbia Law School), p. 2. 25 Ibid., p. 9. 26 “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into The United States,” Executive Order 13769, March 6, 2017, www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting- https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press