Lawyers for eight immigrant families separated under Trump administration policy have filed claims against the US government, demanding $6m each in damages for what they describe as “inexplicable cruelty” and lasting trauma.
In claims filed to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security, released on Monday, the parents accuse immigration officers of taking their children away without giving them information, sometimes without even a chance to say goodbye.
The claims allege the children remain traumatized, including a seven-year-old girl who will not sleep without her mother and a six-year-old boy who is reluctant to eat.
Stanton Jones, an attorney representing some of the plaintiffs, warned the Trump administration that other families caught up in the government’s policy of “zero tolerance” for unlawful border crossings, which resulted in parents being forcibly divided from their children and held in detention separately, are getting ready to sue.
“Today is just the beginning,” he told the Guardian on Monday evening.
One claimant told of the horror of being separated from her child.
“It was the worst moment of my life, when officers tore my crying daughter from my arms,” said Leticia, one of the claimants, in a statement. Last names are being withheld. “During those months, I couldn’t sleep or eat because for much of the time I had no information about where they had taken her.”
One claim alleges that a 13-year-old boy has “outbursts of inexplicable anger” and cannot speak to his mother about their separation and time in detention, according to a press release from Arnold & Porter, a DC-based law firm involved in the case. Another details how a 12-year-old boy named Antonio still has nightmares about his experience in detention and described it as “the worst thing that has ever happened” to him.
Jones said the claims depicted “inexplicable cruelty” and that the affected families deserve monetary damages.
“The government’s actual conduct of tearing children – often small children – away from their parents in a way that was designed to deliberately inflict emotional trauma on those people for the purpose of achieving a policy objective is unlawful,” he said.
“They are entitled to more than just the outrage that was prompted by what people saw in the news in 2018. They are entitled to compensation from the government for intentional infliction of emotional distress. The government’s use of emotionally traumatizing children to try to achieve a policy objective very clearly meets all the legal elements of the offense intentional infliction of emotional distress,” he added.
The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges to the Trump’s zero-tolerance policy over unlawful immigration across the US-Mexico border.
“These children and their parents have experienced horrific, life-altering trauma that was intentionally inflicted on them by our government,” Jones said in a statement. “The government must be held accountable for the impact of its policies.”
Jones’s firm, Arnold & Porter, is also behind a separate lawsuit seeking $60m in damages from the government on behalf of Yazmin Juárez, the mother of a baby who died shortly after being released from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.
An HHS spokeswoman, Evelyn Stauffer, said the department could not comment on the claims, but that HHS “plays no role in the apprehension or initial detention” of children referred to its care.
The government has admitted to separating 2,600 children from their families, though a recent government review says that the Trump administration divided thousands of other families before the policy was publicly known.