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By Associated Press and Julia Ainsley
WASHINGTON – A House committee on Tuesday decided to summon Trump administration officials on family separations on the southern border, the first of the new Congress, while Democrats had promised to hold Aggressive administration so that it counts.
The decision of the Oversight Committee will require justice, homeland security, health and social services officials to submit documents to legislators.
The chair of the committee, Maryland's Democrat Elijah Cummings, pledged to pressure the administration to obtain documents and testimony on a wide range of issues, but the separation of the family was part of of his first priorities.
"I think it's a real national emergency," Cummings said. "When our own government pulls children out of the arms of their mothers and fathers with no plans to reunite them, there is child abuse sponsored by the government."
Cummings said the committee members have been looking for documents for seven months.
The SC wishes to obtain detailed information on separated children, the place and places where they were detained, detailed information about their parents, information on efforts to restore children to their parents' homes and whether their parents have been expelled.
However, subpoenas only require the counting of zero-tolerance separated children, which lasted from May to the end of June 2018, and do not potentially include thousands of separate ones before. Most of these zero-tolerance children have already been reunited or handed over to sponsors by court order.
The Republican committee representative, Jim Jordan of Ohio, sent a letter to Cummings stating that subpoenas would not be necessary and that the administration had produced hundreds of pages of documents in response. to previous requests for information.
"We should not rush to compel departments to provide documents, especially when they wanted to voluntarily comply with your request," Jordan wrote.
Other Republicans said the committee should review the documents they had before deciding if the agencies had not complied with the request and request data on separations under the Obama administration. But two voted to subpoena.
Cummings stated that the documents already submitted to the committee were very incomplete.
"The information we got was not a name, not a number," Cummings said. "Nothing."
The House Judiciary Committee authorized a subpoena to compel Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to testify if necessary, but this was never served.
If officials do not comply with the new subpoenas, the committee and possibly the entire House could vote to condemn the department in contempt, setting in motion a potentially lengthy court battle.
Last year, more than 2,800 children were separated from their parents at the border under the zero tolerance immigration policy imposed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who prosecuted any person who crossed the border illegally.
Because children can not be put in jail with their parents, they have been separated. Surveillance reports revealed that the administration was not ready to handle the aftermath of the separations, that she had no way of keeping up with the families and that she was n & # 39; There was no way to reunite them until a federal judge intervened.
A control report from the Inspector General of Health and Human Services recently revealed that thousands more kids than we thought might have been separated before the ## 147 ## 39, formal entry into force of the zero tolerance policy. Immigration officers are allowed to separate children if their welfare is of concern, if a parent is charged or has serious health risks.
Under a federal court order, Health and Human Services released 2,735 of the 2,816 children separated from their parents under the Zero Tolerance Policy in May and June 2018. Most of these children, 2 155, were reunited with their parents, sent live with sponsors or turned 18 years old.
However, Justice Department lawyers recently told the same court that it would be too restrictive to reunite potentially thousands of separated children before zero tolerance came into effect. The HHS report estimates that thousands of immigrant children were separated before zero tolerance, thanks to a secret pilot program set up by DHS in El Paso from July 2017.
Justice Department attorney Scott Stewart told Justice Dana Sabraw in the Southern District of California last week that finding and reuniting separated children before zero tolerance "radically alters the complexity." this case from the point of view of the government ".
Sabraw, who still plans to order the government to reunite separated children before zero tolerance, told Stewart: "It's important to recognize that we're talking about human beings."
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