From her holding cell, the Salvadoran mother could see her daughter across the room, surrounded by other children. The mother and daughter had been separated days earlier at the border, among the hundreds of migrant families caught up in the government’s new “zero tolerance” policy.
After a guard left her daughter’s cell open one day, the 15-year-old slipped out and brought her mother a small bottle of water.
“Our fingers touched through the chain-linked fence,” the mother, identified as R.M. in court filings, said in her account to lawyers. “I told her that everything was going to be OK and that I loved her very much. This was the last time that I touched my daughter.”
Soon after, R.M. was transferred to a detention center in Washington, thousands of miles from her daughter.
“I was inconsolable. I got maybe one hour of sleep per night,” she said. “I could not eat. I could not talk to anyone. All I could think about was my daughter.”
R.M. is now among the plaintiffs in a federal case seeking to require the government to provide mental health services to migrant families separated this summer at the US-Mexico border. In all, roughly 2,600 children were torn apart from their parents. More than 500 children remain in federal custody as of last week.
“Plaintiffs and their children are entitled to appropriate screening,” reads the complaint, filed in July. “These mental health services cannot be provided in the same slipshod manner as the government implemented its initial trauma inducing policy.”
The lawsuit was filed in the Central District of California by lawyers from Public Counsel, Sidley Austin…