The American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday that the Department of Justice is no longer negotiating to settle lawsuits from migrant families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under a Trump Administration policy.
Border Patrol agents carry out special operations near the U.S.-Mexico border fence.
The images are from the same company.
Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told Forbes that the DOJ cut off settlement talks with parents and children who said they faced severe trauma after being separated from their families at the southern border.
The DOJ did not reply to the request.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the Biden Administration was considering offering up to $450,000 to each person separated from their family, though the exact amount was not known.
President Joe Biden claimed after the Journal report that $450,000 payments are not going to happen, and federal officials told the civil liberties group that the figures reported in the press were too high.
Biden told reporters last month that separated families deserve some kind of compensation, but he didn't specify how much.
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Gelernt said in an email to Forbes that they are disappointed that the Biden administration allowed politics to get in the way of helping the little children.
Some conservatives don't like the idea of giving money to separated families. A group of Senate Republicans drafted an amendment to the annual defense funding bill that would prevent the DOJ from making settlement payments. Senate Minority Leader McConnell said that the idea feels like a satirical policy proposal that Republicans would have invented to make a parody out of the radical left.
Thousands of families were separated from each other when they crossed the southern border illegally. The policy was part of a zero tolerance strategy in which federal officials aimed to prosecute all unauthorized border-crossers and send their children to shelters. This approach drew widespread condemnation, and former President Donald Trump halted the practice by mid-2018. The federal government has struggled to reunify some parents and children who were deported after being separated from their families, despite Biden's vow to reunite them.
