The Biden Regime plans to pay illegal-alien “families” that were “separated” at the border during the Trump administration $1 million each as compensation for the “trauma” they suffered, the Wall Street Journal disclosed yesterday.
The payouts, pursuant to lawsuits from the usual open-borders subversives, will average about $450,000 per person. Price tag for the bucks-at-the-border bonanza: $1 billion.
Worse still, the leftist lawyers who represent the “families” demand permanent residence. That will mean citizenship — and new Democrat voters only all too willing to thank the party for making them rich.
The message from the Biden Regime to the world’s penniless masses is clear: Jump the border, break the law, file lawsuits, get rich.
Final Numbers Not Set
The regime is working “to resolve lawsuits filed on behalf of parents and children who say the government subjected them to lasting psychological trauma,” the newspaper reported:
The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments that could amount to close to $1 million a family, though the final numbers could shift, the people familiar with the matter said. Most of the families that crossed the border illegally from Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S. included one parent and one child, the people said. Many families would likely get smaller payouts, depending on their circumstances, the people said.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents families in one of the lawsuits, has identified about 5,500 children separated at the border over the course of the Trump administration, citing figures provided to it by the government. The number of families eligible under the potential settlement is expected to be smaller, the people said, as government officials aren’t sure how many will come forward. Around 940 claims have so far been filed by the families, the people said.
The total potential payout could be $1 billion or more.
At issue is the so-called family separation policy that border agents enforced during the Trump administration.
“In some cases families were forcefully broken up with no provisions to track and later reunite them, government investigations found,” the Journal reported:
The lawsuits allege some of the children suffered from a range of ailments, including heat exhaustion and malnutrition, and were kept in freezing cold rooms and provided little medical attention.
The lawsuits claim the children suffered “lasting” mental issues, including “anxiety, a fear of strangers and nightmares.”
The open-borders subversives who represent the families demand $3.4 million each.
“President Biden has agreed that the family separation policy is a historic moral stain on our nation that must be fully remedied,” Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union told the Journal. “That remedy must include not only meaningful monetary compensation, but a pathway to remain in the country.”
Some cases settled during the Trump administration.
What About Obama Separations?
The settlements arranged because of POTUS 45’s policy raise the question of damages for those families separated during the Obama Regime when Biden was vice president.
When the hysteria over separation peaked in 2019, McClatchy Newspapers reported the truth that Trump did not conceive the policy even if he vigorously enforced it.
“President Barack Obama separated parents from their children at the border,” McClatchy reported:
Obama prosecuted mothers for coming to the United States illegally. He fast tracked deportations. And yes, he housed unaccompanied children in tent cities. For much of the country — and President Donald Trump — the prevailing belief is that Obama was the president who went easier on immigrants.…
Obama’s policy helped create the road map of enforcement that Trump has been following — and building on.
At the time, Trump officials resented being blamed for “creating policies that were already in action,” McClatchy continued.
A deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama Regime, Leon Fresco, explained that “families” were separated because it was safer for the children. Some fathers, for instance, were drug smugglers.
“ICE could not devise a safe way where men and children could be in detention together in one facility,” Fresco told McClatchy. “It was deemed too much of a security risk.”
All that aside, border authorities have found that as many as 25 percent of so-called families are fakes. Ninety percent of asylum claims are bogus.