- Biden was speaking at a press conference touting the passage of the $1.2trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill when he was asked about the payments
- Biden was forceful in saying he would try to get payments to those families, criticizing former President Donald Trump’s border policy.
- ‘You deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstance,’ he said of separated families. ‘What that will be, I have no idea’
- Last week it was revealed that officials from the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments
- The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the separated families, has identified about 5,500 children separated from parents at the border
- The total potential payout could cost $1 billion or more
President Joe Biden furiously defended a plan to send payments to families separated at the southern border Saturday, days after calling a report that the payments were as much as $450,000 ‘garbage.’
Biden was speaking at a press conference touting the passage of the $1.2trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill when he was asked about the payments.
Fox News‘ David Spunt asked: ‘You said last week, that this report about migrant families at the border getting payments was garbage.’
Biden interrupted: ‘No I didn’t say that, let’s get it straight, you said everybody coming across the border gets $450,000.’
Biden then was forceful in saying he would try to get payments to those families, criticizing former President Donald Trump’s border policy.
‘If in fact, because of the outrageous behavior of the last administration, you coming across the border – whether it was legal or illegal.’
Raising his voice into a yell, the president continued: ‘And you lost your child, you lost your child, it’s gone, you deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstance,’ he said. ‘What that will be, I have no idea.’
Last week it was revealed that officials from the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering the payments that could total close to $1 million for two people within the same family, people familiar with the plans told the Wall Street Journal.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the separated families, has identified about 5,500 children separated from parents at the border during the course of the Trump-era policy.
Former President Trump‘s administration enacted the separation policy in April 2018 and withdrew it two months later after much controversy in June.
The total potential payout could cost $1 billion or more.
The ‘zero-tolerance policy’ applied to families who illegally crossed the US-Mexico border to claim asylum. Since children could not be detained alongside their parents, the families were separated, sometimes with no way to track and reunited them later on, government investigations found.
Now, many families are released into the interior of the US and asked to appear in court at a later date. Some are deported under Title 42, the coronavirus public health policy.
Lawsuits allege that the separated children were housed in poor conditions, and sometimes suffered from malnutrition or heat exhaustion or were kept in freezing cold rooms and offered little medical care. Lawyers for the families argue the children have suffered long-lasting trauma from the anxiety of being without their parents.
They seek a range of payouts, averaging $3.4 million per family, according to the WSJ.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump loyalist, said Tuesday he is ‘very, very concerned’ about the payments declaring them to be a ‘slap in the face’ with Americans themselves already struggling to make ends meet as inflation boosts the cost of living.
