DONALD TRUMP’s anti-immigration policy provoked the ire of the people after a harrowing photo of El Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned on June 4 while crossing the Rio Grande circulated on mass media. The victims were identified as Oscar, 25, and Valeria Martinez, 3. They attempted to cross from Mexico into Texas in the US through the said river to seek for assylum and employment.

The death of the victims is only one of the tragedies suffered by immigrants due to Trump’s implementation of a more stringent immigration process.

Among the mechanisms used to suppress immigrants is Trump’s family separation policy. Although formally announced on April 2018, Trump started implementing this policy as early as 2017. Under this policy, illegal immigrants are separately detained from their children. Parents are detained in federal prisons for up to six months while their children are placed in detention centers supervised by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

It was immediately exposed that the said policy has no mechanism to reunite the families that it had separated. Separations are deliberately and often undocumented by federal agents to make it difficult for parents to find their children after detention. Because of this, it took some parents a month before locating their children. In some cases, children are deported first without their parents knowing. This strategy is dubbed by Trump as “zero tolerance.” He is using family separation as a deterrent to other foreigners considering to seek assylum and a decent life in the US.

Following broad criticism, Trump was compelled to sign an order waiving the effectivity of the policy in June 2018. Despite this, however, the anti-immigrant policy continues to be implemented. In a report last May, the Trump regime acknowledged that 1,712 migrant children may have been separated from their parents since the policy was junked. Last month, a detention center for children in Clint, Texas was exposed to be without adequate food and sanitation facilities.