1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

Orlin, a three year old boy, has been brutally murdered after his mother Wendy was deported without him, despite her begging to have her son (who is US born) deported with her. He was then left with the only “caretaker” available, an estranged ex-partner of his aunt. The man regularly beat Orlin until he killed him. DHS had nothing to say about the three-year-old lying dead in a coffin, except to blame his mother for “abandoning” him. Wendy is a single mother and survivor of domestic violence. She has no criminal record. And now she has no son. FAMILY SEPARATION MUST END NOW. IMMEDIATELY. As of April 4, of the 60,311 people held in ICE detention, 70.8% have no criminal conviction at all. According to ICE's own internal figures, leaked to the Cato Institute, just 5% of those in custody had a violent criminal conviction. Arrests of people with no criminal record like Hernandez surged 2,450% in Trump's first year, according to the American Immigration Council, including by local police that were deputized to work with ICE. Orlin and his mother's story is unbearable, but sadly not unique. Since President Trump began his second term, 146,635 American children -- U.S. citizens -- have had a parent detained by immigration authorities, according to the Brookings Institution. More than 22,000 had both parents taken. More than 1/3 are under the age of six. The federal government is not tracking what becomes of them. Of the children left with no parent at home, Brookings found that only about 5 percent received any services from the child welfare system at all. The rest are with relatives, with neighbors, with whoever happened to be nearby when their parents disappeared -- or, like Orlin, with someone no one thought to check on. Nothing in federal law requires ICE to follow up on the children left behind. The damage family separation does to children is not a matter of opinion. The American Academy of Pediatrics, along with every major pediatric organization in the Western world, has condemned family separation as a cause of lasting harm to children's health and development. Among U.S.-born children studied after a parent's detention or deportation, 29 percent met the clinical threshold for PTSD. We must protect the children. All of them. I demand a public comment and your commitment to end family separation immediately. Now. To save as many children as we can before another child suffers or dies.