Women’s Refugee Commission Responds to President Trump’s Executive Order on Family Separation

Washington, D.C. — Today, the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) responded to President Trump’s executive order (EO) regarding separating families at our border. The EO comes after a week of extreme scrutiny from members of Congress, advocates, and human rights organizations regarding the ‘zero-tolerance’ policy of separating families that his administration implemented earlier this year.

Michelle Brané, the director of the Women's Refugee Commission's Migrant Rights and Justice program made the following statement today:

“The executive order that President Trump signed is no solution. First, there are more than 2,000 children already separated from their parents. This EO does nothing to address that nightmare. Second, this EO effectively creates family prisons, which we already know are a threat to the well-being of children. We must remember that family detention has repeatedly been found to be unsuitable for children. Trading family separation for family detention is not a solution. Courts, child welfare experts, medical professionals, and many others have clearly found that family detention is harmful to children. We know that it puts them at risk of sexual assault and denies them access to meaningful mental health and medical care. It solves nothing and leaves the most vulnerable open to this horrific policy. This simply trades one source of childhood trauma for another.”