Thread by @RepDonBeyer

Today I visited an ICE detention facility outside Baltimore with @Call_Me_Dutch.

There we spoke for an hour with two fathers, Carlos and Mario, who had been separated from their children, a 7-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl, for months.

What they told us was so disturbing:

We went to this facility in Anne Arundel County to get a sense of what was happening with family separation at the border.

I want to say up front I appreciate the federal and county officials who worked with my staff to arrange this visit, and to @Call_Me_Dutch for welcoming us

With help @CAIRCoalition we identified 2 fathers held there who had been separated from their children and uncertain of their status.

After meeting with ICE and local officials, we spent an hour talking to these fathers, agreeing not to use their full names for their protection.

The first was a young man named Carlos. Carlos fled gang violence in Honduras with his 7-year-old-son by train, and surrendered himself at the border in El Paso to CBP in March.

The kind of story you hear often about asylum-seekers.

Carlos told us he was imprisoned for 1-2 days, chained in leg irons with his son next to him, and then separated from his son and transferred here.

He was unable to talk to his son for 3 months until last week when the boy contacted his grandmother, whose number he'd memorized.

The other father was named Mario, also from Honduras.

Mario's sister was a victim of domestic violence committed by a former policeman. When they attempted to press charges through the legal system, he was attacked and beaten up by a gang of 4-5 men. They fled the country.

Mario took buses from Honduras and up through Mexico with his 5-year-old daughter.

They crossed the border and surrendered to CBP, which placed them together in an "ICE box" facility (fenced-in indoor centers which are kept extremely cold) in April for three days.

Then Mario said an officer approached him and told him to give up his daughter, or she would be taken away.

He said his 5-year-old girl was dragged away from him crying and screaming, which was the last he saw her, and the last time he was able to speak to her for over a month.

That's what Carlos and Mario told us.

Both of these young fathers were in tears (as were some of us) throughout our conversation.

Both were deeply worried about their children.

Both said they do not have legal counsel.

One of the biggest problems we discovered, surprisingly and unexpectedly, is that CBP, which detained these fathers and thousands of others every year at the border, apparently does not share records about family of detainees with ICE, even though both are agencies within DHS.

The prison officials and ICE officers there did not have information on which of the people detained there had children, let alone any information on where those children are or how to contact them.

This is inflicting a huge amount of unnecessary suffering on people.

The agency arresting people at the border isn't telling the agency responsible for the children or the (different) agency responsible for holding their parents who is in whose family.

As a result families are going months without speaking to each other and suffering horribly.

Yesterday DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen couldn't answer questions about where small children are, and ICE couldn't tell us either today.

It's clear that the Administration was unprepared for their own zero tolerance policy and inflicted awful tragedy on parents as a result.

The Trump Administration is losing people, and causing parents unable to even talk to their children for months. It's a moral outrage.

I am committed to stopping it, and so are huge numbers of my constituents who are calling to voice their anger and dismay every day.

There isn't a law requiring Trump to do this, previous presidents did not have zero tolerance policies that led to this kind of family separation.

They did not punish asylum-seekers at the border like Trump and Sessions are doing, intentionally.

Family separation is wrong, and I will be working with my colleagues in Congress to stop it.

We should have zero tolerance for destroying families. /end/