Officials from the Biden administration are looking into prospects that could potentially involve awarding up to $450,000 per migrant who have been separated from their families at the southern border.
Local media reports confirmed that the clause will be a settlement for lawsuits pertaining to Trump’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ policy. Moreover, it could entail payments that run close to an estimate of nearly $1 million for just two individuals belonging to the same family.
Meanwhile, the ACLU has gone on to identify which families are deserving and their whopping figures turned out to include nearly 5,500 kids who were separated from their parents at the southern border. This was during the reign of former US President Donald Trump, reports confirmed.
The current Biden administration is working hard to try and settle a large number of lawsuits that entail migrants who claim the Trump policy led them to long-lasting psychological damage. But the news has caused widespread outrage and concern among US citizens who claim the money being used is taxpayers’ dollars.
Now, officials from Homeland Security as well as those hailing from the Department of Justice and Health and Human Services are terming the payments a mega setback where $1 million could be spent for just two people from the same family, as stated by reports from the Wall Street Journal.
Donald Trump’s administration had brought forward the policy in the year 2018 and then opted to withdraw it nearly two months later, as a lot of controversies took place in the month of June.
As a whole, experts predict that the total costs could surmount up to nearly $1 billion or even more.
This ‘zero-tolerance policy’ is only applied to those families who managed to step into the US illegally through the country’s border with Mexico, in an effort to get asylum. Since so many kids couldn’t be detained with their parents, a large number of families suffered from separation as a result of this.
Later on, Government investigations found no way to potentially track down their long-lost loved ones and as a result, they failed to reunite them together.
For this reason, the growing number of lawsuits seek a massive payout range that could mean nearly $3.4 million per migrant family, as stated by expert reports in Wall Street Journal.