A 10-Year-Old With Down Syndrome Has Been Separated From Her Family at the Border

Mexico’s foreign minister brought the case to the public’s attention Tuesday.

Mother Jones illustration; Chris Kleponis/CNP/ZUMA; U.S. Customs and Border Protection/AP

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Mexico is understandably angry about the Trump administration’s controversial “tear families apart” plan.

“We strongly urge the U.S. government to reconsider this policy,” Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said Tuesday, urging federal authorities to implement measures to alleviate the traumatic conditions of some 2,000 children held in U.S. facilities without their parents. He called the Trump administration policies “cruel and inhumane.”

But please continue reading, because it gets worse:

“There’s one particular heartbreaking case,” Mr. Videgaray said, referring to a ten-year-old girl with [Down] syndrome who was recently separated from her mother and 10-year old brother as they attempted to enter the U.S. The girl was sent to a facility in McAllen, while her mother was sent to Brownsville.

“We are working to release the girl, so she can reunite with her father,” who is a legal U.S. resident, Mr. Videgaray added.

The United States is a shining city on a hill that if you approach will kidnap your disabled child and detain her an hour away.

Update, June 20, 2018: US Customs and Border Protection released a statement about the case on Wednesday, saying that the mother of the 10-year-old with Down syndrome was separated from her daughter because she is a witness in a smuggling prosecution.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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