You may have read that Trump arbitrarily shut down the Obama-era Central American Minors program (which reunited children with eligible family members) shortly after he was inaugurated in 2017 and that shutting it down contributed to Trump's shitshow on the border, but there's something else about the program you might not know.
According to a new lawsuit, the program continued to collect fees from those families even after the program was shut down.
From ABC News:
S.A. had been waiting decades to bring her daughter and now her grandson to the U.S., where she is a legal resident, from her native El Salvador, where she escaped violence and poverty. [...]
In February 2017, she made a final payment of $2,500 to the U.S. for her family's flights. They were told by authorities they would be given final documentation and a plane ticket to travel in two weeks time -- but months went by, and nothing ever came.
Without notifying them, President Trump's administration had already frozen the program just days into his term, even as it solicited and collected thousands of dollars from S.A. and others like her who had been granted conditional approval, according to a new lawsuit that argues the administration broke the law and was driven by "racial animus against Latinos."
I don't know how you could describe this as anything but theft.
This is like civil asset forfeiture except these families were tricked into giving the government their money willingly.