Erasing History: The National Archives Is Destroying Records About Victims of Trump’s ICE Policies (Democracy Now!)

MATTHEW CONNELLY: But in this case, it was fascinating, because what I found and what others have found is that records relating to the death, the sexual assault of undocumented immigrants had been designated as temporary. In other words, these were records they decided had to be deleted after sometimes three years, five years, 10 or, at most, 25 years, in this case.

So there was a big outcry. A lot of people — in fact, tens of thousands of people — spoke up in protest. Dozens of members of Congress and the Senate also voiced objections about this. But in December, the archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, announced that they were going to go ahead anyway. They had made some changes, but, in fact, huge numbers of records relating to shoddy medical care, the civil rights violations of these undocumented immigrants, all these records are going to start to be destroyed later this year.

Watch the entire interview here, and read Connelly's original opinion piece in the New York Times here.