90-year-old Ethel Kennedy joins hunger strike to protest Trump's immigrant family separation policies

The family separation policies have separated as many as 2,300 immigrant children from their parents at the border

The family separation policies have sparked protests nationwide (AP)

Ethel Kennedy, the 90-year-old widow of Bobby Kennedy, says that she will join a hunger strike in protest of President Donald Trump’s contentious immigration policies that have separated thousands of children from their parents at the US border.

Ms Kennedy, who is a human rights advocate, said that she will join the “Break Bread Not Families” hunger strike, alongside several other prominent individuals.

The strike has been organised by several activists groups, including the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights nonprofit.

Roughly 40 other Kennedys have also vowed to join the hunger strike in order to protest the president’s contentious policies.

“Generations of Americans did not toil and sacrifice to build a country where children and their parents are placed in cages to advance a cynical political agenda,” Ms Kennedy recently told The Boston Globe, saying that Mr Trump’s recent executive order he said would stop family separations did not go far enough.

Ms Kennedy’s husband, Bobby, was a celebrated politician who was assassinated while running for president in 1968, just months after Reverend Martin Luther King Jur was assassinated. Bobby, as he is fondly referred to in American discourse, was largely expected to be elected president that year, and was the younger brother of assassinated US President John F Kennedy Jr.

Bobby’s 1968 campaign, and his political career just beforehand, has been lionized as one in which he reached out to minority groups in America, including farmworkers in California. He is considered to have been instrumental in helping convince a leader of that group, Cesar Chavez, to end his own hunger strike.

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he had instructed immigration officials to practice “zero-tolerance” approaches when immigrants arrive at the US border, even in cases where individuals are seeking asylum.

That led to the criminalization of those individuals, including those with families who were then separated from their families.

Mr Trump signed an executive order on the issue last week after a series of alarming images and reports detailing the detention conditions for the children, which number as many as 2,300 or more.