Separations on rise before policy official

LOS ANGELES: A woman named Mirian and her 18monthold son reached Brownsville, Texas, early this year after fleeing Honduras, where the military had teargassed their home. She made her way to a port of entry and asked for asylum, court records show.

Mirian had her identification, her son’s birth certificate, which listed her as his mother, his hospital birth record and his vaccination records.

Border officers took the records, then told her they would be taking her boy, she said in a sworn court declaration. They walked her out to a government car, told her to put him in a car seat and closed the door.

It was three months before they were reunited.

Over the last several weeks, the Trump administration’s ‘‘zerotolerance’’ policy of criminally charging people who cross the border illegally led to thousands of children being separated from their parents.

The practice of separating families appears to have begun accelerating last year, long before zero tolerance was announced. Among these cases, according to records and interviews, are many that happened at ports of entry.

Administration officials have said repeatedly that asylum seekers who do not want to be separated from their children should present themselves at a port of entry. That is the legal way to ask for asylum, they said.

But court filings describe numerous cases in recent months in which families were separated after presenting themselves at a port of entry to ask for asylum.

This happened even when asylum seekers carried records, such as birth certificates or hospital documents, listing them as the parents of their children, according to interviews and court records.

While border officials have long had a policy of separating children when their safety might be in question, lawyers and advocates say they began seeing a significant increase last year in officials separating children from their parents who asked for asylum at ports of entry, without clear reasons.

In a ruling last week ordering the reunification of families in a case brought by the ACLU, San Diego federal court Judge Dana M. Sabraw wrote that there had been a ‘‘casual, if not deliberate, separation of families that lawfully present at the port of entry, not just those who cross into the country illegally.’’

❛ . . . casual, if not deliberate, separation of families that lawfully present at the port of

entry