How did the US lose 1500 kids?
immigrant children last year. Here’s why people are outraged now.
Did the United States really lose track of 1475 immigrant kids?
In short, yes. During a Senate committee hearing late last month, Steven Wagner, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), testified that it had lost track of 1475 children who had crossed the US-Mexico border on their own (unaccompanied by adults) and were subsequently placed with adult sponsors in the US. The number was based on a survey of more than 7000 children.
From October to December 2017, HHS called 7635 children the agency had placed with sponsors, and found 6075 were still living with their sponsors, 28 had run away, five had been deported, and 52 were living with someone else. The rest were missing, Wagner said.
Officials have argued it is not the department’s legal responsibility to find those children after they are released from the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. And some have pointed out that adult sponsors are sometimes relatives already living in the US, and who intentionally may not be responding to contact attempts by HHS.
However, neither of those arguments has done much to quell outrage surrounding Wagner’s testimony.
Republican Senator Rob Portman, chairman of the Senate subcommittee, has repeatedly argued it is a matter of humanity, not simply legal responsibility, citing a case in which federal officials turned over eight immigrant children to human traffickers.
‘‘These kids, regardless of their immigration status, deserve to be treated properly, not abused or trafficked,’’ he said in the subcommittee. ‘‘This is all about accountability.’’
He reiterated his stance on a TV programme that documented the plight of the eight children who were forced to work on an egg farm in Ohio.
‘‘We’ve got these kids. They’re here. They’re living on our soil. And for us to just, you know, assume someone else is going to take care of them and throw them to the wolves, which is what HHS was doing, is flat-out wrong. I don’t care what you think about immigration policy, it’s wrong.’’
Were these 1475 children separated from their parents at the border?
No. The children unaccounted for in last year’s HHS survey all arrived at the southwest border alone. The government refers to them as ‘‘unaccompanied alien children’’, or UACs.
Are children being taken from their parents after they cross the border into the US?
Yes. On May 7, US AttorneyGeneral Jeff Sessions announced that the Justice Department would begin prosecuting every person who crossed the southwest border illegally – or at least attempt to prosecute ‘‘100 per cent’’ – even if some of them could or should be treated as asylum-seekers.
Although Sessions said he understood that some people were fleeing violence or other dangerous situations, he has also stated that the US ‘‘cannot take everyone on this planet who is in a difficult situation’’.
‘‘If you cross the border unlawfully . . . then we will prosecute you. If you smuggle an illegal alien across the border, then we’ll prosecute you . . . If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law.
‘‘If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that.’’
The consequence of this new ‘‘100 per cent’’ policy is that children will be separated from their parents as the adults are charged with a crime, even if the adults are seeking asylum and present themselves at official ports of entry. Under federal rules, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) transfers unaccompanied minors, and now children of detained adults, to HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within 48 hours of their crossing the border.
Are child-parent separations being used as a tool to deter border crossings?
That would appear to be the case. Internal discussions about separating families at the border suggest it was to dissuade people from attempting to cross. According to a Washington
Post report: ‘‘Senior immigration and border officials called for the increased prosecutions in a confidential memo to homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. They said filing criminal charges against migrants, including parents travelling with children, would be the ‘‘most effective’’ way to tamp down on illegal border crossings.
‘‘The ‘zero-tolerance’ measure could split up thousands of families because children are not allowed in criminal jails. Until now, most families apprehended crossing the border illegally have been released to await civil deportation hearings.’’
In a May 11 interview, White House chief of staff John Kelly referred to family separation as something that would be a ‘‘tough deterrent’’ to parents who might be thinking of bringing children to the border.
‘‘Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people,’’ Kelly said. ‘‘But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from – fourth, fifth, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm
. . . They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathise with the reason. But the laws are the laws. But a big name of the game is deterrence.’’
What are some of the issues these children face during separation?
For months, stories have abounded of families separated by immigration authorities at the border. Three children were separated from their mother as they fled a gang in El Salvador; a 7-year-old was taken from her Congolese mother who was How accurate are certain claims circulating online? What do those children have to do with the Trump administration’s new immigration enforcement policies? How many families are being separated? And why is there so much outrage about it now? Amy B Wang takes a look at how the story has snowballed.
seeking asylum. In almost every case, families have described heart-wrenching goodbyes and agonising uncertainty about whether they would be reunited.
According to the Florence Project, an Arizona non-profit organisation that provides legal and social services to detained immigrants, there have been more than 200 cases of parents being separated from their children since the beginning of the year in Arizona alone.
‘‘The type of devastation that we’re talking about . . . where a separated mother doesn’t know where her child is for four days, that’s entirely common right now in this administration,’’ Laura St John, the group’s legal director, said. ‘‘Children and parents who are separated sometimes don’t have any way to communicate with each other for days, for weeks – I’ve seen months where a parent had no idea where their child was after the US government took their child away.’’
She noted her group was seeing increasingly younger children being taken into custody by the ORR. ‘‘Just last week we saw a 53-week-old infant in court without a parent. What we’re seeing now is that, because the government is separating the children from the parents, the government is actually rendering these children as unaccompanied minors and bringing them to the shelters.’’
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrants’ rights project, said the number of separations his group had seen was ‘‘unprecedented’’.
‘‘This is the worst thing I’ve seen in 25-plus years of doing this civil rights work. I am talking to these mothers and they are describing their kids screaming, ‘Mommy, Mommy, don’t let them take me away!’ . . . The medical evidence is overwhelming that we may be doing permanent trauma to these kids, and yet the government is finding every way they can to try and justify it.’’
The ORR reported that children spent an average of 34 days in their custody during the 2015 fiscal year.
What has the government’s response been?
In his May 11 interview, Kelly danced around a question about whether it was ‘‘cruel and heartless’’ for border officials to take an immigrant child away from its mother.
‘‘I wouldn’t put it quite that way,’’ he said. ‘‘The children will be taken care of – put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that noone hopes will be used extensively or for very long.’’
Many members of Congress have expressed concern about family separations. In February, 71 Democrats signed a letter to homeland security secretary Nielsen stating they were ‘‘deeply disturbed’’ by the increasing practice, which ‘‘suggests a lack of understanding about the violence many families are fleeing in their home countries’’.
On May 16, Democrat Senator Kamala Harris questioned Nielsen about the ‘‘immoral’’ policy and asked whether she had been directed to separate families to deter future border crossing attempts. Nielsen denied that the new policy was an act of deterrence.
‘‘What purpose have you been given for separating parents from their children?’’ Harris asked.
‘‘So my decision has been that anyone who breaks the law will be prosecuted,’’ Nielsen said. ‘‘If you’re a parent or you’re a single person or you happen to have a family, if you cross between the ports of entry, we will refer you for prosecution. You’ve broken US law.’’
Nielsen tried to recast questions that characterised children being removed from their parents as ‘‘family separations’’. When Harris demanded to know whether or how border agents were trained to take children from their parents, Nielsen interrupted.
‘‘No, what we’ll be doing is prosecuting parents who have broken the law, just as we do every day in the USA,’’ she said.
‘‘I can appreciate that,’’ Harris continued, ‘‘but if that parent has a 4-year-old child, what do you plan on doing with that child?’’
‘‘The child, under law, goes to HHS for care and custody,’’ Nielsen said.
‘‘They will be separated from their parents,’’ Harris said, slowly. ‘‘My question then is, when you are separating children from their parents, do you have a protocol in place about how that should be done, and are you training the people who will actually remove a child . . . on how to do that in the least traumatic way? I would hope you do train on how to do that.’’
Nielsen said she would provide that information. Although the hearing took place two weeks ago, Harris tweeted footage from it on Sunday (NZ time), calling Nielsen’s responses ‘‘beyond insufficient’’.
Why are we hearing about these issues now?
Reports of the 1475 children for whom HHS could not account first emerged in April, and proposals to crack down on migrant families crossing the border were discussed as early as last year.
Nevertheless, the story has snowballed in the past week, with thousands expressing outrage online. As with other topics that mushroom inexplicably on social media, it’s unclear exactly why it has happened now.
Friday also happened to be International Missing Children’s Day, producing what some called an ill-timed tweet from the recruiting arm of ICE. Although it is not the agency responsible for migrant children, it has, since President Donald Trump took office, cracked down on deporting undocumented immigrants who previously would not have been a priority.
Although the 1475 children were not separated from their parents at the border, many expressing their outrage online have been appending their tweets with the hashtags #WhereAreTheChildren or #MissingChildren, intentionally or unintentionally linking the two issues.
Other officials and celebrities seized on the hashtags to propose protests and spread the story further.
The topic gained traction at the weekend when Trump tried to blame Democrats for ‘‘the horrible law that separates children from parents once they cross the border’’ – even though there is no such law, and it was a policy supported by his administration.
He also tried to use the issue to drum up support for his proposed border wall. –