The origins
How did we get here?
Tens of thousands of parents and children, mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, have been caught crossing the US-Mexico border illegally in recent years.
By 2014, President Barack Obama was facing an influx of both children travelling alone and families as a result of violence in Central America. At one point, his administration tried housing the families in special detention centres. But after a federal judge in California ruled the arrangement violated a long-standing agreement barring kids from jail-like settings, even with their parents, the government began releasing families in to the US pending notification of their next court date.
Fast forward to Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who derided these longtime US immigration practices as “catch and release.” Trump and Sessions insisted that people exploit the system, even travelling with children to ensure they aren’t jailed and slipping away before their court dates.
So did US policy change?
Yes. While Trump’s new immigration policy doesn’t call for families to be separated, as pointed out by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the policy makes separations inevitable.
Following Trump’s election, then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly — now Trump’s White House chief of staff — floated the idea of separating families as a way to discourage illegal border crossings. But much of the administration’s focus went into a travel ban aimed at Muslimmajority nations.
By this April, Sessions announced a plan: The US would have “zero tolerance” for illegal crossings. If a person doesn’t arrive at an appropriate port of entry to claim asylum, the crossing is deemed illegal and prosecuted even if the person does not have a criminal history. With the adult detained and facing prosecution, any minors accompanying them are taken away.
Nielsen has muddied the debate by insisting that children will only be separated in narrow circumstances, including if the adult has broken the law. That falsely leaves the impression that only children travelling with gang members or other violent criminals will be separated.
But under US law, the act of crossing the border without proper documentation itself is a crime and would trigger a separation, unless a person can find a designated port of entry and claims asylum.
‘Not new’
Nielsen said Monday that separating families at the border is “not new” and that it happened in the Bush and Obama administrations, albeit to a lesser degree.
Gil Kerlikowske, the US Customs and Border Protection commissioner from early 2014 to the end of Obama’s term, said parents were split from their children if they were arrested — maybe on a drug charge — or had an outstanding warrant. But, he writes, the number of separations was “minuscule” considering how many people were coming at the time.