Reuniting families ‘on track,’ Nielsen says
20 lawmakers beg to differ, say there’s no way U.S. can meet today’s deadline
WASHINGTON — The chief of the Homeland Security Department told members of Congress on Wednesday that the government is “on track” to meet today’s court-ordered deadline of reuniting hundreds of migrant children with their families, lawmakers who met privately with her said.
Wednesday’s assertion by Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was greeted with open disbelief and anger, according to many of the roughly 20 members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — all Democrats — who attended the private, hourlong meeting. The meeting seemed to achieve little toward easing lawmakers’ criticism of how children taken from their parents are being handled.
“She said they believe they’re on track” to meet the court deadline, said Rep. Jim Costa, D-Calif., one of several lawmakers who said Nielsen used that phrase to describe the status of reuniting separated families. Lawmakers said she provided no statistics to back up her assertion.
“That’s impossible. And we all said this to her,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., said in a brief interview that he told Nielsen “she is committing crimes against humanity, that she is a child abuser” and that she is “an accomplice of Donald Trump’s racist regime.”
The meeting came a day before today’s deadline that U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego set for reuniting children ages 5 and older who have been held by
the government since their families were caught entering the country without authorization.
As many as 2,551 children ages 5 and up were separated from their families, and 1,187 children have been reunified with parents, guardians or sponsors, the government has said. The exact number of families still separated is unclear. The government has been releasing hundreds of families to faith-based groups, which are caring for them.
The government has said 463 migrant parents may have been deported after being separated from their children, further complicating the reunification process. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said Nielsen suggested to the lawmakers Wednesday that those children were left behind in the U.S. at those parents’ requests.
“We simply do not believe that’s true,” Menendez said.
A separate deadline that Sabraw had set for reuniting around 100 children younger than age 5 with their families passed two weeks ago. Just over half have rejoined their parents or guardians, according to the latest figures.
At least 217 parents were released into the U.S. without their children, government lawyers said. Both the government and volunteer lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union are trying to locate them in efforts to reunite the families.
As many as 37 children have not been matched with a parent.
The continued confusion, Sabraw said in court this week, was the “unfortunate” result of a policy adopted “without forethought to reunification or keeping track of people.”
The separations caused a bipartisan, nationwide uproar against Trump’s policy of zero tolerance, in which the government prosecutes all people caught entering the U.S. without authorization.
The government initially separated children from their detained parents or guardians. Under pressure, Trump abandoned the family separation policy, but hundreds of children remain apart from their parents in conditions that visitors have described as horrid.
Nielsen ignored reporters’ questions when she left the meeting.
“Very productive. Very frank,” she said.
The lawmakers said Nielsen also told them her agency is financing the costs of detaining families with a 1 percent across-the-board cut to its programs.
A Homeland Security spokesman said the added costs are because of increased numbers of people being caught entering the country, and the money is being used for additional beds and transportation expenses.
Separately, the Republican-dominated House Appropriations Committee approved $5 billion for building parts of Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico after rejecting a Democratic effort to redirect that money to other immigration programs.
Trump has requested the $5 billion for next year, but the Senate version of the bill financing the Homeland Security Department has just $1.6 billion. The final amount will need to be worked out later this year.
CHAOTIC PROCESS
Along the Southwestern border, immigration lawyers have described a reunification process as chaotic and scurried as the separations themselves. With family reunions often taking place in the parking lots of detention centers, activist groups have flooded the Texas border to provide help to often-exhausted, traumatized parents and children.
Some newly reunited families spent their first day together Monday at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, which took them in after they were released from custody. The families included children as young as babies and as old as teenagers, as well as asylum-seekers fleeing violence in Central America and people who were shuttled around the country to various detention facilities.
Natalia Oliveira da Silva, a mother from Brazil, waited nervously outside the immigration detention center in Pearsall, Texas, for her young daughter, Sara. She soon spotted the 5-year-old coming in a vehicle, a seatbelt over her chest.
Sara got out and was quickly in her mother’s arms, asking her, “They’re not going to take you away again, right?”
Since their separation in late May, the girl had been at a shelter for minors in Chicago, while Oliveira was moved through facilities across Texas.
Like other families reunited at Pearsall, Oliveira and her daughter were taken to Catholic Charities in San Antonio, about an hour’s drive away. Charity workers checked them into a hotel Sunday night and picked them up Monday morning, along with another family.
Oliveira, 30, had not slept the night before. Instead, she said, she watched Sara sleep next to her in bed.
At one point while they were detained, Sara refused to talk to her on the phone. She thinks it’s because Sara was angry about what had happened. She’s still angry herself.
“I hope she doesn’t have any memories of this,” Oliveira said.
Inside the Catholic Charities office, volunteers were folding donated clothes and preparing for the day ahead. A local restaurant had dropped off a catered meal of tortillas, beef and grilled vegetables. In a conference room upstairs, parents could pick from shopping racks of clothes and boxes of toys for the children.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had notified Catholic Charities in the morning to expect seven families to be dropped off. Catholic Charities also takes in families that the immigration agency drops directly at the local bus station, but who might otherwise have to stay there overnight or change several buses to reach their destination. Volunteers from a local interfaith group keep watch at the station for migrant families and call Catholic Charities when they see them.
Drop-offs usually happen in the afternoon or early evening. But the first time that Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent families to Catholic Charities, two weeks ago, it didn’t release families until around 3 a.m. And Catholic Charities once found the families it was expecting to receive dropped off at the bus station instead.
“The logic behind how they decide that, we don’t know,” said Matthew Martinez, the group’s vice president of administration.
In many cases, immigrant advocates say, parents and children are quickly released or transferred to family detention centers without notifying their lawyers. The ACLU on Wednesday filed more than a dozen first-person accounts of confusion and disorder during the process.
Caseworkers purchase plane tickets for families and have phones available to call the friend or relative sponsoring the families. They also provide hotel rooms for families waiting for buses or planes.
To fund the effort, Catholic Charities has raised $127,000 and received the help of more than 300 volunteers.
Other groups have also stepped up to help with the reunification process.
Annunciation House in El Paso has assembled hospitality centers with beds, meals, showers and a change of clothing for families. So far, it has helped 250 families who were released from detention after being reunited, the group said in a statement. Private donations have allowed Annunciation House to purchase airline tickets to help parents travel to the homes of relatives or friends across the country.
Congressional organizations, faith groups and nonprofits with the Families Belong Together coalition, including the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, are raising money to help families with airplane and bus tickets. Lawyers groups, such as the American Immigration Council, have been taking donations to provide counsel to parents seeking asylum or other forms of immigration relief.
Congressional Democrats, immigrant rights advocates and lawyers continue to clamor for answers about what’s next for the separated families.
“We are going to continue to ask the questions,” said Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. “We are going to continue to track where parents are and where children are, and we are not going to let it go until every child is reunited.”
Separately, the Republicandominated House Appropriations Committee approved $5 billion for building parts of Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico after rejecting a Democratic effort to redirect that money to other immigration programs.