Report finds border-policy failures

Prosecutions pursued despite family separations, it concludes

About 5,500 children have been separated from their parents since Trump took office, and many of those parents were deported without their children.

WASHINGTON — Justice Department leaders under President Donald Trump knew their 2018 zero-tolerance border policy would result in family separations but pressed on with prosecutions even as other agencies became overwhelmed with migrants, a government watchdog report released Thursday has found.

The report from the inspector general for the Justice Department found that leadership failed to prepare to implement the policy or manage the fallout, which resulted in more than 3,000 family separations from the zero-tolerance policy and caused lasting emotional damage to children who were taken from their parents at the border. The policy was widely condemned by world leaders, religious groups and lawmakers in the U.S. as cruel.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, along with other top leaders in President Donald Trump’s administration, were bent on curbing immigration. The zero-tolerance policy was one of several increasingly restrictive policies aimed at discouraging migrants from arriving at the southern border. Trump’s administration also vastly reduced the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. and all but halted asylum at the border, through a combination of executive orders and regulation changes.

President-elect Joe Biden has said Trump’s restrictive immigration policies are harmful, but it’s not clear yet what he will do when he gets in office to alter the system. About 5,500 children have been separated from their parents since Trump took office, and many of those parents were deported without their children. Advocates for the families have called on Biden to allow those families to reunite in the United States.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued to stop the separations and a federal judge ordered the families to be reunited, but some still are not. Attorney Lee Gelernt, who has been working for years on the issue, said the practice was “immoral and illegal.”

“At a minimum, Justice Department lawyers should have known the latter,” Gelernt said. “This new report shows just how far the Trump administration was willing to go to destroy these families. Just when you think the Trump administration can’t sink any lower, it does.”

The zero-tolerance policy meant that any adult caught crossing the border illegally would be prosecuted for illegal entry. Because children cannot be jailed with their family members, families were separated and children were taken into custody by the Health and Human Services Department, which manages unaccompanied children at the border. The policy was a mess; there was no system created to reunite children with their families. The watchdog report found that it led to a $227 million funding shortfall.

According to the report, department leaders underestimated how difficult it would be to carry out the policy in the field and did not inform local prosecutors and others that children would be separated. They also failed to understand that children would be separated longer than a few hours, and when that was discovered, they pressed on.

The policy began April 6, 2018, under an executive order that was issued without warning to other federal agencies that would have to manage the policy, including the U.S. Marshals Service and the Health and Human Services Department. It was halted June 20, 2018.

The watchdog report found that judges, advocacy groups and even federal prosecutors raised concerns over the policy. But Sessions and others believed that arrests at the border would not result in prolonged separation and ignored the difficulty in reuniting families.

Justice Department leadership looked at a smaller version of the policy enacted in 2017 in west Texas, but ignored some of the same concerns raised by judges and prosecutors at that time. Top leaders were focused solely on increased illegal activity and didn’t seek information that would have shown concerns over the family separations that would result.

A watchdog report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that children separated at the border, many already distressed by life in their home countries or by their journeys, showed more fear, feelings of abandonment and post-traumatic stress symptoms than children who were not separated.