Sessions: Zero tolerance at the border
New policy means families could be separated, he says
WASHINGTON — All immigrants who cross the border illegally will be charged with a crime under a new zero-tolerance border enforcement policy, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday, launching a crackdown that could overwhelm detention facilities and immigration courts with hundreds of thousands of new cases.
Sessions also said that families who illegally cross the border may be separated after their arrest, with children sent to juvenile shelters while their parents are sent to adult detention facilities. Until now, border agents tried to keep parents and their children at the same detention site.
The new policy is expected to send a flood of deportation cases — and legal challenges — into federal courts. It also could put thousands more immigrants in detention facilities and children in shelters, and is likely to strain an immigration system that has struggled to keep up with a surge in enforcement under President Donald Trump. Until now, individuals apprehended while crossing illegally were often simply bused back over the border without charges. That was especially common for people without criminal records or prior immigration violations.
“This border is not open. Don’t come unlawfully .... Make your claim. Wait your turn,” Sessions said Monday near the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego. “We cannot take everyone on this planet who is in a difficult situation.”
“If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” Sessions said earlier Monday in Scottsdale, Ariz. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks Monday at the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego. over our border.”
Families seeking asylum and presenting themselves at official U.S. border crossings will be allowed to stay together as they seek protected status, according to a U.S. official familiar with the new policy.
But asylum seekers caught crossing illegally will be charged with a crime and their children sent to refugee shelters, even as agents conduct the legally required interview to evaluate their asylum claims.
Sessions said that no blanket policy would mandate separating all parents from their kids but acknowledged that such cases would in- crease under the new rules.
“We don’t want to separate families, but we don’t want families to enter the border illegally,” Sessions said. “We urge them not to do so.”
Sessions spoke near a spot called Friendship Park, dedicated by then-first lady Pat Nixon in 1971. Back then she stepped across the barbed wire barrier marking the U.S.-Mexico border, embraced Mexican children and declared: “I hope there won’t be a fence here too long.”
Immigration activists denounced the new policy to separate parents from children and said they expected to see it challenged in court. Past court decisions have put severe restrictions on the government’s ability to detain children for immigration violations.
“It’s clear this administration wants to use families who are fleeing violence as a pawn in a larger strategy to end immigration to the U.S.,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum.
The stepped-up enforcement comes during a documented shift in immigration patterns, with fewer Mexicans crossing the border to find work in the United States, and an uptick in children and families fleeing violence in Central American countries and asking for U.S. asylum.
The Trump administration has called for a change in federal immigration law to close what it terms “loopholes” that allow people who file asylum claims to be released while waiting, sometimes years, for their cases to be heard in the nation’s overloaded immigration courts.
For now, the latest iteration in immigration processing will have a dramatic impact on Border Patrol operations along the border and potentially require major new funding from Congress.
So far this fiscal year, Border Patrol officers have detained about 288,000 people. But only about 30,000 of those were charged with a crime for crossing the border, and only about 12,000 were charged with the more serious crime of re-entry, which is a felony. The rest were sent back across the border.
Likewise, the administration is trying to push asylum seekers away from dangerous border crossings in the desert and along the Rio Grande and to authorized ports of entry where they can be processed.