Trump administration defends family separations at border

President Donald Trump’s administration doubled down Tuesday on its new policy of prosecuting immigrant parents and separating their children, saying it is jailing those who break the law by crossing the border without permission and placing their children in federal foster care as required.

Senior White House officials also sought to push the blame for what they called a “crisis” at the border to Democrats, saying they would not support undoing federal laws that the administration has said encouraged families, many of them Central American asylum seekers, to come here.

“If we had those fixes in federal law, the migration crisis from Central America would largely be solved in a very short time,” said Stephen Miller, the president’s top adviser on immigration policy. “Families would be able to be kept together and sent home safely and expeditiously.”

Trump said this weekend that Democrats must end a “horrible law” separating families. In fact, it is his own administration’s “zero tolerance” strategy on prosecutions that has caused hundreds of children to be removed from their parents and placed in temporary government care.

The White House’s mounting defense of the practice came as outrage over the treatment of immigrant children in government custody reached a fevered pitch, fueled by a viral, though inaccurate, weekend campaign on social media. Featuring the hash tag #Wherearethechildren, it largely focused on the government’s own admission last

month that it had lost track of nearly 1,500 children who crossed the border alone and were released to adult sponsors, usually relatives.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat, joined calls for rallies this week, saying he could not imagine anyone taking his children from him. Though the issue touched the emotions of many, part of the fury confused two different, but related, issues involving the fate of children in custody.

Senior Health and Human Services officials testified last month that of a sample of children it released to sponsors last year, 14 percent could not be reached after the agency followed up once by phone a month later. Advocates agree it is likely many of those adults chose simply not to respond, particularly if they are here illegally.

Denies kids are missing

“There’s no reason to believe that anything has happened to the kids,” said Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary at HHS’s Administration for Children and Families on Tuesday. “That characterization that the kids are missing is incorrect.”

That issue is vastly different from children who are separated from their parents at the border, placed in government custody, then struggle to find each other among the three federal agencies in charge of their care. Advocates say no systematic policies exist to ensure families keep track of each other after parents are prosecuted.

“Reunification after these kinds of separations are very difficult,” said Michelle Brané, executive director of the migrant rights program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, a national advocacy group. “Even finding each other after separation is exceedingly difficult.”

In a briefing with reporters Tuesday, White House officials argued that it is the Democrats’ resistance to changing court rulings and laws that prevented them from detaining families together until they are deported and requires the hard-line approach that has been denounced.

In particular, they blame a 2008 bipartisan law intended to protect children from human trafficking and a 20-year-old federal settlement related to children’s rights in detention. A California judge has ruled the latter means the administration cannot detain children for more than a couple of weeks, so the government was forced to free many families together to pursue their immigration cases.

Trump derided this practice during the 2016 presidential campaign as “catch and release,” because critics say many families disappeared and remain in the U.S. illegally.

Though overall border crossings are at their lowest in decades, nearly 14,000 families and children were detained in April, rising to levels last seen during Obama’s administration. They make up the fastest-growing demographic at the border, up to 40 percent of all apprehensions from just 10 percent five years ago.

“The surge in illegal border crossings and the threat that puts to Americans’ safety and children’s safety obviously required zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry,” Miller said Tuesday. “A nation cannot have a principle that there will be no civil or criminal immigration enforcement for somebody traveling with a child.”

Justice Department spokesman Devin O’ Malley said the administration is simply enforcing current law by prosecuting everyone who crosses the border illegally, including parents with children. “They will not be given a free pass,” he said. “It is unprecedented not to pursue prosecution of federal law because someone has a child.”

Previously such parents were not usually charged with the crime, which is a misdemeanor for first offenders with a typical sentence of a few days or weeks. Instead parents and children were kept together in the family residential centers or released to fight their immigration cases. Illegal entry charges swamp federal dockets at the border, making up 80 percent of cases in the Southern and Western Districts of Texas, and most U. S. Attorneys prioritized more serious offenders.

‘Beyond cruel’ action

Under the administration’s zero tolerance policy announced last month, parents are imprisoned and enter the custody of the Justice Department, from where they are transferred to Homeland Security’s immigrant detention centers and often deported. Their children, who cannot be incarcerated, are placed in federal shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Advocates say that once minors are deemed “unaccompanied,” they require certain legal and privacy protections and have their own potential asylum cases. They land in federal shelters across the country often with little information on their parents.

In one case, a Guatemalan father was separated from his 18-month-old toddler last summer and deported without him three months later. They were only reunified in December. In another, a woman seeking asylum was prosecuted last fall, served several days in prison, and has been detained in an immigrant detention center for eight months while her child is in a federal shelter. She is a lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that seeks to end family separation.

Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney leading the case, said the practice is not confined to parents who are prosecuted for illegal entry but that it has happened to asylum seekers at official ports-of-entry.

Another plaintiff in the suit, a woman from Congo, asked for asylum in San Diego last year. She was held in an immigration facility and her 7-year-old daughter sent to a shelter in Chicago. They were reunited in March after the ACLU intervened.

“Deliberately separating children from parents to sow fear in parents as a deterrence is unprecedented and beyond cruel,” said Ur Jaddou, director of DHS Watch at the immigrant advocacy group America’ s Voice. “There are no ‘loopholes’ nor statutory requirements that children be ripped from their parents’ arms as a matter of routine practice.”