Border policies failing to keep up
Migration system is set up to control laborers, not families, here illegally
WASHINGTON — U.S. authorities set up an immigration system over many decades to deal with migrant laborers, usually Mexican men, who illegally cross the border looking for work.
That system now is buckling as thousands of women and children cross the boundary to escape violence and poverty in Central America.
Congress will have to find new ways to deal with the rising tide of more vulnerable refugees, whether President Donald Trump gets a massive new wall or not.
“It’s totally uncharted territory,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington that studies global immigration trends. “There have been major investments in border control, which have probably made it harder for people to cross the border. But our border control strategy didn’t take into account Central Americans fleeing violence.”
Customs and Border Patrol tactics are designed to catch Mexican migrant laborers crossing the border and quickly return them to their home country, since they rarely make asylum claims.
The Border Patrol is less equipped for the more arduous and complicated requirements of hearing asylum claims from entire families who’ve fled nations without a common border.
Apprehensions of single Mexican men have dropped in recent years while asylum claims by families is the new normal, something officials first noticed amid a wave of unaccompanied children in 2014.
In 2013, the first year officials started tracking the number of undocumented “family units” — consisting of at least one adult and one child — the number was a little more than 15,000. Four years later, in 2017, it was more than 75,000.
Since last October, authorities have recorded nearly 60,000 more; of those, nearly 10,000 were in May. That’s about a 500 percent increase over the 1,580 caught in May 2017, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol statistics show.
Unlike Mexican migration, many of the new arrivals from Central America are seeking refugee status. In 2009, the Homeland Security Department conducted more than 5,000 initial asylum screenings. By 2016, that number had increased to 94,000, the Justice Department reported.
The result has been a roiling humanitarian and political crisis, with the Trump administration and Congress at loggerheads over how to address an influx of refugees who are stretching both law enforcement agencies and immigration courts to the limit.
The long-simmering disconnect exploded into public view with Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting virtually every adult who comes over the border without papers. The practice resulted in Border Patrol taking more than 2,000 children away from their parents — until the administration bowed to public pressure and stopped separating families a week ago.
Trump’s about-face left unresolved new questions about how to humanely handle the traumatized children of immigrants caught in the legal limbo of asylum proceedings. Many cases can take two years or more to resolve in front of overwhelmed judges in backlogged immigration courts.
The dilemma of family separations was highlighted in Tuesday’s ruling by a federal judge in California ordering the reunification of the separated children within 30 days.
“The government has no system in place to keep track of, provide effective communication with, and promptly produce alien children,” Judge Dana Sabraw wrote in ruling on a legal challenge brought by the ACLU. “The unfortunate reality is that under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property.”
Administration officials say Sabraw’s timetable may be impossible to meet. While documented cases of false family claims have been relatively rare, officials say they have to verify all the claimed family relationships and guard against fraud and human trafficking.
“We do see traffickers and very evil people sometimes claiming to be the parents of children,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar testified Tuesday before a Senate committee.
Amid the uncertainty, some critics have questioned whether the U.S. is conforming to United Nations mandates for the treatment of refugees.
“This policy violates our domestic principles and law in addition to international commitments,” said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, whose mother made up part of the Mexican migration a generation ago.
Castro, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, also has expressed concern about the government’s plan to build tent camps on U.S. military bases in Texas — Fort Bliss outside El Paso and Goodfellow Air Force Base near San Angelo — to house the new migrant families and children.
In a letter Wednesday to Defense Secretary James Mattis, Castro cited the need for detailed information about the planned camps and how migrants would be transported and cared for “given the pace at which this situation is developing.”
‘Troubling reports’
Another unforeseen consequence of the “zero tolerance” policy is that the children, having been separated from their parents, were immediately classified as unaccompanied minors — a legal category that confers special anti-trafficking protections preventing their immediate removal.
Those protections, however, don’t necessarily extend to their parents or other adult family members, who could be detained separately pending asylum claims, or prosecuted for illegal entry and then deported.
“We heard troubling reports of parents who have been deported without their children,” said Efrén Olivares of the Texas Civil Rights Project. “We expect the deportations of these parents and family members to continue while their children remain in U.S. custody elsewhere. The government is deporting them faster than we can find immigration attorneys to represent them.”
Responding to the public outcry, Trump and lawmakers in Congress are seeking judicial and legislative remedies to remove a 20-day cap on the detention of immigrant children, which would allow children to be held along with their parents as they undergo court proceedings.
Proposals backed by U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz would keep families together and expedite the asylum cases of detained immigrants with children. The two Texas Republicans also would like to increase the number of immigration judges.
Critics of the family separations, though, including Republican Rep. Will Hurd of San Antonio, say they’re just as uncomfortable with the idea of “indefinite” child detentions, even if they’re kept with their parents.
A coalition of law enforcement officials, including Houston police Chief Art Acevedo, sent a letter to congressional leaders Wednesday urging less expensive alternatives to family detentions.
“Most families do not pose a threat to the community at large,” they wrote. “Given the risks to children’s physical and emotional development posed by prolonged detention, we urge policy makers to consider alternatives.”
Trump’s resistance
Meanwhile, Trump has resisted proposals to invest in more immigration judges. On Monday, he posted a series of tweets that some see as a preference for extrajudicial removals of illegal border-crossers.
“Hiring many thousands of judges, and going through a long and complicated legal process, is not the way to go — will always be dysfunctional,” Trump said Monday on Twitter. “People must simply be stopped at the Border and told they cannot come into the U.S. illegally. Children brought back to their country ...... If this is done, illegal immigration will be stopped in it’s tracks — and at very little, by comparison, cost. This is the only real answer — and we must continue to BUILD THE WALL!
The basic rationale for Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy has been deterrence: ending what administration officials criticize as the “catch and release” policies for asylum-seekers under previous presidents.
Whether immigrants are using their children as shields — a “get out of jail free card” in the words of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen — immigration lawyers say the fear of prosecution is unlikely to deter people fleeing crushing poverty and violence in countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
“These are desperate people,” said David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “They’re desperate to get out of these countries.”
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a centrist Democrat who represents a border district around Laredo, has traveled extensively in Central America.
He doesn’t doubt that wouldbe immigrants and the “coyotes” who traffic them north pay attention to the ebbs and flows of U.S. border security and immigration.
“The coyotes talk. They know exactly what’s happening,” Cuellar said. “And word gets out that if you come in with a child, you’re treated differently.”
But Cuellar said tougher U.S. border enforcement is unlikely to stanch the flow.
“Even under Trump, with his tough talk, it hasn’t stopped people from coming over,” Cuellar said, “because you might have the enforcement part, but there’s another force that’s pretty powerful down there at the border — it’s called desperation.”