How border separation works.
President Donald Trump backed down Wednesday, saying he would rescind his policy that resulted in children being separated from their families after crossing over the border illegally. Here’s how that policy resulted in a skyrocketing number of children taken from adults at the border.
U.S. policy allows children to be separated from adults under certain conditions. The policy for adults who arrive with minors after an illegal border crossing was, and continues to be, that children can be taken from adults under three conditions: if immigration officials believe the child to be in danger, if they believe the adult is not the child’s parent or guardian and/or if they arrest the adults.
This has happened more often under the
Trump administration. It happened under President Barack Obama, but what’s different now is the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, announced by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April. Previously, families who crossed the border were generally held together and brought through immigration court, where they faced civil penalties and subsequently could be deported. Under Trump, adults are now charged with the criminal offense of improper entry, which sends them to federal prison, which in turn requires children to be taken away.
The children are not themselves in federal
prison. Once someone goes into the custody of the Department of Justice, the children are turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services if no immediate relatives can be found. That department then houses them at facilities like the one in Homestead that denied entry to U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, on Tuesday.
Even people who had not been found guilty of an illegal border crossing before were losing their
children. There are actually three levels of potential punishment for improper crossings. First is the civil penalty that was used under the Obama administration, which is a $50 to $250 fine. But criminal penalties can include a prison sentence of up to six months for the first, misdemeanor offense, and longer stints for subsequent crossings, which are felonies.
Trump is not announcing an end to zero tolerance. The new Trump policy, unveiled Wednesday, involves keeping families detained together for an indefinite amount of time — months or even years if that family is seeking asylum.
The issue is likely to end up in court again.
Previous federal court decisions have found that the government can detain children caught at the border during an illegal crossing for up to 20 days. Trump’s new policy flies in the face of those decisions and is almost certain to generate new legal work.
It’s unclear what will happen to children already housed in shelters. According to Nelson, 94 of the teenagers housed at the Homestead facility were taken from their families at the border, with a total of 174 such children housed in facilities across Florida. The rest of the approximately 1,000 children at the Homestead shelter probably crossed the border alone. Since early May, soon after Sessions’ zerotolerance policy announcement, at least 2,300 children have been separated from their families at the border.