Immigrant family separation is ‘cruelty,’ officials say

When he landed in Michigan in late May, all the weary little boy carried was a trash bag stuffed with dirty clothes from his dayslong trek across Mexico, and two small pieces of paper — one a stick-figure drawing of his family from Honduras, the other a sketch of his father, who had been arrested and led away after they arrived at the U.S. border in El Paso.

A U.S. government escort handed over the 5-year-old child, identified on his travel documents as Jose, to the American woman whose family was entrusted with caring for him. He refused to take her hand. He did not cry. He was silent on the ride “home.”

The first few nights, he cried himself to sleep. Then it turned into “just moaning and moaning,” said Janice, his foster mother. He recently slept through the night for the first time, though he still insists on tucking the family pictures under his pillow.

Jose’s separation from his father is part of the Trump administration’s latest and most widely debated borderenforcement policy. Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the government would criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the border illegally, a directive already leading to the breakup of hundreds of migrant families and channeling children into shelters and foster homes across the country.

The goal, according to administration officials, is to discourage Central American families from making the perilous journey to the United States’ southwest border, where they have been arriving in swelling numbers this year to claim asylum.

In just the first two weeks under President Donald Trump’s new family separation policy, 638 parents who arrived with 658 children had been prosecuted, administration officials told Congress.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen emphasized that separating families is not the aim, but merely the effect, of a decision to step up prosecutions of those who cross the border illegally.