USA TODAY International Edition
Officials questioned on family separation
Hard queries, defenses come out of hearing
WASHINGTON — Senators launched into a bipartisan grilling of Trump administration officials on Tuesday during a Judiciary Committee hearing focused on reviewing a controversial policy that separated immigrant families who tried to enter the U.S. illegally.
The government is racing to reunite families who were separated under the administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy. The administration implemented the practice to deter illegal immigration, but later reversed itself in the face of widespread, bipartisan backlash.
“We’re here today because the Trump Administration has engaged in ... a deeply immoral and haphazard policy that fundamentally betrays American values, “said California’s Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the committee.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the committee chair, took a more neutral approach but conceded the administration had “mishandled the family separations.”
In his opening remarks, the Iowa Republican said the hearing was originally intended to be about something else but “it quickly became evident that more oversight of the administration’s entire family separation and reunification effort was needed.”
“Like many well-intentioned policies, there were unintended consequences,” Grassley said.
Administration officials in charge of border enforcement defended their treatment of those immigrant families apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying they were just following orders in the separations and reunification process.
“We do not leave our humanity behind when we report for duty,” Carla Provost, the acting chief of the U.S. Border Patrol said in her opening remarks.
Several dozen protesters, who stood up at the start of Provost’s remarks with signs calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reunification of families and more, were immediately escorted out of the hearing room after Provost started speaking.
ICE Executive Director of Enforcements and Removal Operations Matthew Albence pushed back on allegations that children were kept in bars in detention. He described the “family residential centers” where children were housed as “more like a summer camp” because of 24/7 access to food and water, educational and recreational opportunities and medical care.
He also said allegations of abuse reported by the New York Times were investigated and his agency was committed to providing a detailed plan to end abuse within facilities.
On Monday, a federal judge ruled that minors held in a Texas facility were so troubling that she ordered the government to transfer all the children to other facilities until improvements could be made.
But top federal official, Jonathan White, with the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, admitted that there had been concerns about the policy.
“During the deliberative process over the previous year, we raised a number of concerns in the (Office of Refugee Resettlement) program about any policy which would result in family separation due to concerns we had about the best interest of the child as well as about whether that would be operationally supportable with the bed capacity that we have,” he said.
One exchange was emblematic of the exhaustion over the entire situation. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, asked each of the panelists what had gone wrong.
Each of the agency representatives said they were simply doing their job and staying in their lane, which led Whitehouse to ask the panelist, James McHenry III, the head of the Department of Justice Executive Office For Immigration Review: “You wash your hands of this one?”
The administration’s “zero tolerance” policy required that most people apprehended trying to illegally cross the border were to be charged with a criminal violation, and sent to immigration detention centers or federal prisons to await deportation hearings. That prompted the government to separate them from their children, due to a U.S. law and a 1997 court settlement, known as the Flores Consent Decree, that limits the detention of children to no more than 20 days.
The policy was widely condemned – including by Trump’s own family – and the president signed an executive order ending the practice in an attempt to mitigate the problem.
A week later, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, based in San Diego, ruled that the practice may have violated the due process rights of the families, and ordered the administration to reunite them within 30 days.
Lawyers on both sides are now at odds over whether the government met the judge’s final deadline, which passed last Thursday.
Justice Department lawyers say they fully complied by reuniting 1,442 children with their parents by the deadline. ACLU attorneys, who brought the lawsuit against the administration, say that wasn’t nearly enough. They contend that the government originally identified more than 2,500 children that should have been reunited with their parents.
Sabraw said the government deserves “great credit” for the reunification of families it completed, but said the administration still has much work remaining to reunite those whose parents were deported without their children.
“The government is at fault for losing several hundred parents in the process,” Sabraw said during a court hearing last Friday.
White said 429 children have not been reunited with their parents because their parents were deported. He said there was no official deadline for reunifying these children but said “my preferred deadline for my team is absolutely as quickly as humanly possible.”
“We do not leave our humanity behind when we report for duty.” Carla Provost acting chief of U.S.
Border Patrol