U.S. official: Will meet deadlines to reunite families
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration said Thursday that it will meet court-ordered deadlines for reuniting families separated at the border, even as the politics of immigration remained at a boil.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters that his department is ready to reunite children in its care with their parents, starting Tuesday with those under age 5. The department said it is using DNA testing as a backup to confirm the parent-child link and speed up the process.
However, Azar warned that entire families may
remain in the custody of immigration authorities for extended periods, even those who are claiming asylum. Before the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, migrants seeking asylum under U.S. laws were often granted temporary release as their cases were resolved.
Azar also used a new and much higher number for children separated from their parents, “under 3,000” as compared with the figure of 2,047 he provided at a Senate hearing last week. Of those, about 100 are under 5 years old.
He said the new number reflected a more thorough look by the department at its case files, and over a longer time period, to comply with the court order that families be reunited. That order had been issued after his Senate testimony.
The Health and Human Services Department has long been in charge of caring for unaccompanied minors crossing the border, thousands of children every year. Usually, the agency places children with a U.S. relative or foster family while their immigration cases are decided. This year, the department also took on the role of caring for children separated from their parents as a consequence of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy.
Azar said the new number reflects a case-by-case audit of about 11,800 migrant children in its care, over a longer time frame. About 80 percent of those children arrived unaccompanied at the border, and many are teenage boys.
Azar said the audit was done to make sure the agency was in full compliance with a court order issued after he had given senators a lower number.
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego has ordered the youngest children reunited by Tuesday, and the rest before the end this month.
The judge also prohibited the government from deporting parents without their children unless the adults left the United States voluntarily.
This week, the ACLU expressed concern the federal government is pressuring migrant parents to agree to be deported in order to regain custody of their children. Federal immigration officials have denied doing that, saying they are only seeking to comply with the judge’s ruling.
A status hearing is scheduled for today.
Azar called the deadlines “extreme” but said the department will comply after an extensive effort to identify children in its shelters who were
separated from their parents, to confirm parentage, and to screen parents for criminal violations or other problems that could result in harm to kids.
“While I know there has been talk of confusion, any confusion is due to a breakdown in our immigration system and court orders. It’s not here,” Azar said, adding that migrant children are being well cared for in department facilities.
Once Health and Human Services reunifies the families, they will be in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security, Azar said. Homeland Security has already started moving some parents to facilities closer to shelters where their children are being kept.
Azar said his department has more than 230 people working on just trying to match children with their parents.
DNA testing is being used as a backup to speed up matches if problems arise with paper documentation, said Jonathan White of the Health and Human Services Department’s Administration for Children and Families. It’s done by swabbing the inside of the cheek of parent and child and sending the results to a lab for comparison.
Although White said DNA will only be used for reuniting families and genetic fingerprints will remain confidential, advocates for migrant families were concerned about intrusiveness.
“This is potentially extremely harmful in aggregating a database of DNA that people are somehow directed to provide in order to simply see their children,” said Jonathan Ryan, executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, a Texas nonprofit.
BIPARTISAN REQUEST
Meanwhile, two House oversight committee leaders are pressing key Trump Cabinet officials for a detailed accounting of the thousands of children separated from their parents.
In a bipartisan letter, sent Thursday to Azar, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, they make 11 specific requests for information about every detained child — including age, gender and current location. Since the humanitarian crisis began in April, such details have not been available.
“Like many Americans, we want to ensure that we can reunite children who have been separated from their families as expeditiously as possible,” wrote Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the Government Operations Subcommittee on the oversight panel, and Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, ranking Democrat on the full Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The lawmakers also want to know the age and gender of the parents of each child,
the date the parents were detained and when each child was separated. They also want a full accounting of all the locations where the children have been held since families were separated.
Lawmakers have complained about the lack of access to information and the facilities where parents are detained and children are sheltered. Democratic senators sent Nielsen and Azar a similar letter last week asking for weekly updates on the agency’s reunification efforts.
Earlier Thursday, Trump took to Twitter, showing no signs of backing away from the zero-tolerance policy.
Only recently, the president had told Republicans in Congress to stop wasting their time on immigration until after November’s elections, but Trump insisted Thursday in a tweet in all capital letters that Congress “Fix our insane immigration laws now!”
“When people, with or without children, enter our Country, they must be told to leave without our Country being forced to endure a long and costly trial,” Trump wrote. “Tell the people “OUT,” and they must leave, just as they would if they were standing on your front lawn.”
Congress has been unable to advance major immigration legislation going back to the George W. Bush years. Republicans are divided among hard-liners and business-oriented moderates who don’t see immigration as a threat. Democrats want a path to citizenship for people living in the country without authorization, which many Republicans deride as “amnesty.”
SANCTUARY RULING
Separately, a federal judge in California on Thursday denied a request by the Trump administration to suspend California’s so-called sanctuary policies that limit cooperation between federal immigration authorities and state and local law enforcement.
In a decision praised by opponents of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, Judge John Mendez of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California ruled that the state’s decision not to assist in federal immigration enforcement was not an “obstacle.”
“Standing aside does not equate to standing in the way,” the judge wrote in a 60-page ruling.
Mendez described the case as presenting “unique and novel” questions about the balance in the country between state and federal powers.
“The Court must answer the complicated question of where the United States’ enumerated
power over immigration ends and California’s reserved police power begins,” the judge said.
He urged Congress to find a “long-term solution” to federal immigration policy — “to set aside the partisan and polarizing politics dominating the current immigration debate and work in a cooperative and bipartisan fashion toward drafting and passing legislation that addresses this critical political issue.”
“Our Nation deserves it,” the judge wrote. “Our Constitution demands it.”
Mendez was nominated to the court by President George W. Bush in 2007.
Although he denied the federal government’s attempt to suspend California’s sanctuary policies, he granted the Trump administration an injunction on the more narrow point of a provision in California’s labor law that limits an employer’s ability to reverify an employee’s eligibility for a job.
The specific section of California’s labor law “appears to stand as an obstacle” to the federal government’s effort to ensure that employees are in the country legally.
But he left open the possibility that the court could change its ruling on this point when more evidence is presented “at a later stage of this litigation.”
In a statement, a spokesman for the Justice Department, Devin O’Malley, said the ruling on labor law was a “major victory for private employers in California who are no longer prevented from cooperating with legitimate enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws.”
But O’Malley said he was “disappointed” in the judge’s rejection of the injunction on the state’s sanctuary laws. The Justice Department, he said, “will continue to seek out and fight unjust policies that threaten public safety.”
Opponents of the Trump administration’s immigration policies heralded the ruling as a victory. “California is under no obligation to assist Trump tear families apart,” Kevin de Leon, who is running for senator in November’s election, said in a statement. “We cannot stop his meanspirited immigration policies, but we don’t have to help him, and we won’t.”
Lawyers for the Trump administration had argued that California lacked the authority to “intentionally interfere” with local governments’ voluntary cooperation with federal immigration officials.
California’s lawyers responded by saying the state had “acted squarely within its constitutional authority” and that the sanctuary laws did not undermine the federal government’s authority to enforce immigration laws.