Zero-tolerance policy packs McAllen court with migrants
Parents fearful for children separated from them are among the hundreds prosecuted
MCALLEN — Like hundreds of other illegal border crossers last week, Santiago Choc Chomo piled into the downtown federal courtroom, focused not on his misdemeanor charge but on his 10-year-old daughter. There’s a new law, he said Border Patrol agents told him when they found the two near the Rio Grande. She’s going to a federal shelter.
But they did not tell him where. Along with Choc Chomo, as many as six dozen immigrants at a time filled nearly all the wooden benches in this eighthfloor court, still wearing the same jeans and hooded sweatshirts from when they were apprehended days before.
Under the U.S. government’s new “zero tolerance” strategy of prosecuting every migrant entering illegally, many were parents separated from their children after the adults were imprisoned for the alleged crime. Most had never been in the United States before and sat, shackled and terrified, with one overriding concern.
“All I could think about was my daughter,” Choc Chomo said.
The Rio Grande Valley is the epicenter of President Donald Trump’s latest controversial immigration policy, a hardline approach to curbing illegal immigration that has met resistance from even some Republicans. About 60 percent of all migrant families and children apprehended at the southern border wade across the river near McAllen and since mid-May, public defenders here said, more than 430 parents were parted from their children after facing prosecution.
The administration said that strategy is necessary to handle a “crisis” at the border. Though overall illegal crossings are at their lowest in decades, statistics last week showed that the number of families and children coming here further rose 14 percent in May to almost 16,000, reaching levels last seen during President Barack Obama’s administration. Total southwest border apprehensions remained at more than 50,000 for the third consecutive month.
The increase has infuriated the president, who took pride in the falling apprehensions after his inauguration and boasted on his 500th day in office last week that some of his major accomplishments were lower illegal immigration and stronger borders.
“While the Trump administration is restoring the rule of law, it will take a sustained effort and continuous commitment of resources over many months,” Department of Homeland Security spokesman Tyler Q. Houlton said in a statement. “No one expects to reverse years of political inaction overnight.”
To accommodate the resulting surging detentions, the administration announced late Thursday that it would send 1,600 immigrants from Homeland Security facilities to federal prisons, a decision slammed by immigrant advocates.
“This new move is due to a self-manufactured crisis that stems directly from this administration cruelly separating families at the border and locking up parents, many of whom are lawfully seeking asylum,” said Katharina Obser, senior policy adviser with the Women’s Refugee Commission, a national advocacy group, in a statement.
Far from the politics of Washington, lawyers in McAllen face not only the desperate pleas of parents but severe logistical constraints.
“They say, ‘Please help me get my child back,’ ” said Miguel “Andy” Nogueras, one of 16 public defenders in the office. “I have to let them know there is a possibility they will be deported without their children.”
Once migrant parents are charged, their children by law cannot be held in prison with them and are transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, which places them in 100 temporary federal shelters around the country. After adults serve their criminal sentence of a few days or weeks, they move to Homeland Security detention centers and can be quickly deported, sometimes without their children. Advocates say few procedures exist to ensure they reunite and that even connecting parents and children after such a separation is extraordinarily difficult.
Lauren Dasse, executive director of the Florence Project, an Arizona immigrant advocacy group, said its staffers saw about 100 cases of family separation in the past 10 days, including a 2-year-old and a blind 6-year-old.
“Many of them tell us they have not had contact with their parents for days or even weeks,” she said.
The government has doubled down on its strategy, saying it is fully enforcing a law that has been on the books for decades and that parents cannot be exempted if they bring their children here illegally. Officials maintain most families are reunited after parents serve their sentences, but have not been able to release such data or point to policies ensuring that happens.
“If people don’t want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt last week after the broadcaster said he was “disturbed” by such separations.
Hundreds of cases
In the McAllen courtroom, Judge Peter Ormsby presided over the realworld consequences of ramped-up prosecutions. His docket last week was packed with up to 150 misdemeanor cases a day, and public defenders say they are struggling to keep up.
“It’s certainly swamping the court,” said Marjorie Meyers, chief federal public defender for the Southern District of Texas, which includes McAllen, Brownsville, Laredo and Corpus Christi. Together, they have seen more than 1,000 misdemeanor illegal entry prosecutions a week since mid-May.
“This is impacting our ability to handle the rest of our docket, and in some ways it’s impacting the court,” Meyers said. “In McAllen, I don’t think it will be sustainable for us to represent all of them.”
Day after day, Ormsby repeated the same phrases, that this was not an immigration hearing but a criminal one. He tried to ensure the 70-some in his court understood their rights and charges and were competent to plead guilty, as almost all usually do.
“I have a question,” said Norma Montoya, 30, who came with her two sons, ages 9 and 6, and had no idea where the government had placed them. “If you plead guilty, do you have a right to stay here with your babies?”
Ormsby explained again that he had no power over whether parents would rejoin their children, or if they would remain here, but could only adjudicate their misdemeanor cases.
“I’m very sorry for each of you who have been separated from your family members,” he said. “Having children myself, I can only imagine how difficult that is.”
Danny Bonilla, who is also from Honduras, apologized to the judge for entering illegally and said he just wanted to return home with his 8-year-old.
Again the judge counseled that most of the migrants here would get a sentence of time served in exchange for their guilty plea and released, usually that same day, to the custody of immigration agents. They would decide if they were reunited.
“I understand that should happen,” the judge said.
But advocates say in many cases it does not. Social workers struggle to find parents within the two agencies overseeing immigrant adult detention, the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. Officials in charge of children have said they are not routinely provided information about how family separations occur or where a minor’s parents may be.
In just one example of the lack of procedures, some attorneys said they were given a 1-800 number for parents to locate their children, but it was not for the agency in charge of such minors. It was a tipline for immigration agents.
A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union argues that even when parents and children are located after being separated, they are still not reunited. One lead plaintiff, a Brazilian mother who was prosecuted for allegedly entering the country illegally, served 25 days in prison after telling Border Patrol agents she sought asylum. Her 14year-old son was taken to a facility in Chicago. The woman was held in an immigrant detention center in El Paso for seven months and released on bond in April to pursue her asylum claim. She was reunited with her son last week.
In a ruling last week, a San Diego federal judge agreed the class-action case can proceed and that the policy may violate the Constitution’s guarantee of due process.
“Such conduct, if true … is brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency,” Judge Dana M. Sabraw of the Southern District of California wrote in his 25-page opinion.
The government has repeatedly argued that it sometimes must separate adults and children to ensure minors are not trafficked. It also has said that a 1996 landmark federal settlement and a 2008 bipartisan law protecting children prevents it from the prolonged detention of parents and children in immigration facilities. Without that option, the government said it is forced to release many families to pursue their civil immigration cases and that some never again show up.
‘They’re still coming’
Significant questions abound on whether zerotolerance initiatives deter illegal immigration. An analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit, found a similar program known as Operation Streamline had no long-term deterrent effect between 2005 and 2013. The Government Accountability Office also has suggested immigrant return rates stayed basically unchanged in that time.
In Ormsby’s court, several migrants were back after having recently been deported. One faced the same charge in this very room exactly two weeks ago.
Sister Norma Pimentel, who runs a migrant shelter near McAllen’s downtown Sacred Heart Catholic Church, just returned from a trip to Guatemala and El Salvador, where advocates told her they were struggling with an influx of small children deported alone.
Parents tell her they have heard of Trump’s policy and are afraid.
“But they’re still coming,” she said. “I ask them why, and they say, ‘It’s worse for us to stay.’ ”
Sessions said those seeking asylum should seek help at official portsof-entry. But in McAllen and across the border last week, migrants waited for days on international bridges under ferocious temperatures because federal agents said there wasn’t any room to process them.
Rosa Hidalgo, who is from Peru, was stuck on the international bridge with her children for 17 days. They couldn’t move because they didn’t want to lose their spots.
As the afternoon sun beat down, Choc Chomo, the Guatemalan father, arrived at the shelter. The judge had sentenced him to time served, but immigration officials released him because there wasn’t any more space to hold him. He was reunited with his daughter, who beamed with joy after several days of what she said in her indigenous Quiche language was inconsolable sadness.
The father, a subsistence farmer from an impoverished Mayan region, said they were off to join a friend in Florida. Hopefully, to quickly find fortune, before his ankle monitor brought them back to court.