Child separations persist at border
Halt to ‘zero tolerance’ has slowed, not stopped, cases
From the Rio Grande Valley in Texas to the Southern California coast, the Trump administration continues separating migrant families at rates that alarm immigration attorneys and advocates, even though a federal judge barred family separations as a systemic policy.
Separations have slowed significantly since a federal judge in San Diego ordered the administration to halt the practice in June 2018. U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw allowed separations in rare, specific circumstances, and the Trump administration has exploited those openings at a worrying clip, according to groups that work with migrants along the border.
“We are alarmed,” said Jennifer
Nagda, policy director at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, a Chicago-based national human rights group. “In March and April, we again saw a notable increase.”
The official government count is at 389 separated families since last summer’s injunction, according to data received by the American Civil Liberties Union in court filings. One-fifth of the newly separated children are younger than 5, according to the figures.
Advocates said that border-wide, the number is much higher.
Efrén Olivares, racial and economic justice director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, said he realized the government still intended to separate children at the border days after the injunction. Sitting in the federal courtroom in McAllen, he learned of multiple cases of families being separated. One man from Guatemala had his 2-year-old-daughter taken away despite having a birth certificate with both their names and no prior criminal record, Olivares said. It took nearly a month to get them back together.
“We knew then we couldn’t let our guard down,” Olivares said.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan told a congressional panel Tuesday that his department is conducting “less than two” family separations a day, which he described as minor compared with the 1,600 family units crossing the border each day.
“It’s being done very carefully in extraordinarily rare circumstances,” McAleenan testified before a House appropriations committee.
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees all immigration enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which carries out the separations, refused to answer questions about the separations. They would not say how many have occurred since Sabraw’s order or what happened to the separated minors.
The Department of Health and Human Services, charged with caring for the children, would not comment on the number or status of separated migrants in its custody. “HHS is not a party to the child’s immigration proceedings,” the department said in a statement.
The separations occur amid the shakeup at Homeland Security, which led to the departure of its chief, Kristjen Nielsen, on April 7. President Donald Trump said he wants the agency to take a firmer stance against illegal immigration as the number of Central American families requesting asylum skyrockets.
In March, Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 92,000 immigrants illegally crossing the border, a 12-year high, including 53,077 members of family units, an all-time high.
McAleenan, Nielsen’s replacement, said in an interview with NBC News that family separations are “not on the table” because the policy is “not worth it.”
Border groups said those pronouncements from Washington do not reflect what they see on the ground.
The birth of ‘zero tolerance’
Family separations ramped up in summer of 2017 when the Trump administration started a pilot program in Texas to charge all undocumented border crossers with criminal violations, a change from previous administrations that treated first-time illegal crossings as mostly civil infractions.
Parents were transferred to adult detention centers to await prosecution, and their children were transferred to the care of HHS. That program was kept a secret, but in April 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that “zero tolerance” would be the new Justice Department policy. That led to more than 2,800 family separations.
Republicans and Democrats alike called the policy inhumane and declared that the U.S. should not tear apart families and detain children in “cages.” Facing that mounting pressure, Trump rescinded the policy in June 2018.
A week later, Sabraw barred the government’s policy and ordered the administration to reunite all migrant families that were separated. On April 25, Sabraw went a step further, ordering the administration to identify within six months all families that were separated under the Texas pilot program.
How the decision is made
Border Patrol agents can separate a family if they decide the adult and child are not really related or if the parent is found to be a danger to the child. The agents use everything from years-old DUIs on an immigrant’s record to old theft charges as reasons to separate – not typically offenses that merit a family separation, said Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the ACLU.
“They’re separating families for crimes that have no bearing on parents as a danger to the child,” he said. “If there’s some rhyme or reason to it, we don’t know.”
In Tijuana and across the bridge in San Diego, attorney Erika Pinheiro of Al Otro Lado said she constantly meets and hears of families who have been separated because the parents have been deported – even if the children are U.S. citizens, she said. The separations happen even for asylum seekers arriving at legal ports of entry, Pinheiro said.
After being separated, adults are transferred to detention centers, often run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and children are transferred to shelters operated by HHS.
“It’s devastating,” Pinheiro said. “These parents will never be the same; the kids will never be the same.”
Supporters of the policy say increased separations are necessary to deal with the crush of migrants arriving at the border.
Jessica Vaughn of the Washingtonbased Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit research institute that promotes stricter controls on immigration, said Border Patrol agents have no choice but to scrutinize every parent-child pair that crosses the border and err on the side of caution.
Smugglers, knowing that migrants who cross the border with a child are often released until their asylum court hearing, send migrants with children who are often not their own, she said.
“There’s an incentive for people to bring children to do this,” Vaughn said.
According to Border Patrol data, such cases account for less than 1.2% of all families that cross the southern border. From April 2018 through March 2019, agents apprehended 256,821 members of family units. About 3,100 of those were cases in which the Border Patrol identified some kind of fraud – either the “child” was actually over 18 or not related to the adult.
Laura Belous, advocacy director for the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, the only legal services provider for detained migrants in Arizona, said the number of separated families dropped significantly after the injunction in June – but her office noticed a steep rise in cases again this year.
“It’s extremely alarming,” she said. “This is a huge trauma for both the parent and the children.”