Vox - Immigrant families remain separated after crossing the US-Mexico borderhttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2018-12-15T16:45:41-05:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/172327692018-12-15T16:45:41-05:002018-12-15T16:45:41-05:00Migrant girl dies in Border Patrol’s custody
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<figcaption>Members of the migrant caravan turn themselves in to a US Border Patrol agent after climbing over the US-Mexico border fence on December 3, 2018, while crossing into San Diego, California, from Tijuana, Mexico. | John Moore/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>The 7-year-old “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.” </p> <p id="FKuJeW">A 7-year-old Guatemalan girl died last week while in Border Patrol’s (CBP) custody. But a statement the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) released Thursday night about her death raises more questions than it answers.</p>
<p id="xy6pLR">The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/7-year-old-migrant-girl-taken-into-border-patrol-custody-dies-of-dehydration-exhaustion/2018/12/13/8909e356-ff03-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1b3c8da926ce">reported</a> that CBP told them the girl “died of dehydration and shock after she was taken into Border Patrol custody last week for crossing from Mexico into the United States illegally with her father and a large group of migrants along a remote span of New Mexico desert.”</p>
<aside id="5X9o82"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Trump: I secured the border. Trump an hour later: I need billions for a wall to secure the border.","url":"https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/11/18135978/trump-border-wall-incoherent"}]}'></div></aside><p id="DD4OC6">According to CBP, the girl was traveling with a group of 163 migrants and was in CBP custody for more than eight hours before she started having seizures. She was transported to a hospital in El Paso, where she died. CBP says she “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”</p>
<p id="EIF8Up">The timeline raises questions about whether CBP provided the girl, identified by the Guatemalan foreign ministry as Jackeline Caal, with food or water during the hours she was in their custody. But instead of addressing that concern, DHS, which oversees CBP, initially released a statement about Caal’s death that appears to try to shift blame onto her and her father for making the trek to the US in the first place.</p>
<p id="vVhllO">Here’s the whole <a href="https://twitter.com/haleaziz/status/1073446786843299840?s=21">statement</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p id="O5ZRae">As we have always aid, traveling north illegally is extremely dangerous. Drug cartels, human smugglers and the elements pose deadly risks to anyone who comes across the border illegally. Border Patrol always takes care of individuals in their custody and does everything in their power to keep them safe. Every year the Border Patrol saves hundreds of people who are overcome by the elements between our ports of entry. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts and the best efforts of the medical team treating the child, we were unable to stop this tragedy from occurring. Once again, we are begging parents to not put themselves or their children at risk attempting to enter illegally. Please present yourselves at a port of entry and seek to enter legally and safely.</p></blockquote>
<p id="YJFV7E">Shortly after this story was published, DHS sent a statement to Vox saying that after Caal and her father were detained, they were taken to a facility “where water was available.”</p>
<p id="nesA2Q">Here’s that statement in its entirety.</p>
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<p id="AFrB8i">At 9PM on December 6, 2018, Border Patrol apprehended a group of 163 aliens. Upon apprehension a medical screening was conducted of the aliens where the father denied any illness for either himself or his minor child. In keeping with standard Border Patrol protocol, the father and child were at a station where water was available.</p>
<p id="WFyQ6X">Due to the size and makeup of the group, two transports were needed to move the aliens to the nearest Border Patrol station which is 90 miles away from the point of apprehension. The father and minor boarded the second transport at approximately 4:30AM. Once on the bus, the father told Border Patrol that the minor was sick with a fever and vomiting. Border Patrol takes immediate action and radios for an EMT to meet them upon arrival at the Lordsburg Station. The bus arrives at the Lordsburg Border Patrol station shortly before 6:30AM. Once the father and child arrive at the station the father advises that the child is not breathing. Border Patrol immediately called 911 while administering medical care. Hidalgo County EMS arrives on scene within minutes and they were able to revive her twice. She was transported for air ambulance to the hospital. During this time, the father was transported to the hospital by Border Patrol which was four hours away by car.</p>
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<p id="YqRNN6">Later Friday, White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley said the administration isn’t to blame for Caal’s death.</p>
<p id="SqWghS">“Does the administration take responsibility for a parent taking a child on a trek through Mexico to get to this country? No,” Gidley said, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-says-administration-takes-no-responsibility-for-death-of-girl-in-border-control-custody/2018/12/14/1f00d34e-ffbb-11e8-83c0-b06139e540e5_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.46b39d3577de&wpisrc=al_news__alert-politics--alert-national&wpmk=1">according to the Washington Post</a>.</p>
<p id="C675hV">Gidley added that Caal’s death was a “100 percent preventable” situation and called for Congress to “pass some common-sense laws to disincentivize people from coming up from the border and encourage them to do it the right way, the legal way, then those types of deaths, those types of assaults, those types of rapes, the child smuggling, the human trafficking, that would all come to an end. And we hope Democrats join the president.”</p>
<p id="wQvAUf">On Saturday, a representative of the Guatemalan government told CNN that Caal’s father has “no complaints about how Border Patrol agents treated him and his daughter,” adding that the girl didn’t show any signs of distress until they were on a bus being transported to a border patrol station. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">2/ The consul says the father told him that agents did everything they possibly could to help the girl on the bus.</p>— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) <a href="https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/1074052815897681921?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 15, 2018</a>
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<p id="3wXLfU">While the White House and DHS urge asylum seekers to present themselves at ports of entry, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/28/18089048/border-asylum-trump-metering-legally-ports">Vox’s Dara Lind recently detailed</a> how the Trump administration has made them wait for lengthy, indeterminate periods of time in Mexico before considering their claims. That practice creates an incentive for people like Caal and her father to take matters into their own hands.</p>
<p id="IVwBOs">During an interview on Friday’s edition of <em>Fox & Friends</em>, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen also avoided addressing concerns about how CBP treated the girl, but instead characterized her death as “just a very sad example of the dangers of this journey.”</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">FOX & FRIENDS: What do you know about the 7-year-old girl who died in Border Patrol custody?<a href="https://twitter.com/SecNielsen?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SecNielsen</a>: "This is just a very sad example of the dangers of this journey. This family chose to cross illegally... I cannot stress [enough] how dangerous this journey is." <a href="https://t.co/bjFMdFlW3E">pic.twitter.com/bjFMdFlW3E</a></p>— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) <a href="https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1073572370491809793?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 14, 2018</a>
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<p id="g1sHSN">But Caal didn’t die on the journey to America. She died after making the journey, while in Border Patrol’s custody. </p>
<p id="062L8l">Aura Bogado, an immigration reporter with Reveal, detailed conditions in hieleras — the facilities CBO uses to detain border crossers.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Here's a cropped <a href="https://twitter.com/jbmoorephoto?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jbmoorephoto</a> from a hielera. This is the water people are forced to drink. It's grey and it's disgusting. It routinely makes people sick. There isn't even a place to dry your hands after you wash them. Everything is full of fecal matter. <a href="https://t.co/VrdqjiBO1P">pic.twitter.com/VrdqjiBO1P</a></p>— Aura Bogado (@aurabogado) <a href="https://twitter.com/aurabogado/status/1073569019490254848?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 14, 2018</a>
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<p id="DWd2Gj">Caal’s death comes months after a toddler <a href="https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/paw9ky/toddler-died-after-getting-sick-in-ice-custody">died from an illness</a> she developed at an Immigration and Border Customs Enforcement facility in Dilley, Texas.</p>
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/14/18140697/guatemalan-girl-dehydration-death-border-patrol-custody-dhsAaron Rupar2018-11-06T19:09:39-05:002018-11-06T19:09:39-05:00The scary ideology behind Trump’s immigration instincts
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<figcaption>President Donald Trump listens during a meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy in the Cabinet Room at the White House in January. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>The debate over family separation plays into a familiar narrative that’s being pushed by the White House. </p> <p id="GfrkGy">President Donald Trump’s closing argument in the 2018 midterms was to vote Republican to save America from foreigners — an idea rooted in a fringe theory that whites are under siege, or “white genocide.”</p>
<p id="AMQ8oW">“It’s like an invasion,” Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-he-is-finalizing-plan-to-end-abuse-of-us-asylum-system-vowing-massive-tent-cities-to-hold-migrants/2018/11/01/90fb6252-ddec-11e8-b732-3c72cbf131f2_story.html?utm_term=.5350c5622234">said</a> last week, talking about Central American migrants walking north through Mexico. “They have violently overrun the Mexican border. You saw that two days ago. These are tough people, in many cases. A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country.”</p>
<p id="gWTM2l">In the midst of the debate over family separation earlier this year, Trump implied that his justification for his restrictionist ideology for even legal immigrants is to prevent the United States from enduring what’s happening in <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/18/17474600/trump-tweet-crime-germany">Europe</a>. There, he claims falsely, immigrants are bringing with them a wave of violence that’s driving up the crime rate. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">We don’t want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us!</p>— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1008696952559734787?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 18, 2018</a>
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<p id="YWDvAS">Trump has often referred to these kind of outlandish claims as just <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/16/trump-sanders-shithole-vulgarity-341613">“politically incorrect</a>.” But it’s more than that. </p>
<p id="fl83nj">Believers argue that white people are being systematically “erased” by their inferiors, and thus require an <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=nNWbbhUYv8oC&pg=PA539&lpg=PA539&dq=birth+control+for+non-whites&source=bl&ots=qhqNmBql2-&sig=HBLAaJc-L79fgVVGg8_mmqrERQY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiO2pvkn-LYAhVcFMAKHR5aD1kQ6AEIYDAI#v=onepage&q=birth%20control%20for%20non-whites&f=false">influx of white babies</a> and new white immigrants (and the exclusion of nonwhite immigrants) to survive. </p>
<p id="sKIF2m">To some among these believers, white Americans, and white culture, are threatened by a slow-running “genocide” via demographic replacement. (Indeed, Trump <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/22/politics/donald-trump-retweet-white-genocide/index.html">once retweeted someone</a> with the handle “WhiteGenocide,” which refers to this theory.) </p>
<p id="AJjGOk">This theory has adherents on the alt-right, <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ann-coulter-calls-immigrant-children-ice-separated-from-their-parents-child-actors/">across the conservative media</a>, and even in <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/03/14/rep-steve-king-explains-controversial-tweet-streets-of-europe-burning-with-violent-unrest-from-mass-migration/">Congress</a>.<strong> </strong></p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. <a href="https://t.co/4nxLipafWO">https://t.co/4nxLipafWO</a></p>— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) <a href="https://twitter.com/SteveKingIA/status/840980755236999169?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 12, 2017</a>
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<p id="72vo85">In this worldview, it’s not “racist” to think that a Norwegian might be a better fit with American culture (as they define it) than an <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-africa-immigration-trump-norway-slur-0116-20180112-story.html">immigrant arriving from Lagos or Addis Ababa</a> — it’s <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/how-the-alt-right-uses-social-science-to-make-racism-respectable/">“racial realism.”</a> It’s the only way to stop white people from being losers of a <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-camp-of-the-saints-immigration_us_58b75206e4b0284854b3dc03">fight to the death between races</a>. </p>
<p id="ZkWYze">These ideas are old, rooted in scientific racism and fears of miscegenation once held by <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2006/05/05/when-bigots-become-reformers">Progressive Era stalwarts like President Woodrow Wilson</a> and white supremacist hate groups alike. But now they appear to have the ear of those closest to the president — and are playing a part in the creation of policy. </p>
<p id="ckH1Bb">This group included former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. In fact, long before he ran Trump’s presidential campaign or took a role in the White House, Bannon believed that the movements of nonwhite immigrant groups, legal or not, <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-camp-of-the-saints-immigration_us_58b75206e4b0284854b3dc03">posed a physical, cultural, political, and moral danger to “white” countries</a>. As <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/2/14472404/steve-bannon-legal-immigration-problem">he told White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller</a> in a March 2016 Sirius XM show, “When you look and there’s got 61 million, 20 percent of the country, is immigrants — is that not a massive problem?” Miller agreed wholeheartedly. Now Miller and his former boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, are vocalizing the same views, both to the media and to the president of the United States. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">AG Jeff Sessions on immigration reform: "What good does it do to bring in somebody who's illiterate in their own country, has no skills, & is going to struggle in our country & not be successful? That is not what a good nation should do, and we need to get away from it." <a href="https://t.co/JwOBmbAG0P">pic.twitter.com/JwOBmbAG0P</a></p>— Fox News (@FoxNews) <a href="https://twitter.com/FoxNews/status/953441805873369089?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 17, 2018</a>
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<p id="UaTbZK">Trump’s internal racism might be that of a 71-year-old white man who marvels that, for instance, <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/1/12/16885842/trump-racism-congressional-black-caucus">members of the Congressional Black Caucus didn’t already know Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson</a>. But his external racism is heavily influenced by adherents of an ideology that believes whiteness is the essential character of America, with direct and very detrimental impacts on discussions regarding immigration policy. An ideology that holds that demographic changes — or even the <a href="http://archive.is/8JA5X">existence of mixed-race children</a> — represent a “genocide.”<strong> </strong></p>
<p id="jIzdx7">And importantly, Trump’s language and policies are evidence of a worldview that holds that whiteness is more valuable to participation in the American experiment than anything else — even a deep and abiding belief in American ideals. </p>
<h3 id="3g6XFl">“We cannot ‘cull’ Africans as if they were deer, but ...”</h3>
<p id="eDO0sj">Throughout the 19th century, fears regarding miscegenation and “race mixing,” rooted in a belief that the dilution of white bloodlines — bloodlines that <a href="https://academic.udayton.edu/race/04needs/sex04.htm">offered political, economic, and social authority over nonwhites</a> — would result in societal disaster led to states across the country banning interracial marriages and enforcing strict rules regarding exactly what it meant to be white. In the 20th century, such views were espoused by Progressive Era activists, leading to <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act">restrictionist acts passed in 1917 and 1924</a>. As Madison Grant argued in the 1915 eugenicist tome <a href="https://archive.org/stream/passingofgreatra00granuoft/passingofgreatra00granuoft_djvu.txt"><em>The Passing of the Great Race</em></a>:</p>
<blockquote><p id="kzj8Mr">The resurgence of inferior races and classes throughout not merely Europe but the world, is evident in every despatch from Egypt, Ireland, Poland, Romania, India and Mexico. ... Neither the black, nor the brown, nor the yellow, nor the red will conquer the white in battle. But if the valuable elements in the Nordic race mix with in-ferior strains or die out through race suicide, then the citadel of civilization will fall for mere lack of defenders.</p></blockquote>
<p id="mRAiuI">More recently, the exact language of “white genocide” began to circulate among the white supremacist underground after the Second World War. In 1972, the <a href="https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/fear-white-genocide">official newspaper of the National Socialist White People’s Party</a> published a piece titled “Over-Population Myth Is Cover for White Genocide,” arguing that the widespread availability of contraception would lead to a terrifying future in which “whites will be outnumbered four to one.”</p>
<p id="cS6p9Z">A decade later, David Lane, a white supremacist responsible for the murder of a Jewish radio host in 1984, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/how-the-turner-diaries-changed-white-nationalism/500039/">wrote the “White Genocide Manifesto”</a> while in prison, arguing that “‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide.” He later shortened his three-page manifesto to 14 words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Three decades later, the term “white genocide” is the <a href="https://cchs.gwu.edu/sites/cchs.gwu.edu/files/downloads/Nazis%20v.%20ISIS%20Final_0.pdf">single most popular hashtag</a> used by white nationalists on Twitter. </p>
<p id="SPiHTL">The sentiment among white nationalists has little changed since the Civil War: Whiteness is a valuable commodity, essential to the very nature of American and European life. And it is under attack — not by violence but by immigration, and by sexual intercourse between whites and nonwhites. </p>
<p id="dInbu6">“White genocide” rhetoric circulated in mail-order publications and racist websites like Stormfront for much of the 1990s and 2000s, but also held sway within policy institutes and foundations that gave cover to scientific racism, also known as “racial realism” — a belief that racism is not only based in fact but has scientific and quantitative backing. </p>
<p id="UF5ZWi">Among these groups was the Pioneer Fund — which the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/03/31/cbs-fight-a-litmus-test-for-conservatives/121af96b-41a3-4aae-9ed7-be9f4360ce33/?utm_term=.1a2ee84b55f3">Washington Post </a>found in 1985 to have “financed research into “racial betterment” by “scientists seeking to prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.” American Renaissance, a publication of the <a href="https://dianerehm.org/shows/2016-08-29/the-rise-of-the-alt-right-movement-and-its-place-in-this-years-presidential-campaign">self-described</a> “race-realist, white advocacy organization” New Century Foundation, held an online symposium in late 2017 called “Global Demographics and White Survival: What Is to Be Done?”</p>
<p id="S3vV5T">One writer included in the conference, F. Roger Devlin, compared African birthrates to that of the deer population in Arizona, arguing, “We cannot ‘cull’ Africans as if they were deer, but we can eliminate the misguided humanitarian aid that is doing so much harm.” He concluded his essay with the following:</p>
<blockquote><p id="zb4TLZ">Obviously, we must be prepared to do what is necessary to defend our own living space, up to and including shooting intruders. Whites are so used to seeing Africans as objects of humanitarian concern that many are unable to grasp that they may also be dangerous rivals. But in fact, fertility is a major advantage they possess over us. We should not attempt to compete with them directly, but we can and must prevent our living space from becoming a dumping ground for their excess fertility. If we fail, it will mean a darker future for all humanity.</p></blockquote>
<p id="LbkbVT">Another white supremacy foundation is the National Policy Institute, created by William Regnery in 2005 to “give voice to the interests of white peoples.” Its current president is Richard Spencer, who has said he worked closely with Stephen Miller in <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/richard-spencer-trump-alt-right-white-nationalist/">college on campus activism about immigration</a>. </p>
<p id="aF7pw4">It must be noted that these ideas are not only untrue but also ahistorical. The idea of whiteness as quantifiable and, moreover, essential to the notion of what it means to be an American ignores virtually all of American history. </p>
<p id="xfKjrN">In fact, hard lines dividing Americans by race were redrawn over and over; many American families seemed to <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-invisible-line-between-black-and-white-335353/">cross from black to white to black</a> depending on their social status and the region of the country in which they lived. Immigrant groups, too, <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/when-america-hated-catholics-213177">endured changing racial norms</a>, with Irish and Italian Americans, for example, deemed scientifically inferior for decades. </p>
<p id="QkhjDp">When Maine politician Ira Hersey declared in the early 20th century, “We have thrown open wide our gates and through them have come other alien races, of alien blood, from Asia and southern Europe … with their strange and pagan rites, their babble of tongues,” he was talking about Italian Catholics. </p>
<h3 id="M7BUop">To “racial realists,” it’s all about the numbers</h3>
<p id="AoNEtW">White Americans are <a href="https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-06.pdf">declining as a percentage</a> of the population of the United States, from roughly 69 percent of the population in 2000 to 64 percent in 2010. As of July 1, 2015, just over half of all babies under the age of 1 born in the United States were <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/23/its-official-minority-babies-are-the-majority-among-the-nations-infants-but-only-just/">racial and ethnic minorities</a>. Mixed-race Americans are the <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/asian-population-booming-u-s-new-census-data-shows-article-1.2684990">second-fastest-growing ethnic group in America</a>. </p>
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<figcaption>Time magazine, “The New Face of America,” November 18, 1993.</figcaption>
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<p id="dgy3Vh">For many Americans, this is a positive development. But for “racial realists,” this is an emergency. </p>
<p id="s5E4RT">As they see it, if there are more nonwhite people in America, there will be fewer white people. If there are fewer white people, there will be fewer white voters who would favor conservative policies. As “racial realist” Gregory Hood <a href="https://www.amren.com/commentary/2017/11/maga-requires-racial-realism-steve-bannon-economic-nationalism/">wrote</a> for American Renaissance in November 2017, “American civic nationalism ultimately depends on white voters. The refusal to speak the truth explicitly about demographic realities [dooms] the GOP to electoral extinction.” </p>
<p id="uQ6wep">The underlying assumption is that only white people will favor conservative policies. As Hood wrote in the same piece, conservatives must understand “that many of the things they value — the flag, monuments to certain leaders, or cultural norms such as a tradition of free speech — really are dependent on a European-American majority.” </p>
<p id="xspFzu">That’s an echo of the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20090131/nativist-lobby-three-faces-intolerance">sentiments</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/us/17immig.html?pagewanted=all">shared by immigration restrictionist John Tanton</a>, who told a donor to his organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, “One of my prime concerns is about the decline of folks who look like you and me,” and warned a friend, “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”</p>
<p id="SElJ5R">There’s markedly little discussion among “racial realists” of attempting to creating conservative arguments that appeal to nonwhite Americans. To them, race is political destiny, and to the racial victors will go the nation. In a way, it’s the very inverse of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/demographics-as-political-destiny/2012/11/07/f8faf206-291f-11e2-96b6-8e6a7524553f_blog.html?utm_term=.782607ccee14">“demographics as destiny.”</a></p>
<p id="xj8faN">In short, believers of “white genocide” think that any encouragement of diversity in schools or workplaces, or the <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/interracial-marriages-mixed-race-americans/3749441.html">increase in mixed-race Americans</a> (and <a href="https://www.today.com/style/old-navy-ad-interracial-family-prompts-social-media-outrage-support-t90226">their presence</a> in mainstream media), isn’t evidence of more progressive attitudes toward race, but of a sinister plot.</p>
<p id="ALRT6a">In the words of Richard Spencer: “America was ... a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.” </p>
<h3 id="A73K4t">Off the internet, into immigration policy</h3>
<p id="5LO5Zk">Of course, much of the current GOP might not feel comfortable using terminology like “white genocide” and “racial realism,” in part because many conservatives simply don’t share these views. </p>
<p id="aY1fnd">Many members of the Republican Party think like <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/gop-rep-mia-love-trump-s-vulgar-remarks-i-can-n837616">Haitian-American Rep. Mia Love</a>, who spoke out about Trump’s racist comments about “shithole countries” in January. In her words, Trump’s statements were “unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation’s values,” and she told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “You have to understand that there are countries that struggle out there but ... their people are good people and they’re part of us.” </p>
<p id="9m6hYy">In fact, until recently, the conventional wisdom was that the GOP needed to do more to appeal to people of color in order to survive and thrive. After the presidential election in 2012, Sen. <a href="https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865566243/Republicans-see-demographic-shifts-time-for-soul-searching-in-the-wake-of-election-losses.html">Marco Rubio told Politico</a>, “The conservative movement should have particular appeal to people in minority and immigrant communities who are trying to make it, and Republicans need to work harder than ever to communicate our beliefs to them.” Sen. Susan Collins agreed, <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/republicans-do-some-soul-searching-after-romney-loss-1.1142653">telling the New York Times in 2012</a>, “Republicans cannot win with just rural white voters.” </p>
<p id="D34z1x">“One of the great projects and challenges of the conservative movement is persuading a much broader ethnic coalition of Americans of the value of conservative ideas,” said David French, a staff writer at National Review who experienced <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-october-27-2016-1.3822261/alt-right-trump-supporters-attack-journalists-online-1.3822421">online attacks by far-right trolls in 2015</a>, many of whom aimed their ire at <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/09/18/what-its-like-to-be-a-white-conservative-on-twitter-when-you-have-a-black-child/?utm_term=.f3adf443af19">French’s Ethiopian-born daughter</a>.</p>
<p id="CzZD2T">But many on the right didn’t, and don’t, feel the same way. While Miller was <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/politico50/2016/jeff-sessions-stephen-miller">advising then-Sen. Jeff Sessions</a> on how best to kill the efforts of Rubio and the “Gang of Eight” to pass immigration reform in 2013, Steve Bannon and Breitbart News were fanning the flames of racial discord, complete with a “black crime” article label and stories about the imminent dangers posed by nonwhite immigrants. </p>
<p id="BSVhjw">It’s not just Breitbart. Conservative pundit Ann Coulter (who <a href="https://twitter.com/anncoulter/status/632954040675078144?lang=en">tweeted</a>, “I don’t care if [Trump] wants to perform abortions in White House,” after the release of his <a href="http://time.com/3999767/trump-policy-paper/">immigration policy paper in 2015</a>) <a href="http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2017-11-15.html">wrote last November</a> that “the only reason Democrats want a never-ending stream of Third World immigrants is because they know immigrants will help them win elections. ... There isn’t much time on the clock before it’s lights-out for the GOP.” Trump is a noted <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-white-strategy/485612/">fan of Coulter’s writing</a>, and during his presidential campaign, Coulter warmed up the crowd at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ1KYYryQ9U">several campaign rallies</a>. </p>
<p id="ADhujJ">In a way, the idea slots neatly into Trump’s zero-sum worldview. To those who voice the “white genocide” myth, a victory by nonwhite Americans, particularly immigrants, will inevitably lead to losses by white Americans. </p>
<p id="PL4AcO">As far-right commentator (and former White House senior adviser) Pat Buchanan <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/trumps-jarring-remarks-shroud-broader-immigration-questions/">wrote</a>, “Endless mass migration here means the demographic death of the GOP. In U.S. presidential elections, persons of color whose roots are in Asia, Africa and Latin America vote 4-1 Democratic, and against the candidates favored by American’s vanishing white majority.” </p>
<p id="pL9WHG">To him, this puts America “on the path to national suicide.” American Renaissance <a href="https://www.amren.com/commentary/2018/01/trump-immigration-debate-race-matters/">shared</a> his column. </p>
<h3 id="iNrwsZ">Trump’s adoption of racist views is at the core of the immigration debate</h3>
<p id="2mUzRb">Bannon may be <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/1/14/16875288/bannon-breitbart-conservative-media">out of the White House (and Breitbart News)</a>. But his attitudes regarding immigration and immigrants remain in place, voiced by fellow immigration restrictionists like Sessions and Miller who believe that immigration poses a danger to American culture and American life — unless that immigration is from <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/jeff-sessions-1924-immigration/512591/">a predominantly white country</a>. </p>
<p id="lEE6TW">Most importantly, those views are being voiced by Trump himself. After all, when the white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted, <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-40911744/white-us-nationalists-chant-you-will-not-replace-us">“You will not replace us”</a> — a direct reference to the “white genocide” myth — Trump <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-fine-people-on-both-sides/537012/">made sure to say</a> that there were “very fine people” among those chanting. </p>
<p id="gLKEnF">The “white genocide” viewpoint — one that views immigration of all kinds as an imminent threat to the fabric of America — making the process of dealmaking virtually impossible for Democrats, and for Republicans who desperately want to avoid any arguments that racialize immigration policy. If the debate over immigration is about border security and preventing the entrance of genuine threats to American security, compromise is imaginable, even possible. </p>
<p id="WauFfS">But if the debate over immigration is actually about a belief that nonwhite immigrants pose an existential danger to America and Americanness as a whole, and that “demographics” require Haitian immigrants to be expelled from the country while hypothetical immigrants from Norway are welcomed with open arms, then there is no ready compromise at hand. </p>
<p id="zD9q6v">As my colleague Dara Lind <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/1/16/16897050/trump-racist-shithole-immigration">wrote</a> in January, “You can’t negotiate with people who believe that an America that lets in people from ‘shithole countries’ isn’t the America they know or love. Either America is a nation of immigrants or it is a nation of blood and soil. It cannot be both.” </p>
https://www.vox.com/2018/1/18/16897358/racism-donald-trump-immigrationJane Coaston2018-11-02T11:56:19-04:002018-11-02T11:56:19-04:00Trump doesn’t need to jail families to enforce immigration laws. There are better options.
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_mry5YSovPfYyqk__E4BSzMFAIM=/320x0:5440x3840/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/60150351/ankle_monitor.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A man seeking political asylum was released from detention with an ICE ankle monitor in New York City in 2016. | Andrew Lichtenstein/ Corbis via Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Community supervision and electronic monitoring are two alternatives that the government has used to make sure asylum seekers follow the law.</p> <p id="tOpQZ0">Thousands of families fleeing persecution in Honduras are walking to the United States to request asylum. President Donald Trump has made it quite clear that he doesn’t like that.</p>
<p id="Q6XL0W">Aside from deploying the military to the border, Trump said on Thursday that he plans to detain asylum seekers in “massive tents” along the border. I won't go into the details about the legal problems this would cause the Trump administration, or how inhumane tent cities are. Vox’s Dara Lind does a good job <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/13/17458008/immigrant-children-cages-separated-parents-border">explaining that here</a>. </p>
<p id="8YMmyS">I’ll just focus on what a waste of money the tent cities are, and that the administration has better alternatives to ensure asylum seekers and immigrants comply with US laws. These are a few cost estimates from the administration: Housing someone in a tent city costs about <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/trump-admin-s-tent-cities-cost-more-keeping-migrant-kids-n884871">$775 per day</a>. Housing someone in a traditional immigration detention center costs between <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CFO/17_0524_U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement.pdf">$133 to $319 per day</a>. Releasing immigrants under community supervision or electronic monitoring <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CFO/17_0524_U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement.pdf">costs about $4.50 per day</a>. That’s a pretty big cost difference.</p>
<p id="RkBePz">Under past administrations, the Department of Homeland Security has usually chosen to lock up immigrants arrested at the border — but the agency has also created several effective alternatives to detention. The White House could prioritize these programs instead of trying to find more places to lock up families.</p>
<p id="kS1y13">One alternative is to release immigrants under community supervision, in which a non-profit group or government contractor provides families with social workers, who help them find housing and transportation, and who make sure they attend court hearings and comply with the law.</p>
<p id="XR2bZS">Another alternative is to release immigrants with electronic monitoring, which generally involves placing GPS ankle monitors on the parents and assigning them case workers.</p>
<p id="jW3FJP">Up until recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was running two such programs at the national level: the Intensive Supervision Alternative Program (ISAP), which involves electronic monitoring, and the less restrictive Family Case Management Program (FCMP), which relied on community monitoring. The methods used in these programs are available to DHS, and are<strong> </strong>much cheaper than traditional detention — but the Trump administration locked up instead. </p>
<p id="4QvuVZ">To Trump, these programs represent the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17190090/catch-release-loopholes-border-immigrants-trump">“catch-and-release”</a> immigration policy he despises. However, unlike the practice of merely releasing an immigrant on bond or with a notice to appear in court, which happens in some minor immigration cases, these alternatives actually<strong> </strong>have strict supervision rules — people in these programs are hardly being “released.”</p>
<h3 id="wJjcGp">Social workers can supervise immigrants outside of jail</h3>
<p id="ba7u2v">When someone is arrested for an immigration violation, an ICE officer has a lot of discretion in deciding whether to book that person in immigration jail, or to release them while their case makes its way through immigration court. (Immigration judges do not make initial bond decisions the way judges do in the criminal court system). The decision often comes down to whether the ICE officer thinks that person might commit a crime or skip town.</p>
<p id="5euzFj">Since 2013, ICE officers have been using a computer algorithm, called the <a href="https://www.oig.dhs.gov/assets/Mgmt/2015/OIG_15-22_Feb15.pdf">Risk Classification System</a>, to help them assess whether an immigrant is a danger to the community or a flight risk. They do background checks and search for open warrants, past immigration violations, and gang connections. They also do extensive interviews about each person’s ties to the community, job history, and drug use. The algorithm recommends whether or not an immigrant should be detained, but officers aren’t required to follow it, and <a href="https://www.oig.dhs.gov/assets/Mgmt/2015/OIG_15-22_Feb15.pdf">they often don’t</a>. </p>
<p id="sSex0J">If they choose to release someone, there are several ways to do that. They could issue them a notice to appear in court and trust that they will show up, or release them on bond. They could also release immigrants under community supervision or electronic monitoring.</p>
<p id="55P90i">The <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CFO/17_0524_U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement.pdf">Family Case Management Program</a> was launched by the Department of Homeland Security<strong> </strong>in 2015, in response to the waves of mothers and children <a href="https://www.vox.com/cards/child-migrant-crisis-unaccompanied-alien-children-rio-grande-valley-obama-immigration">seeking asylum</a> from gang violence. Instead of keeping children in detention centers with their parents, families in certain cities were released and monitored by social workers, who helped them find lawyers, housing, and transportation, and made sure they attended their court hearings.</p>
<p id="2PQdfj">It seemed to work pretty well, <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CFO/17_0524_U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement.pdf">according to ICE</a>, though officers never had more than 1,600 people enrolled in the program during the two years it existed (compared to more than <a href="https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/dhs-releases-end-fiscal-year-2016-statistics">350,000 immigrants</a> who were held in ICE detention centers just in 2016)<strong>.</strong></p>
<p id="X9g1N3">The contractor that ran the program <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/ice-shutters-detention-alternative-asylum-seekers/3893854.html">said that 99 percent of participants</a> “successfully attended their court appearances and ICE check-ins.” That included the 15 families who were ultimately deported.</p>
<p id="yASS6D">But in June 2017, after Trump took office, DHS <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/06/ice-shuts-down-program-for-asylum-seekers/529887/">shuttered the program</a>, without explanation. Recent public outcry over family separations has renewed questions about the decision to end the program. On Friday, a spokesperson for the agency told Vox that the program was effective, but suggested that the agency had<strong> </strong>hoped it would lead to more deportations than it did.</p>
<p id="xMsCId">Immigration authorities have partnered in the past with non-profit groups to provide other forms of community supervision, and the compliance rates were also high. A 2012 program with Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services provided community-based supervision to 240 immigrants whom ICE would normally keep behind bars. It had a 97 percent appearance rate, costing an average of $24 a day. There is nothing stopping the agency from launching new partnerships like these.</p>
<h3 id="9VJkTZ">Ankle bracelets are another option to detention </h3>
<p id="QbFYwd">The Obama administration turned to another detention alternative, which involves ankle bracelets and other forms of electronic monitoring. </p>
<p id="JqbuK4">Central American mothers and children seeking asylum were released from detention centers in 2016 after a federal judge told DHS it could not keep children detained more than 20 days. In response,<strong> </strong>DHS ramped up its Intensive Supervision Alternative Program (ISAP), run by a subsidiary of the GEO Group, a Florida-based company that operates private prisons and most of ICE’s detention centers. </p>
<p id="rmmdEs">ISAP allows case workers and immigration officers to<strong> </strong>track immigrants with GPS ankle monitors linked to a cell phone app. The program also requires regular phone check-ins with authorities using voice recognition software and unannounced home visits.</p>
<p id="JS87nL">ISAP has <a href="http://centrolegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Complaint-to-OCRCL-Cover-Letter.pdf">its share of critics</a>, who argue that it’s a burdensome program without clear guidelines. But it also seems effective from ICE’s point of view. The contractor said it led to a 99.6 percent compliance rate for court appearances, though it had a lower compliance rate for deportation orders — 79 percent. </p>
<h3 id="ww2FGA">ICE actually wants more alternatives to detention </h3>
<p id="sEGX4i">In its budget request to Congress in May 2017, the Department of Homeland Security said alternative programs (in general) were effective, and led to “strong alien cooperation” and compliance with immigration proceedings. It asked for <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CFO/17_0524_U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement.pdf">an extra $57 million</a> to expand electronic monitoring and community supervision programs to 26,000 more detainees. </p>
<p id="QTfvFi">Congress ended up giving $4.1 billion to ICE for immigration detention and removal operations, which the agency can spend on detention centers or alternative programs. The agency decided to eliminate the Family Case Management Program, and placed 69,000 immigrants into the ISAP electronic monitoring program. </p>
<p id="mWwsKh">In its <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/U.S.%20Immigration%20and%20Customs%20Enforcement.pdf">budget request for fiscal year 2019</a>, the agency said it’s necessary to continue expanding alternative programs with the limited available bed space in ICE detention centers: </p>
<blockquote><p id="IbMWxG">It is critical that ICE have the ability to assign supplemental reporting requirements available under the ATD program for those individuals not subject to mandatory detention and/or not suitable for detention for a variety of reasons. These generally include family units that must be released from detention within a few weeks pursuant to court order as well as individuals with significant medical issues – where delivery of appropriate care would be difficult in a detention setting. </p></blockquote>
<h3 id="xR08Fs">Indefinite detention is very expensive </h3>
<p id="xoh4S6">Electronic monitoring and community supervision are just a few options the Trump administration could prioritize instead of detention, even if it decides to keep the zero-tolerance policy intact. They would also save the US government a ton of money, which is something Republicans say they care about.</p>
<p id="xEPE79">To understand just how expensive it is for DHS to house, shelter, and feed immigrants, all you have to do is look at the agency’s own numbers. In <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CFO/17_0524_U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement.pdf">its budget request</a> for fiscal year 2018, DHS said that it cost about $133.99 per day to hold an adult immigrant in detention and $319.37 for an individual in family detention. Meanwhile, the agency said the average cost of placing someone in an alternative program is <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CFO/17_0524_U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement.pdf">$4.50 per day</a>. Trump’s new tent cities cost an eye-popping $775 That’s a huge difference.</p>
<p id="IsIPZh">Recent estimates from the Department of Health and Human Services show that housing immigrants in tent cities would cost <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/trump-admin-s-tent-cities-cost-more-keeping-migrant-kids-n884871">a whopping $775 a day</a> per detainee, according to documents reviewed this summer <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/trump-admin-s-tent-cities-cost-more-keeping-migrant-kids-n884871">by reporters at NBC news</a>.</p>
<p id="Erp3DF">Immigrant advocacy groups <a href="https://immigrationforum.org/article/math-immigration-detention-2018-update-costs-continue-mulitply/">have urged Congress</a> to shift more DHS funding from detention to these alternatives as Trump ramps up border enforcement.</p>
<p id="SfxqJL">The problem is that the Trump administration isn’t interested in other options. To the president and other immigration hawks, these alternatives to detention represent what they consider the failed “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17190090/catch-release-loopholes-border-immigrants-trump">catch-and-release</a>” policies of the previous administration. </p>
<p id="sGLwsv">But these programs do work, and they do allow the government to enforce immigration laws effectively. And they are far better than the nightmare of separating families, putting them in tent cities, or keeping them together in jail with no end in sight.</p>
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https://www.vox.com/2018/6/22/17483230/migrant-caravan-tent-city-cost-trumpAlexia Fernández Campbell2018-10-12T11:40:54-04:002018-10-12T11:40:54-04:00Trump is separating an unknown number of families at the border for “fraud”
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<img alt="Father And Son From Honduras Seeking Asylum In The U.S. Await The Court’s Decision On Their Status" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tbOwBgExzbaJw8SMHbX5ULTdAO4=/2737x350:6480x3157/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61736127/1030552830.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>This 6-year-old is one of the 6,000 or more people who were separated from relatives during the peak of Trump’s policy of “zero tolerance” at the US-Mexico border. But a new report reveals that families who are separated due to suspicions of “fraud” — often baseless ones — aren’t even tracked in official statistics. | Mario Tama/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>A new report finds that official family separation statistics don’t count grandparents split from grandkids, or parents whose kids are taken due to “insufficient” documentation.</p> <p id="3lBCeA">The Trump administration has separated more<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/9/13/17853770/children-separated-news-update-parents-trump"> families at the US-Mexico border</a> than it’s previously admitted — including untold numbers that were never officially counted as “separations” because Border Patrol agents claimed the people they were separating weren’t actually families.</p>
<p id="ENFvy4">And those unofficial separations are likely still ongoing.</p>
<p id="hXM68y">The disturbing discovery comes in a new <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/10/usa-treatment-of-asylum-seekers-southern-border/">report from Amnesty International</a> that offers a sweeping rebuke of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/explainers/2018/8/6/17501404/trump-asylum-separate-legal-definition">administration’s approach to asylum seekers </a>from Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere at the border. The report calculates that more than 6,000 people (including at least 3,000 children) were separated from relatives at the border from late spring to mid-August (with the bulk of those separations happening before the end of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, after a public outcry, in late June).</p>
<p id="JFfd5F">More worrisomely, the report also sheds light on another tool that immigration agents have used to separate families: alleging that the family isn’t really a family at all.</p>
<p id="aeCLli">Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials told Amnesty that cases of suspected “fraud” aren’t reliably counted as separations. That’s especially alarming because fraud allegations can be used to separate families after they’ve <a href="https://www.vox.com/explainers/2018/8/6/17501404/trump-asylum-separate-legal-definition">presented themselves legally for asylum at a port of entry</a>. The Amnesty report documents cases in which families who came “the right way” were separated anyway, with fraud as an excuse. </p>
<p id="5bIcXn">The government is now admitting that it doesn’t know how many families have been subjected to this fate. Border officials may be continuing to separate families as a punitive measure by accusing them of fraud — even after the purported end of the separation policy.</p>
<p id="3pm9pQ">“The total number of families forcibly separated, and the trauma they have endured under this abusive practice, are still coming to light,” the Amnesty report says. But part of that slow process of discovery is realizing how much will never be known.</p>
<h3 id="delkFH">More than 6,000 people were separated from family members during the peak of the “zero tolerance” policy</h3>
<p id="SLOk1h">The closest thing to a full accounting of family separations — 2,600 children — came as part of the lawsuit in which a federal judge ordered families still separated as of June 26 to be reunited. But that suit was just a snapshot of separated families in the system at one moment of time — after the “zero tolerance” policy that turned family separation into widespread policy had been in effect across the border for more than two months. (Families had also been separated for prosecution or other reasons prior to this, stretching back to the Obama administration.)</p>
<p id="FgTitD">Now, though, we have a slightly more complete count of the families separated as a direct consequence of Trump’s policies. Customs and Border Protection officials told Amnesty researchers that from April 19 (when DHS started implementing “zero tolerance”) to August 15, 6,022 “family units” were separated. </p>
<p id="xbtULk">This most likely means that 6,022 people in total experienced the effects of family separation, not 6,022 families, with each family containing multiple people. In public statistics about how many immigrants it’s apprehending, CBP tends to use “family unit” to refer to each <em>person </em>who travels as part of a family, and told Amnesty the number was likely calculated in the same way. (Sources familiar with the implementation of family separation shared that impression.). </p>
<p id="BbCppx">That’s consistent with previous numbers. CBP said in June, for example, that it had separated 3,935 family members between April 19 and May 31. On June 20, President Trump signed an executive order ordering an end to the default prosecution of parents for illegal entry (which had led to separation from their children). </p>
<p id="mmVYRG">The typical family usually included about one child per parent, according to previously released CBP statistics. That means during the peak of family separation, over 3,000 children were separated from their parents — more than the snapshot provided in the government’s lawsuit filings indicates.</p>
<p id="Tyv2In">But that still isn’t anywhere near a complete statistic. Because, as the Amnesty researchers discovered, the government doesn’t always count a family separation as a separation.</p>
<h3 id="bUabAn">Grandparents separated from grandchildren and cases of CBP-labeled “fraud” aren’t counted as separations</h3>
<p id="jo81yn">Before and after the rise and fall of “zero tolerance,” DHS has been clear that it will separate children from relatives under certain circumstances: when it believes the children to be in danger, or in cases of suspected “fraud.” “Fraud” ostensibly means that an unrelated adult is posing as the parent of a child as a way of sneaking more easily into the US, given the extra protections granted to children in the immigration system. But in practice, DHS policy is to separate people on suspicion of “fraud” if:</p>
<ul>
<li id="m88Snd">The adult isn’t the parent or legal guardian of the child they’re traveling with — even if it’s a grandparent who is raising the child as their own;</li>
<li id="F31Ii2">The family’s documentation can’t be verified by the embassy of the family’s home country; or</li>
<li id="4EuLSG">Immigration officers have some other reason to believe there’s insufficient evidence of the parent-child relationship</li>
</ul>
<p id="WwmTii">A Congressional Research Service report published in July looked at pre-”zero tolerance” statistics and found very few cases of documented separations based on suspicions of fraud (challenging the Trump administration’s representation that cartels routinely use children to smuggle adult members into the country).</p>
<p id="LSpxUe">But CBP officials told the Amnesty researchers a different story — that it simply doesn’t count fraud allegations as family separations. A document by lead Amnesty researcher Brian Griffey for Thursday’s report says, “CBP informed Amnesty International that all of its public statistics exclude separated families whose relationships authorities categorize as ‘fraud.’”</p>
<p id="NjGwZp">That means the older report might have undercounted separations by quite a lot. And many of those unofficial separations were probably not cartels, but families separated based on thin suspicions.</p>
<p id="EfaqZi">In January, April, and May, Amnesty researchers interviewed 52 asylum seekers along the US-Mexico border. Fifteen of them, 13 parents and two grandparents, had been separated from the children they were traveling with. </p>
<p id="03ya4X">For the most part, these <em>weren’t </em>cases of zero tolerance. Nearly all the families had arrived at ports of entry to seek asylum — in other words, they were entering the US legally, and doing exactly what Trump administration officials said parents should do if they didn’t want to be separated from their children. But they were separated anyway. In most cases, the reason — implicit or explicit — was an allegation of fraud. </p>
<p id="E6ja8o">By the government’s definition, the grandparents were definitionally fraudulent if they didn’t have legal guardianship; one grandmother ended up separated from her developmentally disabled grandson for more than a year after they were separated.</p>
<p id="wDC6Mc">Not all of the parents were told why they had been separated from their children, but some were told that they hadn’t proven there was a relationship; in other cases, CBP officials told Amnesty that neither the adult nor child had provided documentation. But most of the parents had, in fact, arrived with evidence — passports, birth certificates, etc. — and presented it to officials when making their asylum claims.</p>
<p id="iLspJL">In one case, four fathers were forcibly separated from their children upon arriving in the US in fall of 2017, with no reason given for the separation; ICE told Amnesty that they had not provided identification documents, but CBP confirmed that ID documents were in the fathers’ and children’s files.</p>
<p id="Xb8opH">According to official statistics, CBP only separated 36 families at ports of entry from October 2017 to July 2018. But Amnesty researchers ran into 15 such families when it spoke to only 52 asylum seekers over three separate trips. That indicates that a <em>lot </em>of cases of families who arrive legally — and do everything the “right” way — have been separated because a border official asserts that they haven’t done enough to prove their child is their own. </p>
<p id="NDa0BW">“Zero tolerance” may be over. But without any real attention paid to allegations of family fraud, it’s impossible to say that the Trump administration has stopped separating families on a regular basis.</p>
<p id="ek7gy0"></p>
<p id="mqYyZb"></p>
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https://www.vox.com/2018/10/11/17963380/family-separation-news-still-childrenDara Lind2018-09-13T10:39:26-04:002018-09-13T10:39:26-04:00As many as 1,000 parents separated from their children get a second chance to stay in the US
<figure>
<img alt="Father And Son From Honduras Seeking Asylum In The U.S. Await The Court’s Decision On Their Status" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ElrRxH5iwgGvTBgawNdayDsIJ6I=/747x0:6720x4480/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61379837/1030619212.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A Honduran father and his 6-year-old son worship during Sunday mass on September 9, 2018, in Oakland, California. They fled their country seeking asylum in the US. | Mario Tama/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a huge reversal, the Trump administration is giving families another chance to claim asylum — and even some parents who’ve already been deported might be eligible.</p> <p id="8B9IsG">The Trump administration has just agreed to give parents who were separated from their children at the US-Mexico border earlier this year a second chance to make asylum claims in the US.</p>
<p id="SXCbU5">The Department of Justice <a href="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13052057/government_agreement_in_asylum_cases.pdf">has negotiated an agreement</a> that covers three lawsuits filed against the government over the family-separation policy. Parents in the US who’d been ordered deported would get another chance to pass an interview demonstrating a “credible fear” of persecution — the first step in the asylum process. </p>
<p id="IKbYJt">If either the parent or the child passes the screening interview, families will be allowed to apply for asylum together. Some parents who don’t pass will be allowed to remain with their children in the US while the children’s cases are adjudicated. </p>
<p id="EAdcTP">And in some cases, the government is even willing to consider reopening cases for parents who were already deported from the US.</p>
<p id="pOUkWz">The agreement covers three lawsuits: <em>Ms. L v. ICE</em>, which forced the government to reunite separated families this summer; <em>M- M- M- v. ICE</em>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/17/17714918/children-separated-parents-deport-asylum">brought on behalf of children separated from parents</a>; and <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/17/17718530/separated-families-asylum-stay-us-deported-lawsuit"><em>Dora v. Sessions</em></a>, a lawsuit from parents who had failed their initial asylum screenings because they were distraught after weeks of separation from their children.</p>
<p id="pjyLBU">If the agreement is approved by the federal judges overseeing the three lawsuits, it will result in a second chance for hundreds of parents. Muslim Advocates and the Legal Aid Justice Center, who represented the plaintiffs in <em>Dora v. Sessions,</em> believe it could give “well over 1,000” parents another chance at an asylum claim. And for many families, it will eliminate (or at least defer) the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/17/17714918/children-separated-parents-deport-asylum">impossible choice</a> between giving up a child’s legal case, and separating the family again by keeping the child in the US while the parent is deported.</p>
<h3 id="97FqX3">Separating families made it much harder for parents to seek asylum</h3>
<p id="p9EFZH">Under the Trump administration’s family separation policy, a parent who wanted to <a href="https://www.vox.com/explainers/2018/8/6/17501404/trump-asylum-separate-legal-definition">seek asylum</a> in the US had one chance: to pass a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/20/17568480/border-asylum-sessions-credible-fear">“credible fear” screening interview</a> with an asylum office.</p>
<p id="Og8KmC">If a parent passed the credible fear screening, he or she was given a chance to seek asylum before an immigration judge; if the parent failed, he or she could appeal the decision to an immigration judge, with much worse odds. Losing the appeal, or agreeing to drop the case, led to an order of deportation.</p>
<p id="80UTuj">Generally, most asylum seekers pass their credible fear screenings. But evidence suggests that <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/17/17718530/separated-families-asylum-stay-us-deported-lawsuit">parents who were separated from their children often failed their interviews</a>. Parents were often so consumed by grief over their separation from their children that they weren’t able to answer asylum officers’ questions fully and effectively, according to the lawsuit filed in <em>Dora v. Sessions.</em></p>
<p id="1Pcgik">“Explaining the basis for an asylum claim is very difficult under the best of circumstances,” said one source familiar with the interview process but not professionally authorized to speak on the record. “When someone is a) detained, b) almost certainly unrepresented, and c) beside herself with fear and desperation because of having had her child taken from her,” the source continued, “it is almost impossible.”</p>
<p id="cA5319">By the time nearly 2,000 parents and children were reunited in July (thanks to Judge Dana Sabraw’s rulings in the <em>Ms. L</em> case ordering family reunification), the overwhelming majority of parents had already lost their cases and been ordered deported. But their children — who’d been placed on a separate legal track as “unaccompanied alien children” after being separated from their parents — often still had ongoing cases and a real chance of winning some form of legal status in the US.</p>
<p id="VAt0sD">So upon being reunited, hundreds of families were <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/17/17714918/children-separated-parents-deport-asylum">faced with the choice</a> between returning to their home country together (and facing possible peril or persecution), and keeping the child in the US in hopes of winning asylum or another form of legal status — and separating the family anew. (Some parents alleged they weren’t even given this chance, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/17/17714918/children-separated-parents-deport-asylum">were coerced into withdrawing their children’s legal claims</a> — and forcibly reseparated without warning if they refused to comply.)</p>
<p id="EvU300">None of this would have happened if families hadn’t been separated to begin with. Under normal circumstances, if either a parent <em>or </em>a child passed an asylum interview, the government would allow them <em>both </em>to file asylum claims. And obviously, parents who weren’t traumatized by family separation might have had a better chance with their interviews. But simply reuniting the family didn’t solve the problem.</p>
<h3 id="iuT0gw">The government is agreeing to give reunited families the same chance they’d had if they’d never been separated</h3>
<p id="OQ029X">Here is what the agreement proposed by the government would actually do, if approved:</p>
<ul>
<li id="ZENu4x">
<strong>Parents who passed their initial “credible fear” interviews for asylum </strong>will be allowed to continue; this agreement doesn’t change those cases.</li>
<li id="i36qyQ">
<strong>Parents who had lost their cases and been ordered deported </strong>will be given a full review to reassess whether or not they have a credible fear of persecution. This review will include a second interview for “additional fact-gathering” — during which a lawyer can be present (or can dial in by phone). Parents will be allowed to do this even if they didn’t ask for a credible fear interview when they were first arrested.</li>
<li id="9pzDSe">
<strong>Parents who fail their credible fear screenings </strong>will be allowed to remain in the US and apply for asylum if their <em>child </em>passes his or her credible fear screening. The reverse is also true: If a child fails her asylum screening but the parent passes his, both parent and child will be allowed to apply for asylum. This is the way things normally work when families are apprehended together; by instituting it now, the government is essentially wiping away the legal side effects of family separation.</li>
<li id="IUwIXW">
<strong>Parents who aren’t eligible for a credible fear interview </strong>because they had been deported before and were returning will still be allowed to avoid deportation if they meet a higher standard (“reasonable fear”) and qualify for something called “withholding of removal.” Even if they fail that standard, they will be allowed to stay in the US while their children are going through their asylum cases.</li>
<li id="jp6rPC">
<strong>Parents who have already been deported </strong>will not have their cases automatically reviewed by the government. However, the plaintiffs in these lawsuits will have 30 days to present evidence to the government that particular parents should be allowed to return, and the government will consider those requests. (The agreement doesn’t make it clear whether deported parents will have their own cases reopened, or whether they will solely be allowed to return to stay with their children while the children’s legal cases are ongoing.)</li>
</ul>
<p id="Dmu4dj">If the agreement is approved, it will officially send the legal fight over family separation into its endgame phase. While <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/13/separated-migrant-children-remain-united-states/1287860002/">hundreds of parents and children remain separated</a>, the legal fight over reunification is largely about who’s responsible for carrying out various parts of the government’s reunification plan; the new agreement would set a similar plan up for the legal due process of parents and children making claims to stay in the US. </p>
<p id="eBYYH4">It would almost certainly run into similar implementation obstacles to the reunification plan, but it would set expectations that the government would provide this process by default, rather than moving forward with deportation.</p>
<p id="kTBTki">The Trump administration is <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/20/17480680/child-separate-parent-trauma-effects">never going to wholly be able to erase the consequences </a>of its decision to separate families as a matter of course. But it is now agreeing to give up the legal advantages that it accrued by separating parents’ and children’s <em>cases — </em>and forcing parents to go through interviews with life-or-death stakes without knowing when or whether they’d ever see their children again.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2018/9/13/17853770/children-separated-news-update-parents-trumpDara Lind2018-08-20T09:38:54-04:002018-08-20T09:38:54-04:00Exclusive: new lawsuit claims Trump illegally denied asylum claims of separated parents
<figure>
<img alt="Immigrants Reunited With Their Children After Release From Detention In TX" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pl4w2VSmUsAJbUWSbVNv0RIEdaU=/167x0:2834x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/60899569/1005223924.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Joe Raedle/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hundreds of parents failed screening interviews for asylum while they were separated and traumatized. Now, dozens of them want a second chance to make their case.</p> <p id="RBJ45c">A group of parents who failed their <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/20/17568480/border-asylum-sessions-credible-fear">initial asylum interviews</a> while they were <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/17443198/children-immigrant-families-separated-parents">separated from their children</a> under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy this spring and have been given deportation orders are now suing the Trump administration to give them another chance.</p>
<p id="TuXjnK">The 29 parents,<em> </em>represented by Muslim Advocates, Eversheds Sutherland LLP, and the Legal Aid Justice Center, filed the case <em>Dora v. Sessions </em>Friday in the DC federal district. All of them have now been reunited with their children but have been given final deportation orders after losing their asylum cases. </p>
<p id="6hCRia">Right now, the only thing saving them is <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/17/17714918/children-separated-parents-deport-asylum">a court order from a California judge preventing the government from deporting reunified families</a> while children’s<em> </em>asylum claims are adjudicated. But that could be only temporary relief for the 1,000 parents who’ve already been ordered deported — many of whom tried to seek asylum but flunked their initial interviews because they weren’t able to persuade an asylum officer that they had a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/20/17568480/border-asylum-sessions-credible-fear">“credible fear of persecution”</a> if returned to their home countries. </p>
<p id="4qHRes">In theory — unless a judge intervenes — that means that the parents will absolutely get deported sooner or later, whether their children are ultimately granted asylum or not.</p>
<p id="m4kbPB">Because they failed their interviews, says Sirine Shebaya of Muslim Advocates, “the government has made clear that its intention is to deport these people as quickly as they possibly can.”</p>
<p id="o57cDe">The allegations in the new DC lawsuit raise serious questions about how those interviews were conducted.</p>
<p id="9bCwog">Parents describe being interviewed after going weeks without seeing their children, and in some cases knowing nothing about where their children were. Many had trouble concentrating in a fog of insomnia, depression, and grief; others couldn’t understand the purpose of the interview and thought if they got through it more quickly they would see their children again. Some had barely any recollection of the interview after the fact.</p>
<p id="eWM2Ib">Lawyers representing the parents argue that it’s illegal for the government to reject an asylum claim based on an interview conducted while the claimant was so debilitatingly traumatized. They claim it violates procedural safeguards set out for people fighting deportation (even though those safeguards aren’t explicitly provided for asylum screening interviews) and violates their due process. </p>
<p id="zAQexI">It could be an uphill legal battle: Federal judges are only very rarely allowed to overrule the government’s decision to deport someone. In other words, if the lawsuit fails, it may simply show that family separation has permanently ruined hundreds of lives — and, perhaps, doomed people to return to persecution the law is supposed to prevent.</p>
<h3 id="M2UVCl">Separated parents were clearly traumatized during their screening interviews</h3>
<p id="anxZc5">Under the Trump administration’s family separation policy, a parent who wanted to <a href="https://www.vox.com/explainers/2018/8/6/17501404/trump-asylum-separate-legal-definition">seek asylum</a> in the US had one chance: to pass a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/20/17568480/border-asylum-sessions-credible-fear">“credible fear” screening interview</a> with an asylum office.</p>
<p id="Og8KmC">If he passed the credible fear screening, he was given a chance to seek asylum before an immigration judge; if he failed, he could appeal the decision to an immigration judge, with much worse odds. Lose the appeal, or agree to drop the case, and he was given an order of deportation.</p>
<p id="80UTuj">Generally, most asylum seekers pass their credible fear screenings. But while family separation was in full effect early this summer, lawyers representing separated parents started noticing that a lot of their clients were failing. One lawyer estimated to the <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/separated-parents-too-grief-stricken-to-seek-asylum-experts-say_us_5b379974e4b08c3a8f6ad5d9?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004">Huffington Post</a> that half of her clients were failing their interviews. Another lawyer, Carlos Garcia, told Vox that barely any of the mothers he had seen had passed, despite the fact that “three months ago, I would have told you they would have shown credible fear.”</p>
<p id="8QILrR">At the time, lawyers thought this might be partly due to an <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/20/17568480/border-asylum-sessions-credible-fear">early-June ruling from Attorney General Jeff Sessions</a> that sought to limit the grounds on which a victim of domestic or gang violence could qualify for asylum. But overall, the <a href="https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Outreach/Upcoming%20National%20Engagements/FY18CFandRFstats_2018_06_30.pdf">credible fear approval rate in June</a> remained around 75 percent. Anecdotal evidence suggests that for separated parents, it was much lower.</p>
<p id="LsEfRw">The reason, to lawyers and psychiatrists, is obvious: Parents were being asked difficult questions — in an interview designed to recount the traumas they’d suffered in their home country and test their credibility — while totally consumed with the anxiety that came with not having seen their children in weeks.</p>
<p id="RW3ReM">“Explaining the basis for an asylum claim is very difficult under the best of circumstances,” said one source familiar with the interview process but not professionally authorized to speak on the record. Asylum seekers don’t immediately know how their experiences fit into the framework of protections set up by US asylum law: how to articulate membership in a “particular social group,” for example. </p>
<p id="s0afRA">“When someone is a) detained, b) almost certainly unrepresented, and c) beside herself with fear and desperation because of having had her child taken from her,” the source continued, “it is almost impossible.”</p>
<p id="Dxk50q">The new lawsuit shows just how true this is. The lead plaintiff, given the pseudonym “Dora,” was interviewed right after she’d just spoken to her son for the first time after their separation — a conversation in which he’d told her he was being good so an official would not hit him with a belt. She was interviewed while crying over the phone call and repeatedly told the asylum officer she was confused about what she was being asked. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t pass.</p>
<p id="pz0c56">Other parents describe being unable to answer questions about their own experiences in their home countries — the basis for their asylum claims — because all they could focus on was how they wanted their children to be safe. They tried to get through the interview as quickly as possible, in the hopes that they could see their children sooner, rather than provide the complete answers needed to formulate a solid asylum claim.</p>
<p id="QTkSUh">One parent remembered an interview as lasting mere minutes when records showed it was more than an hour. Another told lawyers afterward that she didn’t remember anything she was asked or the answers she gave.</p>
<p id="N4Jf13">Even the most sympathetic asylum officer might have trouble with such a case. One asylum officer who spoke to Vox anonymously reported their own experience with a separated father: “The one thing he really wanted was to be able to call his son on the son’s birthday,” the officer said. Being treated for insomnia and depression, “he spoke really slowly, as if he were half-asleep or drugged.” The officer approved his credible fear claim, but a less patient officer might not have been so lucky.</p>
<p id="Wt9yfN">And many of the asylum officers depicted in the lawsuit were far less sympathetic. Multiple asylum officers insisted that parents respond to questions only with “yes” or “no” — making it all the easier for a parent to give the “wrong” answer to a question they didn’t understand. And ICE agents in the facilities where they were held told some parents that if they dropped their cases, they’d be able to see their children again more quickly.</p>
<p id="ELND0U">A psychiatrist who evaluated some separated parents after their interviews concluded that they suffered from acute stress response. According to federal law, the lawsuit argues, the trauma of family separation counted as a temporary disability. (For that matter, if they’d never been separated from their children to begin with, they would have been allowed to conduct their screening interviews with their children in the room.) But they were evaluated — and denied — as if they’d had all the time in the world to prepare and nothing else on their minds.</p>
<h3 id="NaNh4G">It’s really hard to meet the standard for judicial review of deportation orders</h3>
<p id="jDUepi">Lawsuits over family separation have already hit the federal government from several angles. But what makes this case unique is also what’s going to make it legally tricky: It’s focused squarely on the deportation orders that have already been issued to parents (rather than preserving due process going forward for children who haven’t yet been ordered deported).</p>
<p id="nqpTXI">Generally, federal judges simply aren’t allowed to review or overrule the government’s decision to deport somebody. There are only very limited cases where judicial review is appropriate. The plaintiffs in this case argue that the government’s policies for dealing with separated families count as one such ground: a “written policy directive, written policy guideline, or written procedure” that is in violation of federal law. The Trump administration is all but certain to fight against that characterization tooth and nail.</p>
<p id="e4NoAx">Furthermore, even if the DC District agrees that this case qualifies for such an exemption, it will only benefit these 29 families directly — at least at first. The exemption explicitly prevents class-action lawsuits. </p>
<p id="EKulPx">So even in a best-case scenario, where the plaintiffs get everything they want — their deportations stalled and their interview denials vacated, with new interviews in which they’re given the safeguards that are generally given to mentally incompetent people in full hearings before an immigration judge — there are still hundreds more parents who might be in the same circumstances but could still face imminent deportation. Those parents would have to get themselves added, individually, to the DC lawsuit, or sue under it for their own cases to be reopened.</p>
<p id="Royoee">It’s extremely unlikely, in other words, that this lawsuit will do everything it wants to do: prevent the government from removing anyone based on an interview they were too traumatized to pass. It will be impossible to say, for sure, that no one was deported as a result of family separation who had a legitimate claim to asylum, or that no one was deported back to danger.</p>
<p id="sNV8dS">This is already hard to guarantee in asylum proceedings, Shebaya says. “It’s widely known that asylum seekers typically already arrive with a baseline level of trauma.” Family separation compounded that. And instead of becoming a reason for asylum seekers to get relief in the US, the trauma imposed by the US government may inexorably lead to their deportation.</p>
<p id="ykDw70"><strong>CORRECTION: </strong>This article has been updated to correct the number of plaintiffs in the lawsuit.</p>
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/17/17718530/separated-families-asylum-stay-us-deported-lawsuitDara Lind2018-08-17T10:10:02-04:002018-08-17T10:10:02-04:00Judge blocks Trump from deporting reunited families
<figure>
<img alt="Immigrants Reunited With Their Children After Release From Detention In TX" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/80WaLwP1KfM2LDwbodzaO6Xhk_I=/0x0:2556x1917/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/60886313/1005908254.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A woman, identified only as Maria, is reunited with her son Franco, 4, at the El Paso International Airport on July 26, 2018, in El Paso, Texas. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hundreds of parents had been told to waive their children’s right to an asylum hearing to keep the family together.</p> <p id="pH2a0h">Late Thursday night, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting any of the reunited <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/17443198/children-immigrant-families-separated-parents">families who were separated </a>under the administration’s “zero tolerance” prosecution policy earlier this year, arguing that children reunited with their parents still need to be given the chance to <a href="https://www.vox.com/explainers/2018/8/6/17501404/trump-asylum-separate-legal-definition">seek asylum in the US</a>.</p>
<p id="jXpthu">The ruling was issued by Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California, in the case <em>M.M.M. v. Sessions</em> — a separate lawsuit from the one that’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/26/17620112/family-separation-migrants-deadline-trump">compelled the government to reunify families</a>, but one which is now being overseen by the same judge.</p>
<p id="zo9qXR"><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/btfdy0gdbopasfg/55%20-%202018-08-16%20Order%20Granting%20TRO%20in%20S.D.%20Cal..pdf?dl=0">Sabraw’s ruling</a> temporarily stops the government from <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/25/17610006/families-separated-together-trump-immigration-deportation">forcing a parent to choose</a> between waiving their child’s right to seek asylum so that the family can be deported together, and agreeing to be deported without their child so that the child can pursue their own asylum claim. It covers even those families where the parent already “waived” their child’s asylum rights (on a form some parents have claimed <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/29/17626588/separated-families-lawsuit-deport-ice">they were coerced into signing</a>).</p>
<p id="hbN8tJ">More than 1,000 families were facing that choice. <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/25/17610006/families-separated-together-trump-immigration-deportation">Hundreds of them were facing imminent deportation</a>, together, if the judge had ruled against the families. </p>
<p id="1deVxd">Now they have at least one more week together in the US — in immigration detention — while the government tries to work with legal advocates on a plan that will keep families together without forcing anyone to waive their rights to seek asylum in the US.</p>
<h3 id="gHZigY">Trump tried to get parents to waive children’s asylum rights to deport the family together</h3>
<p id="lKdexv">When the Trump administration separated parents from their children, as it did for more than 2,500 families (mostly between April and late June), it put parent and child on different legal tracks. </p>
<p id="nfqois">The child was designated an “unaccompanied alien child” — as if she’d come across the border on her own. Legally, that gave her the right to a full immigration court hearing to determine whether she’d qualify to stay in the US (by getting asylum or some other form of legal protection) — a process that can take months or years. </p>
<p id="39OBN4">The parent, however, was put on the fast track. </p>
<p id="anxZc5">After being criminally prosecuted with the federal crime of “illegal entry” (a misdemeanor), a parent who wanted to <a href="https://www.vox.com/explainers/2018/8/6/17501404/trump-asylum-separate-legal-definition">seek asylum</a> in the US had one chance to pass a screening interview with an asylum officer, to show that he had a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/20/17568480/border-asylum-sessions-credible-fear">“credible fear” of persecution</a> if deported. If he passed the credible fear screening, he was given a chance to seek asylum before an immigration judge; if he failed, he could appeal the decision to an immigration judge, with much worse odds. Lose the appeal — or agree to drop the case — and he was given an order of deportation.</p>
<p id="phPsi9">So when parents and children were finally reunited after Judge Sabraw’s June order, many parents had already run out of options. </p>
<p id="YiqgXB">Of the 2,000 parents who’ve been reunited with children after Sabraw’s June order, about 1,000 of them had already gotten final orders of removal. Some of those probably never tried to seek asylum; others already lost both their credible fear screening and their appeal; and others likely agreed to withdraw their requests. </p>
<p id="EsnvIZ">The Trump administration dealt with this by offering those parents a choice. They could choose to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/25/17610006/families-separated-together-trump-immigration-deportation">have their children deported with them</a>, by “waiving” the child’s remaining legal rights. Or they could choose to allow their children to stay in the US and seek asylum (or another form of legal status), but be deported without them. </p>
<p id="LImxfv">In practice, even that may not have been much of a choice: In late July, a group of parents reported that <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/29/17626588/separated-families-lawsuit-deport-ice">they had been coerced by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents</a> into agreeing to have their children deported with them, and had been forcibly re-separated — with no chance to say goodbye — when they refused to waive their children’s rights.</p>
<p id="GhVxxK">A group of parents had brought a lawsuit in the DC District on behalf of their children, arguing that the children had a right to be allowed to seek asylum — <em>with </em>their parents around. After a few weeks of legal wrangling (during which the government essentially agreed not to deport any families), the case was sent to Sabraw in California, to prevent the government from having to deal with the possibly contradictory rulings of two different judges.</p>
<p id="jWd0wZ">And late on Thursday, Sabraw forcefully ruled in favor of the families. “The public has an interest in ensuring these children receive the process that Congress has provided,” he wrote. He ruled that even parents who had signed the form agreeing to have their children deported with them hadn’t actually waived their children’s asylum rights — because they hadn’t been adequately informed those rights existed.</p>
<h3 id="5ElWJ2">This doesn’t mean families won’t have to choose reseparation or deportation. It just kicks that choice down the road.</h3>
<p id="JjI72Z">Thursday night’s ruling was a temporary restraining order, in effect until Sabraw decides whether to issue a medium-term injunction against the government’s waiver policy. </p>
<p id="oKG4g4">In the meantime, Sabraw has instructed the two sides in the lawsuit — the Trump administration, and the lawyers bringing suit on the families’ behalf — to come up with a plan for how many families should be covered by his ruling, and for exactly which track (slow or fast) should be used for children’s asylum cases now that they’ve been reunited.</p>
<p id="CDCb4H">The ruling makes it much less likely that the government is going to be able to summarily deport hundreds of reunited families — a possibility that has worried advocates for some time — because parents “waived” their children’s cases. </p>
<p id="NTlhqd">But it doesn’t change the underlying fact that, no matter what happens to their children, the parents have already been ordered deported from the United States. The question right now is <em>when </em>they will actually be deported, not <em>whether </em>they will be. Some advocates claim that those parents only agreed to deportation orders because they thought it would help them see their children again — or that they would, themselves, have made better asylum cases if they weren’t traumatized by separation. The new ruling does nothing to address that.</p>
<p id="K2IY7p">And even if parents are allowed to stay in the US for months while their children pursue asylum claims, there’s no requirement that the government release them from immigration detention. Sabraw’s clarified that the government has the right to force parents to choose between<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/10/17553526/trump-separate-immigrant-families-ruling"> indefinite detention with their children and detention without them</a>.</p>
<p id="eWZgJb"><a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/2/17641208/immigrant-strike-detention-families-separation">Detained families are already growing desperate</a>; an uprising in one family detention facility led to the re-separation of several families this week, according to government officials and the advocacy group RAICES. </p>
<p id="b8NcYe">Last night’s ruling offers a lifeline to the parents who have fought to allow their children to remain in the US. But there’s a tension between families who want to secure maximal due process and those who simply want to be free with their children again — even if that means deportation.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/17/17714918/children-separated-parents-deport-asylumDara Lind2018-08-14T13:29:03-04:002018-08-14T13:29:03-04:00The Trump administration’s separation of families at the border, explained
<figure>
<img alt="The Trump administration is separating families like this one (from 2015) who cross the US/Mexico border illegally, prosecuting the parents and placing the children in government custody or foster care." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ebNmNEKv1ZD3PdlOesO6yTydcYI=/478x0:4942x3348/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/60023969/GettyImages_500414658.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>The Trump administration is separating families like this one (seen in 2015) who cross the US-Mexico border illegally, prosecuting the parents and placing the children in government custody or foster care. | John Moore/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Why children are being sent to “foster care or whatever” while their parents are sent to jail.</p> <p id="gsVnlu">As a matter of policy, the US government is <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/8/17327512/sessions-illegal-immigration-border-asylum-families">separating families</a> who seek asylum in the US by crossing the border illegally. </p>
<p id="U2MLjm">Dozens of parents are being split from their children each day — the children labeled “unaccompanied minors” and sent to government custody or foster care, <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/8/17327512/sessions-illegal-immigration-border-asylum-families">the parents</a> labeled criminals and sent to jail. </p>
<div id="TPTnqx"><iframe src="https://player.megaphone.fm/VMP6017413146" style="width: 100%; height: 200px; border: 0 none;" scrolling="no"></iframe></div>
<p id="FR83nl">Between October 1, 2017 and May 31, 2018, at least 2,700 children have been split from their parents. 1,995 of them were separated over the last six weeks of that window — April 18 to May 31 — indicating that at present, an average of 45 children are being taken from their parents each day.</p>
<p id="t4SZ3T">To many critics of the Trump administration, family separation is an unpardonable atrocity. Articles depict children crying themselves to sleep because they don’t know where their parents are; one Honduran man <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/a-family-was-separated-at-the-border-and-this-distraught-father-took-his-own-life/2018/06/08/24e40b70-6b5d-11e8-9e38-24e693b38637_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a8cca7590df2">killed himself in a detention cell</a> after his child was taken from him.</p>
<p id="8L1v9Z">But the horror can make it hard to wrap your head around the policy.</p>
<p id="F1KYP2">Family separation isn’t sudden, nor is it arbitrary. While the Trump administration claims it’s taking extraordinary measures in response to a temporary surge, it is entirely possible this will be the new normal. Here’s what you need to know to understand it.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="The Trump administration has separated over 2,000 families at the US/Mexico border. This visualization from Vox’s Javier Zarracina shows family separations over six weeks, from mid-April to the end of May." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ELba1hB5gPZYxgMXp07lQIMqMd4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11547143/kidsf.gif">
<cite>Javier Zarracina/Vox</cite>
<figcaption>The Trump administration has separated over 2,000 families at the US/Mexico border. This visualization from Vox’s Javier Zarracina shows family separations over six weeks, from mid-April to the end of May. On May 7, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy of prosecuting everyone caught crossing the border illegally (between ports of entry), launching the family-separation policy in its current form.</figcaption>
</figure>
<h3 id="d3ngUz">1) How is the government separating families at the border?</h3>
<p id="2P98cA">To be clear,<strong> </strong>there is no official Trump policy stating that every family entering the US without papers has to be separated. What there is is a policy that all adults caught crossing into the US illegally are <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/8/17327512/sessions-illegal-immigration-border-asylum-families">supposed to be criminally prosecuted</a> — and when that happens to a parent, separation is inevitable.</p>
<p id="nYtA6l">Typically, people apprehended crossing into the US are held in immigration detention and sent before an immigration judge to see if they will be deported as unauthorized immigrants. </p>
<p id="B5Ouq7">But migrants who’ve been referred for criminal prosecution get sent to a federal jail and brought before a federal judge a few weeks later to see if they’ll get prison time. That’s where the separation happens — because you can’t be kept with your children in federal jail.</p>
<aside id="A3MITV"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The House GOP says their new bill bans separating families at the border. That’s a lie.","url":"https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/15/17467490/children-separated-parents-bill-congress"},{"title":"It’s not just cruel to separate a breastfeeding baby from a mom. It’s medically dangerous.","url":"https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/15/17465306/children-immigrant-families-separated-breastfeeding-baby"},{"title":"The racist history of the Bible verse the White House uses to justify separating families","url":"https://www.vox.com/2018/6/15/17467818/the-racist-history-of-the-bible-verse-the-white-house-uses-to-justify-separating-families"},{"title":"Trump keeps making it harder for people to seek asylum legally","url":"https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/5/17428640/border-families-asylum-illegal"}]}'></div></aside><p id="B6CjLr">According to federal defenders, some Border Patrol agents are lying to families about why and how long they’re being separated. A federal defender told the<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/they-just-took-them-frantic-parents-separated-from-their-kids-fill-courts-on-the-border/2018/06/09/e3f5170c-6aa9-11e8-bea7-c8eb28bc52b1_story.html"> Washington Post’s Michael E. Miller that parents were told their children</a> were just being taken away briefly for questioning. <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/06/09/borderseparations/Z95z4eFZjyfqCLG9pyHjAO/story.html">Liz Goodwin of the Boston Globe</a> cites a defender saying that in several cases, children were taken “by Border Patrol agents who said they were going to give them a bath. As the hours passed, it dawned on the mothers the kids were not coming back.”</p>
<p id="3QiC3W">Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who visited a <a href="https://jayapal.house.gov/media/press-releases/jayapal-goes-inside-federal-detention-center-meet-asylum-seeking-women-mothers">federal prison</a> where some mothers were being housed on Sunday, recounted stories of women being told by Border Patrol agents that “their ‘families would not exist anymore’ and that they would ‘never see their children again.’”</p>
<p id="neZF53">First-time border crossers don’t usually do prison time. After a few weeks in jail awaiting trial, they’re usually brought before a judge in mass assembly-line prosecutions (according to <a href="https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/New-zero-tolerance-policy-overwhelms-South-12981190.php">Lomi Kriel of the Houston Chronicle</a>, one courtroom in McAllen, Texas, has been hearing 1,000 cases a day in recent weeks) and sentenced, within minutes, to time served — as long as they plead guilty. Michael E. Miller depicted the scene for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/they-just-took-them-frantic-parents-separated-from-their-kids-fill-courts-on-the-border/2018/06/09/e3f5170c-6aa9-11e8-bea7-c8eb28bc52b1_story.html?utm_term=.e37ffffdce9f">the Washington Post</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="3rtpZm">As [the federal defender] consulted with Nicolas-Gaspar, dressed in the same dirt-caked tennis shoes and mud-stained shirt in which he’d been detained, the immigrant in his late 20s began to sob. She told him the best chance he had of seeing his son soon was to plead guilty.</p>
<p id="b8eOEg">“<em>Culpable</em>,” he told the judge when court resumed minutes later. “<em>Culpable. Culpable</em>.”</p>
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<p id="vNXfue">There are also <a href="https://www.aclu.org/cases/ms-l-v-ice">some cases</a> in which immigrant families are being separated after coming to ports of entry and presenting themselves for asylum — thus following US law. It’s not clear how often this is happening, though it’s definitely not as widespread as separation of families who’ve crossed illegally. Trump administration officials claim that they only separate families at ports of entry if they are worried about the safety of the child, or if they don’t think there’s enough evidence that the adult is really the child’s legal custodian.</p>
<p id="Pqj0e8">Upon being separated from their parents, children are officially designated “unaccompanied alien children” by the US government — a category that typically describes people under the age of 18 who come to the US without an adult relative arriving with them. Under federal law, unaccompanied alien children are sent into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The ORR is responsible for identifying and screening the nearest relative or family friend living in the US to whom the child can be released. </p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">ICE has now released a flyer for parents separated from their children at the border.<br><br>A flyer.<br><br>And it's in English. <a href="https://t.co/gsW3DmtmsQ">pic.twitter.com/gsW3DmtmsQ</a></p>— Prerna P. Lal, Esq. (@prernaplal) <a href="https://twitter.com/prernaplal/status/1004371630968197120?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 6, 2018</a>
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<h3 id="7khaGW">2) How many families have been separated at the border?</h3>
<p id="LUohA9">At least 2,700 — but we don’t know how many more.</p>
<p id="oNhTsa">Lomi Kriel of the Houston Chronicle <a href="https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Trump-moves-to-end-catch-and-release-12383666.php">first reported last fall</a> that families were being separated by Border Patrol after arriving in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. The<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/us/immigrant-children-separation-ice.html"> New York Times</a> later reported that from October 2017 to April 20, 2018, 700 families were split by the Trump administration. (The Trump administration <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/8/17327512/sessions-illegal-immigration-border-asylum-families">claims</a> it piloted its “zero-tolerance” prosecution policy in the Rio Grande Valley in summer 2017, which would have led to family separations over that period; <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-children-exclusive/exclusive-nearly-1800-families-separated-at-us-mexico-border-in-17-months-through-february-idUSKCN1J42UE">Reuters has reported</a> that nearly 1,800 families were separated between October 2016 and February 2018, suggesting that the practice may have been going on for some time.)</p>
<p id="GRMePl">In early April, the Department of Justice announced that any migrant referred for illegal entry by DHS officials would be prosecuted. On May 7, DOJ and DHS announced that any migrant caught by Border Patrol agents after crossing illegally would be sent to DOJ — and, therefore, prosecuted.</p>
<p id="DTUo7t">From April 18 to May 31, Department of Homeland Security officials reported in June, 1,995 children were taken from 1,940 adults.</p>
<p id="Vh6VUX">That might be an undercount. According to DHS officials, this number reflects only the families that have been separated when parents were sent into criminal custody to be prosecuted for illegal entry. That means it doesn’t include families who presented themselves for asylum legally by coming to a port of entry — an official border crossing — and were then separated. </p>
<p id="ev63ew">It doesn’t look like all families apprehended by Border Patrol get separated — or even most of them. According to Border Patrol statistics, 9,485 migrants were apprehended in “family units” in May 2018 — 306 a day — while the CBP statistics on family separations suggest that 93 people were separated from their children or parents a day after the zero-tolerance directive went into effect.</p>
<p id="utqFtU">But the pace may be picking up. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/they-just-took-them-frantic-parents-separated-from-their-kids-fill-courts-on-the-border/2018/06/09/e3f5170c-6aa9-11e8-bea7-c8eb28bc52b1_story.html?utm_term=.3fb04f55f627">Federal defenders in McAllen</a> counted 421 parents coming into court between May 21 and June 5 — and that represents just one Border Patrol sector, though admittedly the highest-traffic one for family crossings. (Many of those parents could have been apprehended and split from their children during the May 7-21 period and counted in the Customs and Border Protection stats.) </p>
<h3 id="TFDOyT">3) Is the policy of separating families new?</h3>
<p id="Yj2ihl">Yes. But it’s building on an existing system, and attention to family separation has brought more awareness to problems with that system that have been going on for some time.</p>
<p id="7PCRL5">For the past several years, a growing number of people coming into the US without papers have been Central Americans — often families, and often seeking asylum. Asylum seekers and families are both accorded <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17190090/catch-release-loopholes-border-immigrants-trump">particular protections in US and international law</a>, which make it impossible for the government to simply send them back. Those protections also put strict limits on the length of time, and conditions, in which children can be kept in immigration detention.</p>
<p id="zsGHsO">When the Obama administration attempted to respond to the “crisis” of families and unaccompanied children crossing the border in summer 2014, it <a href="https://www.vox.com/2014/8/6/5971003/artesia-immigrants-detention-due-process-families-lawyers-asylum-court-border">put hundreds of families in immigration detention</a> — a practice that had basically ended several years before. But federal courts stopped the administration from holding families for months without justifying the decision to keep them in detention. So most families ended up getting released while their cases were pending — which immigration hawks have derided as <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17190090/catch-release-loopholes-border-immigrants-trump">“catch and release.”</a> In some cases, they disappeared into the US rather than showing up for their court dates.</p>
<p id="B4xd5q">The Trump administration has stepped up detention of asylum seekers (and immigrants, period). But because there are such strict limits on keeping children in immigration detention, it’s had to release most of the families it’s caught.</p>
<p id="sXwess">The government’s solution has been to prosecute larger numbers of immigrants for illegal entry — including, in a break from previous administrations, large numbers of asylum seekers. That allows the Trump administration to ship children off to ORR, rather than keeping them in immigration detention.</p>
<h3 id="582C9W">4) What happens to the children? </h3>
<p id="dEKQif">In theory, unaccompanied immigrant children are sent to ORR within 72 hours of being apprehended. They’re kept in government facilities, or short-term foster care, for days or weeks while ORR officials try to identify the nearest relative in the US who can take the child in while his immigration case is being resolved.</p>
<p id="2N5LuR">But the system for dealing with unaccompanied immigrant children was already overwhelmed, if not outright broken.</p>
<p id="Ouwsk4">ORR facilities were already 95 percent full as of June 7; 11,000 children are being held. (Remember, most of these are probably children who arrived in the US without their parents.) According to the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/us/children-immigration-borders-family-separation.html">New York Times</a>, the government “has reserved an additional 1,218 beds in various places for migrant children, including some at military bases.”</p>
<p id="r4Crqz">The agency has been overloaded for years; its backlog in 2014 precipitated the child migrant “crisis,” when Border Patrol agents ended up having to care for kids for days. An <a href="https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-obtains-documents-showing-widespread-abuse-child-immigrants-us-custody">American Civil Liberties Union report</a> released in May 2018 documented hundreds of claims of “verbal, physical, and sexual abuse” of unaccompanied children by Border Patrol.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/F6pc5e-rPMnMuAJszoyXiIdELJ8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11517347/GettyImages_458329272.jpg">
<cite>John Moore/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>This picture is from 2014, when a surge of unaccompanied children crossing the border caused Border Patrol to use temporary holding centers to house immigrant children before sending them to the Office of Refugee Resettlement to be placed with relatives. Often, the children’s parents were already living in the US.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="einXX2">There are questions about how carefully ORR vets the sponsors to whom it ultimately releases children. A PBS <em>Frontline</em> investigation found cases of teenagers getting released to labor traffickers by ORR. The agency told Congress in April that of 7,000 children it attempted to contact in fall 2017, 1,475 could not be contacted — leading to allegations that the government “lost” children, or that they’d been handed over to traffickers. </p>
<p id="C2MmBR">For the most part, though, it’s probable that the families ORR was unable to contact made the deliberate decision to go off the map. People who came to the US as unaccompanied children were usually teenagers who had close relatives here to reunite with. In 2014-’15, according to an Office of the Inspector General report, 60 percent of unaccompanied children were released to their parents; 99 percent were released to relatives or close friends. (The other 1 percent were put in long-term foster care.) </p>
<p id="bBHC5z">That isn’t true of children who come to the US with their parents — children who don’t have to be old enough to make the journey on their own — and are then separated from them. ORR isn’t used to changing diapers. </p>
<p id="WAMNGq">In May, according to the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/us/children-immigration-borders-family-separation.html">New York Times</a>, the government put out a request for proposals for “shelter care providers, including group homes and transitional foster care,” to house children separated from parents. One organization coordinating placements is placing children with foster families in Michigan and Maryland — and planning to expand to several other states.</p>
<p id="xMQDgF">Some of these foster families have experience fostering unaccompanied children. But they’re not used to children who’ve just been separated from their parents.</p>
<h3 id="rS6AdL">5) Are families being reunited?</h3>
<p id="cJ7Otw">Some have been. But the government is sending very mixed signals about how families can be reunited — and whether the Trump administration is even trying to make that happen at all.</p>
<p id="yW0jqx">In an ACLU lawsuit over the separation of families in immigration detention, a DOJ official <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/06/09/borderseparations/Z95z4eFZjyfqCLG9pyHjAO/story.html">told the judge</a> that “once a parent is in ICE<strong> </strong>[Immigration and Customs Enforcement] custody and the child is taken into the Health and Human Services system, the government does not try to reunite them, and instead attempts to place the child with another relative in the United States — if the child has one.”</p>
<p id="tX6Oj4">That isn’t what ICE and DHS say. They claim that once parents have finished their criminal sentences for illegal entry or reentry, they can be reunited with their children in civil immigration detention while they pursue their asylum case.</p>
<p id="eUdoDD">They don’t appear to have a system to bring families back together.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/v1zZn3U1WkBKCXojfZvU1s5I5-M=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11517327/GettyImages_934155044.jpg">
<cite>Michael Stravato/The Washington Post via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>This family was reunited in Houston after being separated upon crossing into the US from El Salvador. Others aren’t so lucky.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="Yu3EeW">One flyer given to parents in Texas offered a number to call to locate children. But the number was wrong: Instead of being a number for ORR, it was an <a href="https://twitter.com/lomikriel/status/1005841302242693120?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet">ICE tip line</a>. (The flyers had to be corrected in pen.) And even if a parent can call ORR and ORR can identify the child, they might not be able to call the parent back — because immigrants in detention don’t have phone access. (Federal judges sentencing immigrants have <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/06/09/borderseparations/Z95z4eFZjyfqCLG9pyHjAO/story.html">urged the government</a> to make sure that they have access to phones so they can relocate their kids.)</p>
<p id="9BZDG7">The plaintiffs in the ACLU’s family-separation lawsuit are one woman separated from her child for eight months after she presented herself for asylum at a port of entry, and another woman who was sentenced to a brief jail term for illegal entry but couldn’t be reunited with her child for months after her release back to DHS custody.</p>
<p id="e2hpjJ">Some parents are being deported without their children. And some small children, according to advocates in Central America, are getting deported without their parents.</p>
<h3 id="9AgZg0">6) Why does Trump say there’s a “Democratic law” requiring families to be separated?</h3>
<p id="FStguU">President Trump has responded to criticisms of family separation by claiming that a “Democratic law” requires him to do it, and that if Congress doesn’t like it, they can change the law.</p>
<div id="VkzzAa">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Separating families at the Border is the fault of bad legislation passed by the Democrats. Border Security laws should be changed but the Dems can’t get their act together! Started the Wall.</p>— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1003969399148118016?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 5, 2018</a>
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<p id="Itmzqu">This is not true. There is no law that requires immigrant families to be separated. The decision to charge everyone crossing the border with illegal entry — and the decision to charge asylum seekers<em> </em>in criminal court rather than waiting to see if they qualify for asylum — are both decisions the Trump administration has made.</p>
<p id="inbLk5">Other administration officials back up Trump by pointing to the laws that give <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17190090/catch-release-loopholes-border-immigrants-trump">extra protections<em> </em>to families, unaccompanied children, and asylum seekers</a>. The administration has been asking Congress to change these laws since it came into office, and has blamed them for stopping Trump from securing the border the way he’d like. (Those aren’t “Democratic laws” either; the law addressing unaccompanied children was passed overwhelmingly in 2008 and signed by George W. Bush, while the restriction on detaining families is a result of federal litigation.) </p>
<p id="ZH2x0L">In that context, the law isn’t forcing Trump to separate families; it’s keeping Trump from doing what he’d perhaps really like to do, which is simply sending families back or keeping them in detention together, and so he has had to resort to plan B.</p>
<h3 id="brPgdA">7) Does family separation deter people from coming illegally, or coming at all?</h3>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9ZfbDfjtJi_gglUu403MIJAz-0k=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11517365/GettyImages_922986298.jpg">
<cite>John Moore/Getty Images</cite>
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<p id="tv0Dhz">Some administration officials say they’re prosecuting immigrants (and separating families) for a simple reason: They want to stop people from coming into the US illegally between ports of entry. “You have an option to go to a port of entry and not illegally cross into our country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told a Senate committee last month.</p>
<p id="OMkpy3">It sounds like common sense — and it allows the administration to avoid awkward legal or moral questions about trying to keep out people fleeing persecution. </p>
<p id="OsxNMw">But there isn’t evidence that strategy will work. In early May, rolling out the zero-tolerance policy, the Trump administration claimed that a pilot of the program along one sector of the border had reduced border crossings in that sector by 64 percent — but <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/8/17327512/sessions-illegal-immigration-border-asylum-families">failed to produce numbers to back up that claim</a> and instead produced numbers about something else.</p>
<p id="MWgnWI">Furthermore, the administration sends mixed signals about whether it actually wants people to use ports of entry to seek asylum legally.</p>
<p id="5s7ILC">Some asylum seekers have been separated from their children at ports of entry, though advocates don’t believe it’s happening systematically. The Trump administration has promised to prosecute anyone who submits a “fraudulent” asylum claim — and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made it clear that he suspects many, if not most, asylum claims are fraudulent.</p>
<p id="zEYsLI">Meanwhile, at several ports of entry, asylum seekers are being told there’s no room for them and that they’ll have to come back another time. In at least one case, asylum seekers were <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/5/17428640/border-families-asylum-illegal">physically prevented from stepping on US soil</a> — which would have given them the legal right to seek asylum at the port of entry.</p>
<p id="MccbqJ">The statistics the Trump administration uses to back up the idea that there’s a “surge” since last year sometimes count both people getting caught by Border Patrol between ports of entry and those presenting themselves without papers at ports of entry for asylum. The implication is that the current crackdown will reduce both — implying that one point of the policy is to stop families from trying to enter the US to seek asylum, period.</p>
<h3 id="IEam9b">8) How is family separation legal?</h3>
<p id="qH9CrB">The Trump administration puts it bluntly: Criminal defendants don’t have a right to have their children with them in jail.</p>
<p id="uNLhLq">The question is whether the Trump administration has the legal authority to put asylum-seeking parents in jail awaiting trial to begin with, knowing they’re splitting them from their children.</p>
<p id="zgvusE">Human rights organizations, including the United Nations, have argued that it violates international law to prosecute asylum seekers criminally. But no administration has agreed with that interpretation; the Obama administration prosecuted some asylum seekers too, just not as often.</p>
<p id="hpiGm0">Federal courts have, however, ruled that it’s illegal to keep an immigrant in detention in the hopes of deterring others, instead of making an individual assessment about whether that immigrant needs to be detained. </p>
<p id="bxfAmk">That might pave the way for advocates to fight back against family separation — or, at least, to force the government to start helping families get reunited after the parents have been sentenced.</p>
<p id="NGdxlo">The ACLU won an early victory in its case in June: The federal government asked the judge to throw out the case, and <a href="https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/71_mtd_order.pdf">the judge refused</a>. In his ruling, he made it clear he believed that if the allegations against the administration were true, they might very well be unconstitutional — violating family integrity, which some courts have found is implicitly part of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of “liberty” without due process of law.</p>
<p id="qQKECr">This doesn’t mean that the case is definitely going to succeed, though the tea leaves are favorable. And, of course, any opinion will be appealed — and will likely go to the Supreme Court unless something else happens to change the policy before then.</p>
<p id="t3DQJY">Even if the ACLU does succeed, it won’t stop families from being separated at the border. The lawsuit argues that it’s unconstitutional for parents who are in immigration detention to be separated from their children — but not that it’s unconstitutional to charge parents with illegal entry and take them into separate criminal court. </p>
<p id="IFGYKD">A victory would merely obligate the federal government to reunite parents with their children once they’ve served their (brief) time for illegal entry. But whether the government will actually be able to do that is another question. And it’s certainly less preferable, for families, than not being separated at all.</p>
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<img alt="Dozens of “Families Belong Together“ rallies are planned for Thursday, June 14th to protest the Trump administration’s practice of separating children from their parents at the US/Mexico border. The administration has separated hundreds of families, mostl" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2Y-oxY4C2MKiBaO0gLtNj6-RHt8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11517375/GettyImages_965624104.jpg">
<cite>Spencer Platt/Getty Images</cite>
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<h3 id="EBJAqK">9) How long will this last?</h3>
<p id="lothnv">The Trump administration presents its crackdown as a temporary response to a temporary “surge” of people crossing the border illegally. But the “surge” is simply a return to normal levels of the past several years after a brief dip last year. It would be foolish to assume that the administration will be satisfied with border apprehension levels in a few months, and wind down the aggressive tactics it’s started to use.</p>
<p id="7NIE6P">If we had a different president running a different White House, the outrage that family separation has generated would probably make it more likely that the policy would be quietly ended or at least curbed. Not only is it galvanizing progressives, but some conservatives — including <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2018/06/05/sessions-defends-separating-immigrant-parents-and-children-weve-got-to-get-this-message-out/">talk show host Hugh Hewitt</a> and <a href="http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2018/june/separating-families-evangelical-leaders-plead-with-trump-to-address-border-concerns">evangelical leader Samuel Rodriguez</a>— have voiced concerns for the children. </p>
<p id="mgtqf6">But this administration very rarely backs down from something because people are mad about it — often, the president takes that as an indication he’s doing something right. </p>
<p id="nwfzV7">It’s possible the administration simply won’t have the resources to keep this many people in detention for this long — it’s already running out of space in ICE detention — or to keep prosecuting more and more people for a crime that already overwhelms federal dockets. But it’s also possible that it will simply burn through the money it has and demand Congress give it more, in the name of protecting the US from an invasion of illegality.</p>
<p id="58C4di">It is extremely unlikely that Congress is going to pass a law that stops the administration from separating families at the border. Democrats are scrambling to propose bills to limit prosecution and separation, but the issue isn’t even inspiring the bipartisan momentum that Trump’s decision to end the <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/31/16226934/daca-trump-dreamers-immigration">Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)</a> program last fall did<strong>.</strong></p>
<p id="48pjpA">Indefinite family separation is almost certainly going to overwhelm the already precarious system for dealing with migrant children. Border Patrol and ORR aren’t going to get the resources they need to address the new jobs they’re being asked to take on by treating children separated from their parents as “unaccompanied” children. But the public and policymakers never paid much attention to that part of the immigration system anyway.</p>
<p id="rOFr5j">When it first became clear that the Trump administration was engaging in wide-scale family separation, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly waved off questions about the policy by saying that children would be sent to “foster care or whatever.” The vagueness and inaccuracy were telling. </p>
<p id="jipcQh">The administration knows it is separating families. It does not appear to believe it’s its job to reunite them.</p>
<p id="WBKLLk"><em>For more on the family separations at the border, listen to the </em><a href="https://art19.com/shows/today-explained/episodes/75e9814f-5321-4784-a68d-80336a20209c"><em>June 18 episode</em></a><em> of </em><a href="https://art19.com/shows/today-explained"><em>Today Explained.</em></a><em> </em></p>
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/17443198/children-immigrant-families-separated-parentsDara Lind