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How Trump Came to Enforce a Practice of Separating Migrant Families By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear
NYT, June 16, 2018
WASHINGTON – Almost immediately after President Trump took office, his administration began weighing what for years had been regarded as the nuclear option in the effort to discourage immigrants from unlawfully entering the United States.
Children would be separated from their parents if the families had been apprehended entering the country illegally, John F. Kelly, then the homeland security secretary, said in March 2017, “in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network.”
For more than a decade, even as illegal immigration levels fell overall, seasonal spikes in unauthorized border crossings had bedeviled American presidents in both political parties, prompting them to cast about for increasingly aggressive ways to discourage migrants from making the trek.
Yet for George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the idea of crying children torn from their parents’ arms was simply too inhumane – and too politically perilous – to embrace as policy, and Mr. Trump, though he had made an immigration crackdown one of the central issues of his campaign, succumbed to the same reality, publicly dropping the idea after Mr. Kelly’s comments touched off a swift backlash.
But advocates inside the administration, most prominently Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior policy adviser, never gave up on the idea. Last month, facing a sharp uptick in illegal border crossings, Mr. Trump ordered a new effort to criminally prosecute anyone who crossed the border unlawfully – with few exceptions for parents traveling with their minor children.
And now Mr. Trump faces the consequences. With thousands of children detained in makeshift shelters, his spokesmen this past week had to deny accusations that the administration was acting like Nazis. Even evangelical supporters like Franklin Graham said its policy was “disgraceful.”
Among those who have professed objections to the policy is the president himself, who despite his tough rhetoric on immigration and his clear directive to show no mercy in enforcing the law, has searched publicly for someone else to blame for dividing families. He has falsely claimed that Democrats are responsible for the practice. But the kind of pictures so feared by Mr. Trump’s predecessors could end up defining a major domestic policy issue of his term.
Inside the Trump administration, current and former officials say, there is considerable unease about the policy, which is regarded by some charged with carrying it out as unfeasible in practice and questionable morally. Kirstjen Nielsen, the current homeland security secretary, has clashed privately with Mr. Trump over the practice, sometimes inviting furious lectures from the president that have pushed her to the brink of resignation.
But Mr. Miller has expressed none of the president’s misgivings. “No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” he said during an interview in his West Wing office this past week. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”
The administration’s critics are not buying that explanation. “This is not a zero tolerance policy, this is a zero humanity policy, and we can’t let it go on,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon.
“Ripping children out of their parents’ arms to inflict harm on the child to influence the parents,” he added, “is unacceptable.”
Beyond those moral objections, Jeh C. Johnson, who as secretary of homeland security was the point man for the Obama administration’s own struggles with illegal immigration, argued that deterrence, in and of itself, is neither practical nor a long-term solution to the problem.
“I’ve seen this movie before, and I feel like what we are doing now, with the zero tolerance policy and separating parents and children for the purpose of deterrence, is banging our heads against the wall,” he said. “Whether it’s family detention, messaging about dangers of the journey, or messaging about separating families and zero tolerance, it’s always going to have at best a short-term reaction.”
And that view was based on hard experience.
When Central American migrants, including many unaccompanied children, began surging across the border in early 2014, Mr. Obama, the antithesis of his impulsive successor, had his own characteristic reaction: He formed a multiagency team at the White House to figure out what should be done. “This was the bane of my existence for three years,” Mr. Johnson said. “No matter what you did, somebody was going to be very angry at you.”
The officials met in the office of Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, and convened a series of meetings in the Situation Room to go through their options. Migrants were increasingly exploiting existing immigration laws and court rulings, and using children as a way to get adults into the country, on the theory that families were being treated differently from single people.
“The agencies were surfacing every possible idea,” Cecilia Muñoz, Mr. Obama’s top domestic policy adviser, recalled, including whether to separate parents from their children. “I do remember looking at each other like, ‘We’re not going to do this, are we?’ We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea. The morality of it was clear – that’s not who we are.”
They did, however, decide to vastly expand the detention of immigrant families, opening new facilities along the border where women and young children were held for long periods while they awaited a chance to have their cases processed. Mr. Johnson wrote an open letter to appear in Spanish-language news outlets warning parents that their children would be deported if they entered the United States illegally. He traveled to Guatemala to deliver the message in person.
Opening a large family immigration detention facility in Dilley, Tex., he held a news conference to showcase what he called an “effective deterrent.” The steps led to just the kind of brutal images that Mr. Obama’s advisers feared: hundreds of young children, many dirty and some in tears, who were being held with their families in makeshift detention facilities.
Immigrant advocacy groups denounced the policy, berating senior administration officials – some of whom were reduced to rueful apologies for a policy they said they could not justify – and telling Mr. Obama to his face during a meeting at the White House in late 2014 that he was turning his back on the most vulnerable people seeking refuge in the United States.
“I was pissed, and still am,” said Ben Johnson, the executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “I thought that he had a shocking disregard for due process.”
Before long, the Obama administration would face legal challenges, and be forced to stop detaining families indefinitely. A federal judge in Washington ordered the administration in 2015 to stop detaining asylum-seeking Central American mothers and children in order to deter others from their region from coming into the United States.
Under a 1997 consent decree known as the Flores settlement, unaccompanied children could be held in immigration detention for only a short period of time; in 2016, a federal judge ruled that the settlement applied to families as well, effectively requiring that they be released within 20 days. Many were released – some with GPS ankle bracelets to track their movements – and asked to return for a court date sometime in the future.
It was Mr. Bush, who had firsthand experience with the border as governor of Texas and ran for president as a “compassionate conservative,” who initiated the “zero tolerance” approach for illegal immigration on which Mr. Trump’s policy is modeled.
In 2005, he launched Operation Streamline, a program along a stretch of the border in Texas that referred all unlawful entrants for criminal prosecution, imprisoning them and expediting assembly-line-style trials geared toward quickly deporting them. The initiative yielded results and was soon expanded to more border sectors. Back then, however, exceptions were generally made for adults who were traveling with minor children, as well as juveniles and people who were ill.
Mr. Obama’s administration employed the program at the height of the migration crisis as well, although it generally did not treat first-time border crossers as priorities for prosecution, and it detained families together in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody – administrative, rather than criminal, detention.
Discussions began almost immediately after Mr. Trump took office about vastly expanding Operation Streamline, with almost none of those limitations. Even after Mr. Kelly stopped talking publicly about family separation, the Department of Homeland Security quietly tested the approach last summer in certain areas in Texas.
Privately, Mr. Miller argued that bringing back “zero tolerance” would be a potent tool in a severely limited arsenal of strategies for stopping migrants from flooding across the border.
The idea was to end a practice referred to by its detractors as “catch and release,” in which illegal immigrants apprehended at the border are released into the interior of the United States to await the processing of their cases. Mr. Miller argued that the policy provided a perverse incentive for migrants, essentially ensuring that if they could make it to the United States border and claim a “credible fear” of returning home, they would be given a chance to stay under asylum laws, at least temporarily.
A lengthy backlog of asylum claims made it likely that it would be years before they would have to appear before a judge to back up that plea – and many never returned to do so.
The situation was even more complicated when children were involved. A 2008 law meant to combat the trafficking of minors places strict requirements on how unaccompanied migrant children from Central America are to be treated. Minors from Mexico or Canada – countries contiguous with the United States – can be quickly sent back to their home countries unless it is deemed dangerous to do so. But those from other nations cannot be quickly returned; they must be transferred within 72 hours to the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services, and placed in the least restrictive setting possible. And the Flores ruling meant that children and families could not be held for more than 20 days.
In October, after Mr. Trump ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that gave legal status to undocumented immigrants raised in the United States, Mr. Miller insisted that any legislative package to codify those protections contain changes to close what he called the loopholes encouraging illegal immigrants to come.
And in April, after the border numbers reached their zenith, Mr. Miller was instrumental in Mr. Trump’s decision to ratchet up the zero tolerance policy. “A big name of the game is deterrence,” Mr. Kelly, now the chief of staff, told NPR in May. “The children will be taken care of – put into foster care or whatever – but the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.”
Technically, there is no Trump administration policy stating that illegal border crossers must be separated from their children. But the “zero tolerance policy” results in unlawful immigrants being taken into federal criminal custody, at which point their children are considered unaccompanied alien minors and taken away. Unlike Mr. Obama’s administration, Mr. Trump’s is treating all people who have crossed the border without authorization as subject to criminal prosecution, even if they tell the officer apprehending them that they are seeking asylum based on fear of returning to their home country, and whether or not they have their children in tow.
“Having children does not give you immunity from arrest and prosecution,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a speech on Thursday in Fort Wayne, Ind. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government,” said Mr. Sessions, quoting Bible verse as he took exception to evangelical leaders who have called the practice abhorrent. “Because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”
Happy Fathers Day: on 19:36 - Jun 18 by LeonWasGod
Fair point. Although once they are there I suppose they could chose not to separate them, hold them in cages and treat them like animals? I'm sure it wouldn't beyond their means to have slightly more humane places to hold families.
Don’t disagree with that.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Only way the issue gets solved is understanding why people choose to immigrate illegally to begin with.
The big thing that Trump and his advisors seem to miss with this is that for many of these families spending time in an immigration detention facility and having your kids thrown into the disaster that is the American Foster Care system is probably a hell of a lot safer than the situation back in their current country.
Separating children from their families isn't going to solve this issue. Perhaps spending enough time reading a history book could explain that in times of extreme peril, parents are far more willing to make non rational decisions to save their lives and lives of their children.
So if we understood why people migrate then it will stop them doing so?
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
You know what he’s picking up on, don’t you? It’s me calling you love. Being a foreigner Glamorgan vernacular is a mystery to him. I don’t think he realises that’s how I speak in real life, we all do down here.
Yea, that'll be it, with foreigners like me unable to perceive the manly non-needy banter you are engaging in.
In fact you're so at ease with your position, you've only made 3 febrile posts on the subject in the last 10 minutes.
Yes, my country. I am a citizen of the USA. That is a fact, whether you like it or not.
Anyone who is a citizen call call this their country.
If anything, I consider immigrants (usually POC) who come here legally and EARN citizenship to be better Americans than me, since they have made a conscious effort to become Americans, and have done it the right way.
Trump loyalist and Fox analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano breaking ranks: ++++++++++++++++++ Andrew Napolitano: Trump is ‘Trying to Use Children’ as Negotiating Chip, Policy is ‘Child Abuse’
So if we understood why people migrate then it will stop them doing so?
No, but it would prevent stupid decisions like this from being made the Administrational Level.
Trump foolishly believed that separating families would prevent migration. If he understood that its probably going to continue to happen regardless, he likely doesn't make the same decision. If one person is able to snap a few photos of immigrant children in prison and manage to upload those photos to the internet, his critics would have a field day.
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Happy Fathers Day: on 22:03 - Jun 18 with 2910 views
This move was signalled last week: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ U.S. expected to retreat from main U.N. rights forum: activists, diplomats
Reuters, June 14, 2018
GENEVA (Reuters) - Talks with the United States over how to reform the main U.N. rights body have failed to meet Washington’s demands, activists and diplomats say, suggesting that the Trump administration will quit the Geneva forum whose session opens on Monday.
A U.S. source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the withdrawal appeared to be “imminent” but had no details.
Diplomatic sources said it was not a question of if but of when the United States retreats from the Human Rights Council, which is holding a three-week session through July 6.
Lisa never apologises . Ever. I've exposed her short comings as I have countless others on here .
She ranks as high as anyone for self important crap .
You don't know the truth Lisa. You re not right . You need an injection of humility .
You only impress the impressionable
Yours ...the twerp
My index finger betrayed me. It gave an up arrow to this comment and by extension to an American President who has shown himself to be despicable in his private, business and political life and who unfortunately is an extremely talented con artist..Fortunately, my index finger, unlike Trump, can admit to being wrong and hopes to atone for its error by tapping out this explanation.
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Happy Fathers Day: on 07:16 - Jun 20 with 2745 views
My index finger betrayed me. It gave an up arrow to this comment and by extension to an American President who has shown himself to be despicable in his private, business and political life and who unfortunately is an extremely talented con artist..Fortunately, my index finger, unlike Trump, can admit to being wrong and hopes to atone for its error by tapping out this explanation.
How is Trump a con artist ?. He’s doing what he was elected to do, one of which was to clamp down on illegal immigration.
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Happy Fathers Day: on 09:58 - Jun 20 with 2716 views
APNewsBreak: Youngest migrants held in ‘tender age’ shelters By GARANCE BURKE AND MARTHA MENDOZA
AP, June 20 2018
Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border to at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas, The Associated Press has learned.
Lawyers and medical providers who have visited the Rio Grande Valley shelters described play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis. The government also plans to open a fourth shelter to house hundreds of young migrant children in Houston, where city leaders denounced the move Tuesday.
Since the White House announced its zero tolerance policy in early May, more than 2,300 children have been taken from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, resulting in a new influx of young children requiring government care. The government has faced withering critiques over images of some of the children in cages inside U.S. Border Patrol processing stations.
Decades after the nation’s child welfare system ended the use of orphanages over concerns about the lasting trauma to children, the administration is standing up new institutions to hold Central American toddlers that the government separated from their parents.
“The thought that they are going to be putting such little kids in an institutional setting? I mean it is hard for me to even wrap my mind around it,” said Kay Bellor, vice president for programs at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which provides foster care and other child welfare services to migrant children. “Toddlers are being detained.” Bellor said shelters follow strict procedures surrounding who can gain access to the children in order to protect their safety, but that means information about their welfare can be limited.
By law, child migrants traveling alone must be sent to facilities run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services within three days of being detained. The agency then is responsible for placing the children in shelters or foster homes until they are united with a relative or sponsor in the community as they await immigration court hearings. But U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announcement last month that the government would criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the U.S.-Mexico border illegally has led to the breakup of migrant families and sent a new group of hundreds of young children into the government’s care.
The United Nations, some Democratic and Republican lawmakers and religious groups have sharply criticized the policy, calling it inhumane.
Not so, said Steven Wagner, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services.
“We have specialized facilities that are devoted to providing care to children with special needs and tender age children as we define as under 13 would fall into that category,” he said. “They’re not government facilities per se, and they have very well-trained clinicians, and those facilities meet state licensing standards for child welfare agencies, and they’re staffed by people who know how to deal with the needs – particularly of the younger children.”
Until now, however, it’s been unknown where they are.
“In general we do not identify the locations of permanent unaccompanied alien children program facilities,” said agency spokesman Kenneth Wolfe.
The three centers – in Combes, Raymondville and Brownsville – have been rapidly repurposed to serve needs of children including some under 5. A fourth, planned for Houston, would house up to 240 children in a warehouse previously used for people displaced by Hurricane Harvey, Mayor Sylvester Turner said.
Turner said he met with officials from Austin-based Southwest Key Programs, the contractor that operates some of the child shelters, to ask them to reconsider their plans. A spokeswoman for Southwest Key didn’t immediately reply to an email seeking comment.
“And so there comes a point in time we draw a line and for me, the line is with these children,” said Turner during a news conference Tuesday.
On a practical level, the zero tolerance policy has overwhelmed the federal agency charged with caring for the new influx of children who tend to be much younger than teens who typically have been traveling to the U.S. alone. Indeed some recent detainees are infants, taken from their mothers.
Doctors and lawyers who have visited the shelters said the facilities were fine, clean and safe, but the kids – who have no idea where their parents are – were hysterical, crying and acting out.
“The shelters aren’t the problem, it’s taking kids from their parents that’s the problem,” said South Texas pediatrician Marsha Griffin who has visited many.
Alicia Lieberman, who runs the Early Trauma Treatment Network at University of California, San Francisco, said decades of study show early separations can cause permanent emotional damage.
“Children are biologically programmed to grow best in the care of a parent figure. When that bond is broken through long and unexpected separations with no set timeline for reunion, children respond at the deepest physiological and emotional levels,” she said. “Their fear triggers a flood of stress hormones that disrupt neural circuits in the brain, create high levels of anxiety, make them more susceptible to physical and emotional illness, and damage their capacity to manage their emotions, trust people, and focus their attention on age-appropriate activities.”
Days after Sessions announced the zero-tolerance policy, the government issued a call for proposals from shelter and foster care providers to provide services for the new influx of children taken from their families after journeying from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico.
As children are separated from their families, law enforcement agents reclassify them from members of family units to “unaccompanied alien children.” Federal officials said Tuesday that since May, they have separated 2,342 children from their families, rendering them unaccompanied minors in the government’s care.
While Mexico is still the most common country of origin for families arrested at the border, in the last eight months Honduras has become the fastest-growing category as compared to fiscal year 2017.
During a press briefing Tuesday, reporters repeatedly asked for an age breakdown of the children who have been taken. Officials from both law enforcement and Health and Human Services said they didn’t know how many children were under 5, under 2, or even so little they’re non-verbal.
“The facilities that they have for the most part are not licensed for tender age children,” said Michelle Brane, director of migrant rights at the Women’s Refugee Commission, who met with a 4-year-old girl in diapers in a McAllen warehouse where Border Patrol temporarily holds migrant families. “There is no model for how you house tons of little children in cots institutionally in our country. We don’t do orphanages, our child welfare has recognized that is an inappropriate setting for little children.”
So now, the government has to try to hire more caregivers.
The recent call for proposals by the federal government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement said it was seeking applicants who can provide services for a diverse population “of all ages and genders, as well as pregnant and parenting teens.” Even the policy surrounding what age to take away a baby is inconsistent. Customs and Border Protection field chiefs over all nine southwest border districts can use their discretion over how young is too young, officials said. And while Health and Human Services defines “tender age” typically as 12 and under, Customs and Border Protection has at times defined it as 5 and under.
For 30 years, Los Fresnos, Texas-based International Education Services ran emergency shelters and foster care programs for younger children and pregnant teens who arrived in the U.S. as unaccompanied minors. At least one resident sued for the right to have an abortion in a high-profile case last March.
For reasons the agency did not explain, three months ago the government’s refugee resettlement office said it was ending their funding to the program and transferred all children to other facilities. This came weeks before the administration began its “zero tolerance” policy, prompting a surge in “tender age” migrant children needing shelter.
In recent days, members of Congress have been visiting the shelters and processing centers, or watching news report about them, bearing witness to the growing chaos. In a letter sent to Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday, a dozen Republican senators said separating families isn’t consistent with American values and ordinary human decency.
On Tuesday, a Guatemalan mother who hasn’t seen her 7-year-old son since he was taken from her a month ago sued the Trump administration. Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia was released from custody while her asylum case is pending and thinks her son, Darwin, might be in a shelter in Arizona.
“I only got to talk to him once and he sounded so sad. My son never used to sound like that, he was such a dynamic boy,” Mejia-Mejia said as she wept. “I call and call and no one will tell me where he is.”
He’d have to set aside a couple of weeks to read the countless thousands of articles you post every day.
You poor little lambs.
See if you can hack you way though this one: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Trump and Kirstjen Nielsen’s embarrassing surrender on separating families at the border by Aaron Blake
Washington Post, June 20 at 12:33 PM
The Trump administration insisted it didn't have a policy of separating children from their parents at the border. It said that it was merely following the law. And it said “Congress alone can fix” the mess.
It just admitted all that was nonsense – and that it badly overplayed its hand.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who on Sunday and Monday insisted this wasn't an actual a policy and that the administration's hands were tied, will now have to untie them as the White House will reverse the supposedly nonexistent policy. Amid an outcry from Senate Republicans and a threat to fix the problem themselves – just as the White House had demanded – the Trump administration has drafted an executive action to change the policy and keep families united.
It's at once an admission that the politics of the issue had gotten out of hand and that the administration's arguments were completely dishonest. Virtually everything they said about the policy is tossed aside with this executive action. It's the political equivalent of waving the white flag and the legal equivalent of confessing to making false statements. Rather than letting Congress rebuke it, the White House is rebuking itself and trying to save some face.
The administration will argue that this is merely a stopgap decision that will still be subject to legal review. It will even cast doubt on the idea that the executive action will stand – instead arguing that it's worth halting the policy while the courts decide. But that's decidedly the opposite of the approach the administration had said was demanded by the situation for the last several days.Here's a sampling: * “Congress and the courts created this problem, and Congress alone can fix it. Until then, we will enforce every law we have on the books to defend the sovereignty and security of the United States.” – Nielsen * “It's not a policy. Our policy at DHS is to do what we're sworn to do, which is to enforce the law.” – Nielsen * “The only [other] option is to not enforce the law at all.” – Nielsen * “I don't want children taken away from parents. And when you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally, which should happen, you have to take the children away. Now we don't have to prosecute them, but then we're not prosecuting them for coming in illegally.” – Trump * "You can’t do it through an executive order.” -- Trump
This is such a course-reversal that, just two days ago, the White House was saying it wasn't even onboard with Congress passing a stand-alone bill to fix the problem – dismissing such efforts as a “Band-Aid” that didn't deal with core immigration problems. Today, it is gladly applying the “Band-Aid” itself – and in a way it insisted it couldn't.
Rarely has the White House so tacitly and unmistakably admitted to overplaying its hand. And rarely has it so blatantly copped to its own dishonesty about its actions. Nielsen, in particular, has a lot of explaining to do. But this whole thing is an extremely ugly chapter. And it makes clear that, from Day One, this was a political gambit to force an immigration bill through. It didn't work.
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