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“WE NEED TO TAKE AWAY CHILDREN”‘We Need to Take Away Children,’ No Matter How Young, Justice Dept. Officials SaidTop department officials were “a driving force” behind President Trump’s child separation policy, a draft investigation report said.By Michael D. Shear, Katie Benner and Michael S. SchmidtThe New York TimesOctober 6, 2020 — The five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico, including three appointed by President Trump, recoiled in May 2018 against an order to prosecute all illegal immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. They told top Justice Department officials they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare.But the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, made it clear what Mr. Trump wanted on a conference call later that afternoon, according to a two-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general into Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy.“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.“Those two cases should not have been declined,” John Bash, the departing U.S. attorney in western Texas, wrote to his staff immediately after the call. Mr. Rosenstein “instructed that, per the A.G.’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child.”The Justice Department’s top officials were “a driving force” behind the policy that spurred the separation of thousands of families, many of them fleeing violence in Central America and seeking asylum in the United States, before Mr. Trump abandoned it amid global outrage, according to a draft report of the results of the investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the department’s inspector general.The separation of migrant children from their parents, sometimes for months, was at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on immigration. But the fierce backlash when the administration struggled to reunite the children turned it into one of the biggest policy debacles of the president’s term.Though Mr. Sessions sought to distance himself from the policy, allowing Mr. Trump and Homeland Security Department officials to largely be blamed, he and other top law enforcement officials understood that “zero tolerance” meant that migrant families would be separated and wanted that to happen because they believed it would deter future illegal immigration, Mr. Horowitz wrote.“The department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and effective implementation of the policy, especially with regard to prosecution of family-unit adults and the resulting child separations,” the draft report said.The draft report, citing more than 45 interviews with key officials, emails and other documents, provides the most complete look at the discussions inside the Justice Department as the family separation policy was developed, pushed and ultimately carried out with little concern for children.This article is based on a review of the 86-page draft report and interviews with three government officials who read it in recent months and described its conclusions and many of the details in it. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss it publicly, cautioned that the final report could change.Before publishing the findings of its investigations, the inspector general’s office typically provides draft copies to Justice Department leaders and others mentioned in the reports to ensure that they are accurate.Mr. Horowitz had been preparing to release his report since late summer, according to a person familiar with the investigation, though the process allowing for responses from current and former department officials whose conduct is under scrutiny is likely to delay its release until after the presidential election.Mr. Sessions refused to be interviewed, the report noted. Mr. Rosenstein, who is now a lawyer in private practice, defended himself in his interview with investigators in response to questioning about his role, according to two of the officials. Mr. Rosenstein’s former office submitted a 64-page response to the report.“If any United States attorney ever charged a defendant they did not personally believe warranted prosecution, they violated their oath of office,” Mr. Rosenstein said in a statement. “I never ordered anyone to prosecute a case.”Gene Hamilton, a top lawyer and ally of Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s assault on immigration, argued in a 32-page response that Justice Department officials merely took direction from the president. Mr. Hamilton cited an April 3, 2018, meeting with Mr. Sessions; the homeland security secretary at the time, Kirstjen Nielsen; and others in which the president “ranted” and was on “a tirade,” demanding as many prosecutions as possible.Mr. Hamilton declined to comment for this article, as did Mr. Horowitz’s office. Mr. Sessions did not respond to requests for comment. Alexa Vance, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, disputed the draft report and said the Homeland Security Department referred cases for prosecution.“The draft report relied on for this article contains numerous factual errors and inaccuracies,” she said. “While D.O.J. is responsible for the prosecutions of defendants, it had no role in tracking or providing custodial care to the children of defendants. Finally, both the timing and misleading content of this leak raise troubling questions about the motivations of those responsible for it.”The draft report also documented other revelations that had not previously been known:Government prosecutors reacted with alarm at the separation of children from their parents during a secret 2017 pilot program along the Mexican border in Texas. “We have now heard of us taking breastfeeding defendant moms away from their infants,” one government prosecutor wrote to his superiors. “I did not believe this until I looked at the duty log.”Border Patrol officers missed serious felony cases because they were stretched too thin by the zero-tolerance policy requiring them to detain and prosecute all of the misdemeanor illegal entry cases. One Texas prosecutor warned top Justice Department officials in 2018 that “sex offenders were released” as a result.Senior Justice Department officials viewed the welfare of the children as the responsibility of other agencies and their duty as tracking the parents. “I just don’t see that as a D.O.J. equity,” Mr. Rosenstein told the inspector general.The failure to inform the U.S. Marshals Service before announcing the zero-tolerance policy led to serious overcrowding and budget overruns. The marshals were forced to cut back on serving warrants in other cases, saying that “when you take away manpower, you can’t make a safe arrest.”For two years, Ms. Nielsen has taken the brunt of the public criticism for separating migrant families because of her decision to refer adults crossing the border illegally with children for prosecution. A day after the president’s retreat, Mr. Sessions distanced his department from the decision, telling CBN News that “we never really intended” to separate children.That was false, according to the draft report. It made clear that from the policy’s earliest days in a five-month test along the border in Texas, Justice Department officials understood — and encouraged — the separation of children as an expected part of the desire to prosecute all illegal border crossers.“It is the hope that this separation will act as a deterrent to parents bringing their children into the harsh circumstances that are present when trying to enter the United States illegally,” a Border Patrol official wrote on October 28, 2017, to the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, according to the draft report.After the pilot program in Texas ended, the report asserted, Mr. Sessions, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Rosenstein pushed aggressively to expand the practice across the entire southwestern border, with help from prosecutors.In a briefing two days after Christmas in 2017, top Justice Department officials asked Mr. Bash for statistics from the pilot program, conducted by his predecessor, that could be used to develop “nationwide prosecution guidelines.” Mr. Bash, a former White House adviser, did not receive a follow-up request for the information. Thinking that the idea had been abandoned, he did not provide it.By April 2018, Mr. Sessions nevertheless moved to enact the zero-tolerance policy across the entire border with Mexico. Mr. Rosenstein told the inspector general that Mr. Sessions “understood what the consequences were.”“The A.G.’s goal,” he said, “was to create a more effective deterrent so that everybody would believe that they had a risk of being prosecuted.”But the Justice Department still needed to persuade Ms. Nielsen to refer all families for prosecution, which she had been resisting. The draft report says a pressure campaign culminated in a May 3 meeting in which Mr. Sessions insisted that Customs and Border Protection begin referring all of those cases to prosecutors.A note from Mr. Hamilton to Mr. Sessions before the meeting indicated: “You should lead this discussion.”“We must vigorously enforce our criminal immigration laws to ensure that there are consequences for illegal actions and to deter future illegal immigration,” Mr. Sessions planned to say, according to the draft report. “That means that an illegal alien should not get a free pass just because he or she crosses the border illegally with a child.”When the group voted by a show of hands to proceed, Ms. Nielsen was the only one who kept her hand down, according to two people familiar with the vote, which was reported earlier by NBC News. The next day, Ms. Nielsen backed down, signing a memo referring all adults for prosecution and clearing the way for the children to be separated.The decision roiled the prosecutors along the border. In Arizona, Elizabeth Strange, the acting U.S. attorney, led a minor rebellion, temporarily declining six cases, citing concern about the children. That prompted a rebuke from top Justice Department officials, who demanded to know “why would they be declining these cases?”Justice Department officials have repeatedly claimed that they thought the adults would be prosecuted and reunited with their children within hours of being separated. But the inspector general found a memo informing top officials that sentences for adults ranged from three to 14 days, making it all but certain that children would be sent to the custody of officials at the Health and Human Services Department for long periods of time.“We found no evidence, before or after receipt of the memorandum, that D.O.J. leaders sought to expedite the process for completing sentencing in order to facilitate reunification of separated families,” the inspector general wrote.Over all, Mr. Horowitz concluded in the draft, Mr. Sessions and other senior department officials “were aware that full implementation of the zero-tolerance policy would result in criminal referrals by D.H.S. of adults who enter the country illegally with children and that the prosecution of these family-unit adults would result in children being separated from families.”*****************************************************545 SEPARATED CHILDREN CAN’T BE FOUNDLawyers say they can't find the parents of 545 migrant children separated by Trump administrationAbout two-thirds of the 1,000-plus parents separated from their kids under a 2017 pilot program were deported before a federal judge ordered that they be found.By Julia Ainsley and Jacob SoboroffNBC NewsOctober 20, 2020 — Lawyers appointed by a federal judge to identify migrant families who were separated by the Trump administration say that they have yet to track down the parents of 545 children and that about two-thirds of those parents were deported to Central America without their children, according to a filing Tuesday from the American Civil Liberties Union.The Trump administration instituted a "zero tolerance" policy in 2018 that separated migrant children and parents at the southern U.S. border. The administration later confirmed that it had actually begun separating families in 2017 along some parts of the border under a pilot program. The ACLU and other pro-bono law firms were tasked with finding the members of families separated during the pilot program.Unlike the 2,800 families separated under zero tolerance in 2018, most of whom remained in custody when the policy was ended by executive order, many of the more than 1,000 parents separated from their children under the pilot program had already been deported before a federal judge in California ordered that they be found."It is critical to find out as much as possible about who was responsible for this horrific practice while not losing sight of the fact that hundreds of families have still not been found and remain separated," said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. "There is so much more work to be done to find these families."People ask when we will find all of these families, and sadly, I can't give an answer. I just don't know," Gelernt said. "But we will not stop looking until we have found every one of the families, no matter how long it takes. The tragic reality is that hundreds of parents were deported to Central America without their children, who remain here with foster families or distant relatives."The ACLU and other organizations that are part of a court-appointed "steering committee" learned that more than 1,000 families were separated in 2017 based on data provided by the Department of Homeland Security. Of those, the committee has been able to contact the parents of more than 550 children and believes about 25 of them may have a chance to come back to the U.S. for reunification.Gelernt said some of the families that have been contacted have elected to keep their children in the U.S. with family members or sponsors "due to fear of what will happen to their child if they return" to their home countries.The group Justice in Motion is physically searching for the separated parents in Mexico and Central America. "While we have already located many deported parents, there are hundreds more who we are still trying to reach," the group said in a statement. "It's an arduous and time-consuming process on a good day. During the pandemic, our team of human rights defenders is taking special measures to protect their own security and safety, as well as that of the parents and their communities."A separate court order directed that the Trump administration reunite families separated under zero tolerance in 2018.The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Parents of 545 children separated at US border still can't be foundBy Priscilla AlvarezCNNOctober 20, 2020(CNN) Lawyers have not been able to reach the parents of 545 children who had been separated from their families by US border officials between 2017 and 2018, according to a Tuesday court filing.Hundreds of parents may also have been deported without their children.The filing from the Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union is part of an ongoing effort to identify and reunite families separated by the Trump administration, more than two years after the "zero tolerance" policy was created.While a federal court order forced the reunification of many of those families, an explosive government watchdog report released last year revealed there could be thousands more who hadn't previously been acknowledged by officials.Trump administration hypes immigration enforcement in key swing state ahead of electionA court-appointed "steering committee" has tried to locate those families. As of October 20, the committee has attempted to reach the families of 1,030 children. Of those, the committee has not been able to reach the separated parents of 545 children, according to the court filing."Approximately two-thirds" of parents are believed to have been deported without their children, the filing adds.The children were previously released from government custody and almost all are likely in the United States with a sponsor.While Covid-19 has hampered reunification efforts, the filing says, attorneys have resumed on-the-ground attempts to locate families."Following a suspension due to the COVID-19 pandemic, limited physical on-the-ground searches for separated parents has now resumed where possible to do so while protecting the health of personnel working with the Steering Committee and members of vulnerable communities in separated parents' home countries," the filing reads."Even before Covid, it was hard enough finding these families but we will not stop until we've found every one," said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt. "Some of these children have been separated for years and were just babies at the time."Parents of 545 children still not found three years after Trump separation policyLawyers struggling to find parents deported to Central America, says ACLU, after US government removed 1,030 children in 2018By Ed PilkingtonThe GuardianOctober 20, 2020 years after Donald Trump ordered a crackdown on undocumented migrants crossing into the US, lawyers are still struggling to find the parents of 545 children separated from them under the “zero-tolerance” policy, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.In a court filing, the ACLU said that about two-thirds of the parents had been deported back to the country of origin in Central America, leaving their separated children behind. In the rush to carry out Trump’s orders, the locations of the parents were not recorded and three years later they still cannot be found.The zero-tolerance policy was announced in April 2018. It was later revealed that the administration had begun family separation the previous year under a secret pilot program.In total, 1,030 children were removed from their parents by the US government under that pilot scheme, of whom 485 children have had their parents found under a scheme imposed by federal judges. The ACLU and a team of lawyers have been tasked by the courts with finding all the parents.Under the pilot scheme, about 66% of the parents separated from their children were deported back to Central America before the court order was imposed on the Trump administration to find them. The search for the parents, who are called “unreachable” in the court document, has been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.The on-going suffering of hundreds of children and their parents lost to each other as a result of government action three years after the event has caused widespread anger and revulsion. Paola Luisi, director of the coalition of almost 250 groups, Families Belong Together, said that efforts would continue to find the parents until they had all been found.“The Trump administration ripped 545 children away from their parents, lied about it, then lost track of them as they departed them into danger. That’s par for the course for a sadistic immigration system.”Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, told NBC News: “We will not stop looking until we have found every one of the families, no matter how long it takes. The tragic reality is that hundreds of parents were deported to Central America without their children, who remain here with foster families or distant relatives.”Family separation was one of the most visceral results of the Trump administration’s ruthless assault on illegal border crossing. The goal of the zero-tolerance policy was to criminally prosecute every migrant who entered the US without authorization – irrespective of the consequences to their families including their children.The full horror of the administration’s intentions was only disclosed earlier this month when the New York Times reported previously unpublished communications between top officials. Jeff Sessions, then US attorney general, told prosecutors in a conference call in May 2018: “We need to take away children.”Notes of that call taken by a participant added: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”The then deputy AG, Rod Rosenstein, told prosecutors at the time that children should be pulled away from their parents no matter how young they were – even if they were infants.Lawyers say they can't find parents of 545 migrant children: reportBy Dominick MastrangeloThe HillOctober 20, 2020 appointed to represent hundreds of children who were separated from their parents as a result of President Trump's 2018 policy say they are having a difficult time locating the adults, fearing many of them were deported while their children stayed in the country.The lawyers said the parents of 545 children have still yet to be located and they believe about two-thirds of those individuals were deported to Central America, according to court filing by the American Civil Liberties Union, NBC News reported on Tuesday.The ACLU and other law firms were appointed to represent the children, many of whom were kept in detention facilities away from their parents as part of the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, which sparked backlash in 2018 and was eventually scrapped.NBC News, which has done extensive reporting on the crisis at the Southwest border, estimated some 2,800 families were separated by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol as a means to deter further illegal immigration.“It is critical to find out as much as possible about who was responsible for this horrific practice while not losing sight of the fact that hundreds of families have still not been found and remain separated," Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, told the outlet. "There is so much more work to be done to find these families."Gelernt continued: "People ask when we will find all of these families and, sadly, I can’t give an answer. I just don’t know. But we will not stop looking until we have found every one of the families, no matter how long it takes. The tragic reality is that hundreds of parents were deported to Central America without their children, who remain here with foster families or distant relatives.”Trump ran on a hardline immigration policy in 2016, promising to "build a wall" along the southwest border with Mexico and make the country pay for it.Report: Lawyers Unable To Locate Parents Of 545 Children Separated By The Trump AdministrationBy Matt PerezForbesOctober 20, 2020 federally assigned to reunite families that were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration say they're still unable to locate the parents of 545 migrant children, according to a Tuesday report by NBC News citing a filing from the American Civil Liberties Union.Key FactsHundreds of parents were deported or taken into custody under a "zero tolerance" policy announced by the Trump administration in 2018.Appointed by a federal judge in California to locate and reunite parents separated from their children in 2017 before it became an official policy, the ACLU and other lawyers have been able to contact the parents of over 550 children, according to the report.However, it's still trying to find the parents of 545 children, with estimated two-thirds being deported to Central America, according to the filing."There is so much more work to be done to find these families," Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, told NBC.Key BackgroundAfter bipartisan uproar, the zero tolerance policy was ended in 2018. Trump campaigned on building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and has sought to curb legal immigration into the country.TangentThe U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to overturn a September decision by three federal judges to block Trump's attempt to not include undocumented immigrants counted in the 2020 Census in the population tallies that will be used to reapportion seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Census Bureau has always counted every person within the country, though before the passing of the 14th amendment, enslaved people were counted as three-fifths a person.Big NumberMore than 3,000 children were separated from their families under the Trump administration, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre. The Los Angeles Times, however, reported the number could be as high as 4,368.Parents of 545 children separated by Trump administration at Mexico border can't be found, lawyers say'The tragic reality is that hundreds of parents were deported to Central America without their children’By Justin VallejoThe IndependentOctober 20, 2020 have been unable to find the parents of 545 children separated at the Mexico border after the majority of families were deported back to Central America, according to the ACLU.A court filing from the American Civil Liberties Union showed they have only made contact with parents of 550 children out of the 1,000 families separated at the border in 2017, according to NBC News.While 25 of those parents may have a chance of returning for reunification, several families contacted by the federal court-appointed committee to identify separated families chose to leave their children in the US with a family member or sponsor.Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, told NBC News that hundreds of families have still not been found."People ask when we will find all of these families and, sadly, I can’t give an answer. I just don’t know," Mr Gelernt said. "The tragic reality is that hundreds of parents were deported to Central America without their children, who remain here with foster families or distant relatives.”Justice in Motion, the group on the ground in Mexico and Central America physically searching for the separated families, said in a statement they were continuing to look for more deported parents.“It’s an arduous and time-consuming process on a good day. During the pandemic, our team of human rights defenders is taking special measures to protect their own security and safety, as well as that of the parents and their communities,” the statement shared with NBC said.The Trump administration began trialling a "zero tolerance" policy at the US's southern border in a pilot programme in 2017.Parents of 545 Children Separated at the Border Cannot Be FoundA new report shows hundreds of cases in which migrant children were taken from their families, and their parents, who were deported, cannot be located.By Caitlin DickersonThe New York TimesOctober 21, 2020 spots are airing throughout Mexico and Central America. Court-appointed researchers are motorbiking through rural hillside communities in Guatemala and showing up at courthouses in Honduras to conduct public record searches.Their efforts are part of a wide-ranging campaign to track down parents separated from their children at the U.S. border beginning in 2017 under the Trump administration’s most controversial immigration policy. It is now clear that the parents of 545 of the migrant children still have not been found, according to court documents filed this week in a case challenging the practice.About 60 of the children were under the age of 5 when they were separated, the documents show.Though attempts to find the separated parents have been going on for years, the number of parents who have been deemed “unreachable” is much larger than was previously known.Under court order, the government first provided an accounting of separated families in June of 2018, reporting that about 2,700 children had been taken from their parents after crossing into the United States. After months of searching by a court-appointed steering committee, which includes a private law firm and several immigrant advocacy organizations, all of those families were eventually tracked down and offered the opportunity to be reunited.But in January 2019, a report by the Health and Human Services Department's Office of the Inspector General confirmed that many more children had been separated, including under a previously undisclosed pilot program conducted in El Paso between June and November 2017, before the administration’s widely publicized “zero tolerance” policy officially went into effect.Under that policy, the Trump administration directed prosecutors to file criminal charges against those who crossed the border without authorization, including parents, who were then separated from their children when they were taken into custody. Some parents who crossed the border at legal ports of entry were also among those separated from their children.The Trump administration fought for months against providing documentation on the additional families, arguing that it was not necessary because the children had already been released from federal custody into the care of sponsors, who are typically relatives or family friends. The parents of the children had already been deported without them.But in June 2019, under court order, the government eventually acknowledged that an additional 1,556 children had been separated from their families; 200 of them were under 5 years of age at the time they were taken into custody.When that information came out, the search efforts started again, but were made significantly more difficult by the amount of time that had passed between when the children were released from federal custody and when volunteer researchers began trying to find them. The effort hit another roadblock with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, during which travel through the Central American countries where most of the families live has been severely restricted.“The Trump administration had no plans to keep track of the families or ever reunite them and so that’s why we’re in the situation we’re in now, to try to account for each family,” said Nan Schivone, legal director of the organization Justice in Motion, which is leading on-the-ground search efforts for separated families.The American Civil Liberties Union, which is leading the court challenge to the family separation policy, said it had also been unable to find 362 of the children, many of whom are likely living in the United States, whose parents were deemed unreachable.“The fact that they kept the names from the court, from us, from the public, was astounding,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the A.C.L.U.’s case over family separations. “We could have been searching for them this whole time.”The latest findings were first reported by NBC News.In some cases, members of the steering committee have had only names and countries of origin to go on in trying to locate separated parents. Even after conducting public record searches to identify the cities where the families were from, they faced additional hurdles. Many of the families had fled their homes because they were escaping violence or extortion, and intentionally withheld information from friends and neighbors about where they were going.Researchers are presuming that about two-thirds of the parents now being sought are back in their home countries.As part of the legal case over family separations in the Federal District Court in San Diego, overseen by Judge Dana Sabraw, the search efforts will continue and the government will be required to provide information about any additional families that are separated at the border.As of October 2019, the government had provided contact information for more than 1,100 additional parents who had been separated from their children, but argued that it would not disclose information about some 400 of the parents because those individuals had criminal records that prevented the United States government from reuniting them with their children under Homeland Security Department policies.Of the more than 1,100, the steering committee has been able to locate the parents of 485 additional separated children. The rest have not been found.Parents Separated From Hundreds of Children by U.S. Officials Still Can’t Be Found, Advocates SayWhite House disputes lawyers’ claim that short-lived border policy continues to keep families apart, saying many parents have ‘declined to accept their children back’By Alicia A. CaldwellThe Wall Street JournalOctober 21, 2020 for immigrant families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border can’t find the parents of 545 children, a new claim made as part of a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.As many as two-thirds of the parents, mostly from Central America, are thought to have been deported by U.S. authorities, according to the filing made in federal court Tuesday by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union.“These are children who have been separated for years, some of whom were just babies when taken from their parents,” said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU lawyer leading the lawsuit. “These families must be reunited, and the administration must be held accountable.”White House deputy press secretary Brian Morgenstern disputed the characterization of the claim, saying many of the parents “have declined to accept their children back.” Chase Jennings, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman, said “DHS has taken every step to facilitate the reunification of these families where the parents wanted such reunification to occur.”Separating immigrant families who tried entering the U.S. without permission, in many cases to request asylum, was made a border-wide policy in May 2018. As many as 2,800 children were kept from their parents before President Trump issued an executive order scrapping the policy the following month, following outcry over the practice.Children separated from parents were placed in the custody of the U.S. Department of Health and Humans Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement and housed in migrant shelters around the U.S. The Trump administration has long said parents were given the option of being deported with their children. Some parents said they were misled or coerced into signing documents that allowed them to be deported without their children, according to court filings from the ACLU and other groups.The administration’s initiative separating parents and children was part of its broader effort to deter migrant families from crossing the border and asking for asylum in the U.S. During the government’s 2019 budget year, border agents arrested more than 473,000 people traveling as families.Under immigration law, almost anyone is permitted to apply for asylum once on U.S. soil, regardless of how they arrived.A federal judge in San Diego barred the government from separating families as a matter of policy a few days after Mr. Trump ordered an end to the practice. The judge also directed the government to reunite parents with their children.Last year, the government acknowledged that as many as 1,500 other children had been separated from their parents before the May 2018 policy was put in place border-wide. Many of those children were thought to have been separated during a trial run by the Border Patrol in New Mexico and the far western edge of Texas.After the policy was ended, the administration said it had no system to track separated families. At the time, a Health and Human Services official in charge of family reunification said the agency was trying to build one.Since then, a group of lawyers and immigrant advocates have worked to track down thousands of parents in Central America, using billboards and radio ads.White House Says Parents of Migrant Kids 'Declined to Accept Their Kids Back' After Report Saying Lawyers Can't Find ParentsBy Jason LemonNewsweekOctober 21, 2020 parents of the hundreds of migrant children who have still not been reunited with their families did not want their children back, according to a White House spokesman, who said the Trump administration had tried.Under President Donald Trump's highly controversial "zero tolerance" policy at the Mexican border, thousands of undocumented immigrant children were taken away from their parents or guardians. According to a court filing from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Tuesday, the parents of 545 migrant children have still not been tracked down. But the White House said Wednesday that it had tried and that the parents did not want the children back."Many of them have declined to accept their children back.... It's not for lack of effort on the administration's part," White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern said, according to NBC News.A 2-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. John Moore/GettyLee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, described the situation as "horrific" in comments to NPR."Some of these children were just babies when they were separated. Some of these children may now have been separated for more than half their lives. Almost their whole life, they have not been with their parents," he said.Ali Noorani, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, described the situation as "America's anguish, and our shame," in comments emailed to Newsweek."In a nation where family unity is a fundamental value, the administration separated families intentionally, with no way of tracking or reuniting them," Noorani said. "This is negligence layered on cruelty."Progressive Democratic lawmakers, who have repeatedly condemned the Trump administration's treatment of immigrants at the border and in detention centers, did not mince words in their criticism."This is child abuse of staggering proportions," Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted when the news broke on Tuesday."We created whole generation of children who will remember that we caged them like animals, ripped them away from their parents & pumped them with drugs to make them stop crying. No amount of apologies will make this better," Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan wrote in a Twitter post, calling for the abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.In 2017, the Trump administration began separating undocumented migrant children from their parents at the border. Then, in May 2018, the Justice Department announced that it had implemented the zero tolerance policy in an effort to further deter undocumented immigration. A little over a month later, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw issued a preliminary injunction ordering the Trump administration to reunite the migrant children with their families. But now, more than two years later, hundreds have yet to be returned to their parents."This administration ripped babies from their mother's arms, and then it seems those parents were in many cases deported without their children and have not been found. It's an outrage, a moral failing, and a stain on our national character," Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said in a statement emailed to Newsweek on Wednesday.Parents Of 545 Children Separated At U.S.-Mexico Border Still Can't Be FoundMark KatkovnprOctober 21, 2020 a federal judge's order that the government reunite families who had been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under the Trump administration's "no tolerance" migration policy, the parents of 545 children still can't be found, according to a court document filed Tuesday by the U.S. Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union.Thousands of families were separated under the policy before the Trump administration ended the practice in 2018. The ACLU successfully sued the government, winning a court order to reunite families. Thousands of parents and children were reunited within weeks.But about 1,000 families who had been separated in a pilot program in 2017 were not covered by the initial court order — reunification of this group was ordered only last year. The passage of time has made finding both parents and children more difficult."What has happened is horrific," says Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, who has been leading the litigation. "Some of these children were just babies when they were separated. Some of these children may now have been separated for more than half their lives. Almost their whole life, they have not been with their parents."The update on reunification efforts was filed ahead of a status conference scheduled for Thursday before U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego.The filing estimates that two-thirds of the separated parents are believed to have returned to their home countries. Nongovernmental groups appointed by the court have "engaged in time consuming and arduous on-the-ground searches for parents in their respective countries of origin," according to the filing, but those efforts were halted by the coronavirus pandemic and are only now resuming in limited fashion.NPR's Joel Rose reports that the children initially went into a shelter system before being placed with sponsors across the country and that many will likely try to remain in the United States. The ACLU's Gelernt says about 360 of the children still have not been located.The case is Ms. L. v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement et al., in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, 3:18-cv-428.Parents of 545 children separated at US border still not foundRights groups have been searching for parents by going door to door in Mexico and Central America.Al JazeeraOctober 21, 2020 a federal judge’s order that the government reunite families who had been separated at the United States-Mexico border under the Trump administration’s “no tolerance” migration policy, the parents of 545 children still have not been found.According to a court document filed on Tuesday by the US Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the children were separated between July 1, 2017, and June 26, 2018, when a federal judge in San Diego ordered that children in government custody be reunited with their parents.Children from that period are difficult to find because the government had inadequate tracking systems. Representatives from rights groups have been searching for parents by going door to door.A rally on Capitol Hill demands action to end family separations, inhumane detentions and deportations, in Washington, US on July 25, 2019 [File: Mary F. Calvert/Reuters]Justice in Motion, a New York-based non-profit organisation that has been assisting the ACLU to locate parents, say it suspended the search in March at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, but it now has 21 team members on the ground who have been physically searching for the separated parents in Mexico and Central America.“The Justice in Motion team take the often inaccurate and inadequate information that’s been provided by the government and do in-person physical searches to find the parents in their local communities,” Nan Schivone, the legal director at Justice in Motion, told Al Jazeera.More than 2,700 children were separated from their parents in June 2018 when US District Judge Dana Sabraw ordered an end to the practice under a “zero-tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute every adult who entered the country illegally from Mexico. The administration sparked an international outcry when parents could not find their children.While those families were reunited under court order, authorities later discovered that up to 1,556 children were separated under the policy going back to the summer of 2017, including hundreds during an initial run at family separation in El Paso, Texas, from July to November 2017, that was not publicly disclosed at the time.The ACLU, which sued over the practice, said a court-appointed steering committee located the parents of 485 children, up 47 from August. That leaves 545 still unaccounted for among the 1,030 children for whom the steering committee had telephone numbers from US authorities.About two-thirds of parents of those 545 children are believed to be in their countries of origin. But once located, Schivone says, many of the parents have a “glaring trust deficit” with anyone claiming to help them locate their children.“The US government treated them horribly and then deported them without their kids,” Schivone said. “Many of the deported parents who are still separated, once we found them, in explaining our role in helping to reunite them, it’s hard for them to believe that anyone in the US is willing to help.”The steering committee has also promoted toll-free phone numbers in Spanish to reach families.The judge has scheduled a hearing on Thursday to discuss the status of reunification efforts.“We are committed to seeing this through, to continue the searches in the way we have in the past,” Schivone said, “and we are enraged that we are in this situation three years later.”Parents of 545 Children Separated at Border Can't Be FoundBy Associated PressOctober 21, 2020 DIEGO - Court-appointed lawyers said Tuesday that they have been unable to find parents of 545 children who were separated at the U.S. border with Mexico early in the Trump administration.The children were separated between July 1, 2017, and June 26, 2018, when a federal judge in San Diego ordered that children in government custody be reunited with their parents.Children from that period are difficult to find because the government had inadequate tracking systems. Volunteers have searched for them and their parents by going door-to-door in Guatemala and Honduras.More than 2,700 children were separated from their parents in June 2018 when U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw ordered an end to the practice under a "zero-tolerance" policy to criminally prosecute every adult who entered the country illegally from Mexico. The administration sparked an international outcry when parents couldn't find their children.While those families were reunited under court order, authorities later discovered that up to 1,556 children were separated under the policy going back to the summer of 2017, including hundreds during an initial run at family separation in El Paso, Texas, from July to November 2017 that was not publicly disclosed at the time.The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued over the practice, said a court-appointed steering committee located parents of 485 children, up 47 from August. That leaves 545 still unaccounted for among the 1,030 children for whom the steering committee had telephone numbers from U.S. authorities.About two-thirds of parents of those 545 children are believed to be in their countries of origin, the ACLU said.Volunteers have "engaged in time-consuming and arduous on-the-ground searches for parents in their respective countries of origin," the ACLU said in a court filing. Those searches were suspended after the coronavirus outbreak but have resumed in a limited way.The steering committee has also promoted toll-free phone numbers in Spanish to reach families.The judge has scheduled a hearing on Thursday to discuss status of reunification efforts.Parents of 545 Children Separated at the Border Are Still MissingBy Bridget ReadThe CutOctober 21 2020 2018, the Trump administration was ordered by a federal judge to reunite families torn apart by its horrific, notorious “zero-tolerance policy” of family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border. Around 1,000 families were left out of that ruling, however: those who were separated in 2017 before the policy was officially implemented and still a “pilot program.” They were finally set to be reunited by another court order in 2019.Except that lawyers say that the parents of 545 children in this group are still missing, three years later. According to a document filed by the ACLU on Tuesday, advocates assigned with tracking down the parents of children separated by the pilot program have not been able to locate them. They believe at least two-thirds were deported to Central America.“People ask when we will find all of these families, and sadly, I can’t give an answer. I just don’t know,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, told NBC. The ACLU, other pro bono law firms, and human-rights organizations searching on the ground have been able to contact the parents of around 550 children, and believes approximately 25 of them may have a chance to come back to the U.S. for reunification. Some parents have reportedly chosen to keep their kids in the U.S., “due to fear of what will happen to their child if they return.” Separated children were initially held in the shelter system before being placed with sponsors around the country, according to NPR. Three-hundred and sixty of them have still not been located.The scale of the damage “zero tolerance” did to families at the border is beyond comprehension. Some of the children who’ve remained in the United States were infants when they were separated, and have lived more than half their lives without their parents. For those parents who cannot be found, the separation may be permanent.“The tragic reality is that hundreds of parents were deported to Central America without their children, who remain here with foster families or distant relatives,” Gelernt said. “It is critical to find out as much as possible about who was responsible for this horrific practice while not losing sight of the fact that hundreds of families have still not been found and remain separated. There is so much more work to be done to find these families.”The parents of 545 children separated at the border still haven’t been found. The pandemic isn’t helping.By Teo Armus and Maria SacchettiThe Washington PostOctober 21, 2020 for immigrants say they still have not found the parents of 545 minors who were separated from their families starting three years ago during President Trump’s immigration crackdown at the U.S.-Mexico border.The 545 children are among more than 1,500 who were separated from their parents as far back as July 1, 2017, and they include cases that were part of a pilot immigration program at the time and were not immediately disclosed to the U.S. district judge who ordered the families reunited in June 2018, said American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Lee Gelernt.More than two-thirds of the minors are from Central America, and the children are believed to be with sponsors or other family members in the United States.“Unfortunately, there’s an enormous amount of work yet to be done to find these families — work that will be difficult, but we are committed to doing,” Gelernt said after filing information about the children with the federal court on Tuesday. “Not only are we still looking for hundreds of families, but we would have never even known about these families if the Trump administration had its way.”Department of Homeland Security officials said Wednesday that the government has been working to reunite the children with their families but has found in some cases that parents do not want to claim them, a move that allows the children to remain in the United States. Justice Department lawyers have said in court filings that most of the separated children already have been released to parents or legal guardians.“DHS has taken every step to facilitate the reunification of these families where the parents wanted such reunification to occur,” said DHS spokesman Chase Jennings.Health and Human Services officials confirmed Wednesday that all of the 545 minors were “appropriately discharged” from its shelters — to a legal guardian or a parent — before June 2018, when the judge ordered the reunifications.The ACLU has demanded the names of all separated parents and children and wants to work to confirm all reunifications. The organization, which filed the lawsuit that led to the judge’s order to reunite the families, estimates that as many as 5,400 children have been separated from their families since Trump took office.More than half were split up from May to June in 2018, when DHS and the Justice Department rolled out the administration’s official “zero tolerance” policy to deter a surge of asylum-seeking families at the southern border.The ACLU and others say the effort to locate the still-separated families has been hindered by incomplete government reports as well as conditions on the ground in the children’s native lands, including gang violence, remote villages, and now, the coronavirus pandemic.With the elections less than two weeks away, the updated numbers ignited fresh outrage about one of the Trump administration’s biggest debacles, and one that sharply divided members of his Republican Party. Democrats seized on the new filing to remind voters that the family separations remain unresolved.“Every day, it seems we uncover new horrors perpetrated by President Trump and his administration,” Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic rival, said in a tweet.Lawmakers and advocates for immigrants said Wednesday that the government should do more to ensure the families are reunited.“I was very shaken by the number,” said Efrén Olivares, who, as director of the racial and economic justice program at the Texas Civil Rights Project, worked with separated families in the Rio Grande Valley. “This was torture.”The federal judge overseeing the reunifications ordered government officials to hand over records to a group of lawyers and advocates, including Gelernt and his team at the ACLU, who undertook a months-long effort to locate thousands of parents. By now, most of those still in custody when the judge issued the reunification order in June 2018 have been reunited, either in the United States or in their home countries.But the actual number of separated families was higher. Lawyers say about 1,500 children had been taken from their parents before the official launch of “zero tolerance” in spring of 2018, including while family separations were being carried out during a secretive pilot program in El Paso. Many of those parents were deported, never given the option of reuniting with their children in the United States.Trump had campaigned on ending illegal crossings at the southern border, but his plan was thwarted when smugglers began sending busloads of families — often one parent and one child — to seek asylum in the United States. With limited family detention beds, most were released together to await an asylum hearing.To counter the surge, the Trump administration opted to prosecute parents for the crime of crossing the border illegally, and then separated them from their children.When parents returned to immigration detention after a brief court hearing, their children were gone.Officials transferred the minors — some as young as infants — to U.S. Health and Human Services shelters across the United States. A federal judge and government inspectors found that the Trump administration did not have a plan to quickly reunite them.Of the 1,500 separations, approximately 500 are not considered to be part of the lawsuit. Gelernt said advocates have contacted the parents of 485 of the children. DHS says these parents have opted not to reunite with their children, but Gelernt said many parents still hope to come to the United States to be with them.Of the 545 children whose parents have not yet been found, advocates have managed to reach 183 of the children, and they remain in the United States.“At some point, we’re going to hit a group of families that becomes very hard to find,” Gelernt said. “It’s not inconceivable that we’ll still be looking for them a year from now.”When records prove insufficient, lawyers must instead rely on a network of human rights lawyers and nonprofit staff — led by the New York-based group Justice in Motion — who have tried to physically track families on the ground in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico.With little more than a misspelled name or an outdated phone number, the attorneys travel to remote, mountainous villages that are sometimes controlled by gangs and residents often are suspicious of all outsiders. The roads to these tiny hamlets are bumpy and ragged, and the prevailing tongue might be the Mayan language of Mam, not Spanish.These human rights defenders “take the minimal, often inaccurate or out-of-date information provided by the government and do in-person investigations to find these parents,” Nan Schivone, the group’s legal director, said in a statement to The Washington Post, noting it was already “an arduous and time-consuming process on a good day.”Then came the coronavirus pandemic.With strict curfews and other containment measures imposed across much of Central America, Justice in Motion was forced to halt its work entirely. The suspicion and trauma common among separated parents — who are no easier to locate these days — has made it difficult to replicate efforts online.“We had to completely stop because of the pandemic,” one Honduran human rights defender, Dora Melara, told KQED.For months, as outbreaks of covid-19 spread worldwide, hundreds of parents and children continued to remain apart — now in quarantine.Some of the pandemic rules have loosened in recent months, but the work remains no less challenging. In Honduras, where people are only able to leave their homes once a week, Melara spends her one free day traveling to visit families, even though she must be back in her own home 14 hours later.The last thing she and others plan to do is give up.“When we will find these parents is impossible to know,” Gelernt said, “but we will not stop until we find every last family.”Some Trump administration officials involved in the “zero tolerance” policy have disavowed the effort. Before stepping down as acting Homeland Security secretary, Kevin McAleenan, said the family separations “went too far.” And his predecessor, Kirstjen Nielsen told “PBS NewsHour” that she did not regret enforcing the law, but was sorry for the prolonged separations.“What I regret is that that information flow and coordination to quickly reunite the families was clearly not in place,” she said.U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Tex.) said Wednesday that the government should do more to ensure that the families have been reunited, noting that it is another example of the administration not caring about the immigrant community.“This never should have happened in the first place, and it’s up to us now to fix it,” Garcia said.*****************************************************TRUMP SAYS THE CHILDREN WERE "SO WELL TAKEN CARE OF”To defend taking immigrant kids from their parents, Trump blamed BidenBy Philip BumpThe Washington PostOctober 22, 2020 the top of the list of ways that President Trump’s administration has deviated from established practice was his endorsement of a zero-tolerance policy for families seeking to migrate to the United States.During the second year of his term in office, families hoping to escape violence in Central America or seeking more economic opportunity began arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in record numbers to seek asylum in the United States. Immigrant advocates began to notice that children were systematically being separated from their parents and detained in different facilities. The administration at first denied that there had been any formally instituted policy change leading to the separations, but it soon became apparent that these separations were meant to evoke precisely the terror that inevitably resulted. The goal was a simple, callous one: make parents choose between seeking asylum or keeping their kids.Make parents fleeing violence and poverty risk losing their children.Following public outcry, the administration folded, ending the policy. Over the two years that followed, attention was redirected to other ways in which Trump’s behavior as president broke with established norms. But, as NBC News reported this week, hundreds of the children separated under the policy still hadn’t been reunited with their parents. When the policy first came to light, there were dozens of stories about the panic and cruelty involved, audio recordings of parents wailing as their children were taken away. The quiet suffering of the kids still separated from their parents, though, flew under the radar.During Thursday night’s presidential debate, moderator Kristen Welker asked Trump how he would ensure that those kids and their parents would be able to see each other once again. The question prompted one of the most heated exchanges between Trump and his opponent, former vice president Joe Biden — and spurred a blizzard of at-times contradictory excuses and redirections from the president.“Children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people. Cartels,” Trump began. “And they’re brought here and they used to use them to get into our country.”This is a standard bit of rhetoric for Trump but one, as Biden was quick to note, that is untrue. There are sporadic examples of people arriving at the border with children who aren’t their own, though those are usually more distant family members (aunts and uncles, for example) or family friends. Nearly all of the kids at issue were, instead, traveling with their parents, which was entirely the point of the policy.After Trump riffed about the border wall for a while, Welker pressed him on her question: “How will you reunite these kids with their families, Mr. President?”“Let me just tell you,” Trump replied. “They built cages” — referring to the administration of Barack Obama. “You know, they used to say I built the cages. And then they had a picture in a certain newspaper and it was a picture of these horrible cages and they said, look at these cages, President Trump built them. And then it was determined they were built in 2014. That was him. They built cages.”It’s true that, in 2014, a surge in children arriving at the border prompted the Obama-Biden administration to build systems to house them while they were processed. That surge, in fact, spurred a massive backlash on the right, providing political energy that Trump leveraged the next year in announcing his presidential bid. But Trump’s conflation of “building the cages” with “using them to house kids taken from their parents” is obviously ludicrous, like excusing kidnapping a dozen people in your basement by arguing that you didn’t build your house.Welker again asked if Trump’s administration had a plan to reunite the children with their parents, which Trump insisted they did.But they do not. As the New York Times’s Caitlin Dickerson reported, the parents are being sought by court-appointed lawyers after the administration was forced to release information about the separated children. This is no easy task; as was made obvious at the outset of the policy, the separation policy was haphazard and sloppy, often excluding proper record-keeping which might allow reunification.After Biden pointed out that Trump’s claim about the children being smuggled was false, Trump interjected to say that they — Obama and Biden — did it but he “changed the policy.” This is an old canard of Trump’s, pretending that his policy on children was simply a continuation of his predecessor, which it wasn’t, and that the policy he ended only under duress was, instead, his nobly ending a hated inheritance from Obama.Trump began taunting Biden, asking the former vice president who built the cages. Biden, visibly angry, sidestepped the comments.“Let’s talk about what we’re talking about,” he said. “What happened? Parents were ripped — their kids were ripped from their arms and separated and now they cannot find over 500 of sets of those parents and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal, it’s criminal.”Trump had a rebuttal.“Kristen, I will say this: they went down, we brought reporters, everything,” he said, referring to a belated tour of one facility that occurred as the policy was in place. “They are so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that were so clean, that have gotten such good —"Welker jumped in before Trump could finish whatever point he was going to make.One of Trump’s rhetorical tics is that he tends to land in well-worn grooves. This was one: As the policy was being debated, his team tried to defend it by suggesting that the children were being well cared for. But, of course, that’s not really the broader issue that was being debated. This was, after all, the president who a few minutes prior had referred to the cages in which the children were being housed as “horrible”; now, though, looking for a point to score, he slipped into his “we took good care of the kids who we took away from the families they loved and with whom they’d traveled thousands of miles seeking a safer life.”Regardless, even that claim wasn’t true. The conditions in which they were held were often dire and dirty.That this policy has largely been absent from the conversation over the course of this election is, if nothing else, a sign of the breadth of concerns Trump’s critics have raised about his tenure in the White House. It seems likely, though, that the family separation policy will be one of the first decisions included in future summaries of Trump’s presidency, whether it lasts for one term or two.It proved so indefensible in 2018 that Trump walked away from it, something he’s only rarely done. Two years later, seeking four more years in office, Trump was unable to effectively defend it.Trump Tried to Blur Responsibility for His Family Separation Policy in Final DebatePresident Trump repeatedly hurled the phrase “They built the cages” at his debate opponent Thursday, but separating children from parents was a policy all his own.By Zolan Kanno-YoungsThe New York TimesOctober 23, 2020 — President Trump has never been known for making apologies or displaying regret, but when his policy of separating children from their families at the southwestern border arose during his debate with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Thursday, he had a ready deflection for the “kids in cages” accusation.It was Mr. Biden’s fault.“They said, ‘Look at these cages; President Trump built them,’” Mr. Trump said. “And then it was determined they were built in 2014. That was him.”Mr. Trump is correct that the Obama administration expanded the number of border facilities with chain-linked enclosures in 2014, but the journey from their construction to contend with a surge of Central American children crossing the border to Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that led to the separation of thousands of families was not captured by the president’s evasions. Nor is it explained by the “kids in cages” catchphrase often hurled by Mr. Trump’s opponents.“It is one of the definitive phrases, but I don’t think sloganeering will ever bring you closer to why this disaster happened in the first place,” Cristobal Ramón, a senior policy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said of the “kids in cages” catchall. “You have to get beyond slogans.”The Obama administration separated children from adults at the border only in cases when there was a doubt about the familial relationship between a child and an accompanying adult or if the adult had a serious criminal record.Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy was a deliberate act of family separation, meant to deter migrants from trying to enter the United States. It directed prosecutors to file criminal charges against everyone who crossed the border without authorization, including parents, who were then separated from their children when they were taken into custody.That policy was ended amid international outcry, but its repercussions remain. Court documents filed this week showed 545 children still have not been reunited with their parents after the Trump administration resisted sharing information with a court-appointed committee of lawyers and advocacy groups tasked with finding their guardians.But as with many of Mr. Trump’s prevarications, there was a nugget of truth to his assertions Thursday night. The holding of migrant children in chain-linked enclosures predated his administration.Traditionally, migrants who crossed the border initially were held by the Border Patrol in stations designed for the short-term stay of a specific population: single Mexican adults who could be quickly returned to Mexico. In 2014, the demographic at the border shifted dramatically, to Central American families and unaccompanied children who surrendered to agents with the hope of obtaining protection in the United States.A law designed to protect migrant children, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, prevented the U.S. government from rapidly turning away such families, since they had not traveled from a neighboring country. The families, who fled poverty, torture and persecution, were instead packed into the stations, prompting agents to cram some into adjacent concrete sally ports — essentially large garages — in the sweltering heat.“I went back to Washington and said you have a humanitarian disaster in front of you,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, recalling his message to the Obama administration after a visit to the facilities in 2014.The Obama administration then converted a warehouse in McAllen, Texas, into a facility that could hold more than 1,000 detainees. That facility, with chain fencing installed to separate adult men from mothers and children, would later be known as the Central Processing Center.“They stood up what we thought would be a temporary structure” that would be better for families and children, said Ronald D. Vitiello, former deputy chief of the Border Patrol in the Obama administration and a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Mr. Trump. “In a nontechnical sense, are those cages? I guess you could call them that.”The design, he said, was to “be open so you can see from one side of the facility to the other to protect people in it.”But expediency led to cruelty. Mr. Trump claimed on Thursday that the migrants were “so well taken care of,” but in reality, his own policies fueled overcrowding in the holding facilities.After drawing widespread condemnation from lawmakers in both parties, immigration activists and the United Nations, Mr. Trump signed an executive order in June of 2018 that largely ended the policy of family separation.But the president’s anti-immigration messaging helped fuel another surge of Central American families seeking refuge at the border in 2019. Smugglers purchased radio spots warning families that there was a brief window to go to the United States before the next crackdown.After they are processed in a Border Patrol facility, migrant children traveling alone are supposed to be transferred to a shelter managed by the Health and Human Services Department, where many are subsequently released to a relative sponsor.But Mr. Trump deterred many sponsors from claiming those children by requiring they provide fingerprints and other personal information that some feared would later be used to find and deport them. With spaces limited in those shelters as well as longer-term detention facilities managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the holding cells along the border were once again crammed with children lacking proper hygienic resources and exposed to disease. They were held in the border cells for weeks, even though the government is supposed to transfer them to shelters within 72 hours.“There was the front-end policy of separating children through zero tolerance,” Mr. Ramón said. “There was the back-end policy of requiring fingerprints to get children out of detention.”“That’s where you create this backlog of children in facilities that weren’t designed for them,” he added.The detention facilities are not as relevant now — but not because migration has halted. Instead, through its “Remain in Mexico” policies, the Trump administration has forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers to wait on the other side of the border for court hearings, creating squalid refugee camps in some of Mexico’s more dangerous areas.The administration has also cited the coronavirus in using a public health emergency rule to rapidly return migrants, including children traveling alone, back to Mexico or their home country.At the debate on Thursday, Mr. Trump hurled his “They built the cages” accusation at Mr. Biden repeatedly, so often that it was difficult for Mr. Biden to answer. But the former vice president did manage to say that parents had their children “ripped from their arms and separated, and now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone, nowhere to go, nowhere to go.“It’s criminal,” Mr. Biden added.Lee Gelernt, the primary lawyer challenging the family separation policy, said Mr. Trump was trying “to switch the debate” away from a policy that was exclusive to his administration.“The fact is no other administration, Democrat or Republican, has ever systematically separated children,” Mr. Gelernt said. “The Trump administration’s actions to systematically separate children is unprecedented and what made that much more horrific is that there was no age limit. Even babies and toddlers were separated.”Trump says children separated from their parents were "so well taken care of"By Kathryn WatsonCBS NewsOctober 23, 2020 the first time, President Trump addressed the finding that the federal government still cannot find the parents of 545 children separated at the border. At Thursday's presidential debate, Mr. Trump claimed his administration is working to reunite children with their parents, but also claimed the children in U.S. custody have been "so well taken care of."Advocates have been unable to reach the parents of 545 children who were separated by U.S. immigration authorities at the southern border and who could be eligible for court-mandated reunifications, according to a joint legal filing earlier this week by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Justice Department.Mr. Trump started off answering by claiming it was the Obama administration, not the Trump administration, that built the "cages" for children. Pressed further, the president claimed he does have a plan but a lot of children came to the U.S. without their parents, many brought by coyotes, or a person who smuggles people across the border.Thousands of migrant children have allegedly suffered sexual abuse while in U.S. government custody over the past four years, according to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) documents released last year by Florida Democratic Congressman Ted Deutch.According to the documents, over a thousand allegations of sexual abuse against unaccompanied minors in HHS custody were reported to federal authorities each fiscal year since 2015. In total, between October 2014 and July 2018, 4,556 sexual abuse complaints were reported to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) — an agency within HHS in charge of caring for unaccompanied migrant minors.Amna Nawaz, a reporter with PBS News Hour, offered her own perspective on Twitter."President Trump said the separated children were 'so well taken care of.' I've been inside the border processing centers where many kids and families were held. They were under resourced. Crowded. Staff overwhelmed. Groups of young kids crammed into windowless rooms," she of FormBottom of FormPresident Trump Won't Say How 545 Migrant Children Still Separated From Their Parents Will Be ReunitedBy Lissandra Villa TimeOctober 23, 2020 Donald Trump defended his Administration’s decision to separate migrant children from their parents—and would not detail how he planned to reunite hundreds of kids who reportedly remain separated years later.At the final presidential debate Thursday night, Trump was asked about the families of 545 kids who have not been located after being separated because of his administration’s immigration policy. The Trump Administration previously pursued a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy as a deterrent for immigrants by prosecuting adults who crossed into the country illegally, resulting in systematic family separation. While many of the families separated by this practice have been reunited, it was later learned that the number of separated children was bigger than initially reported. Earlier this week, members on the steering committee charged with reuniting the families, including the ACLU, said 545 children’s parents still cannot be found, and estimated that about two-thirds had been deported without their kids.“Yes, we’re working on it, we’re trying very hard,” Trump said when pressed on how his Administration was working to reunite the families. He did not go into details, pivoting instead to tout border security.Meanwhile groups like Justice in Motion are working to make family reunification happen, including by conducting on the ground searches, to track down the families. They have reportedly struggled in part because of the time that has lapsed since the separations took place at the border.Instead of engaging with the policy around the specifics, Trump tried to place blame on the Obama Administration, and suggested that “bad people” had brought the children to attempt getting into the U.S. In fact, they were brought by their families, many fleeing violent and dangerous situations, to attempt building a better life.The Biggest Moments in the Final Presidential DebateThe zero-tolerance policy sparked national fury in 2018 when thousands of families were torn apart at the border, with heartbreaking crying of some of the children among one of the most poignant cases against it. Eventually, the Trump Administration reversed course following public outrage. A recent New York Times report on an inspector general’s investigation into the policy revealed that top Department of Justice officials knew the policy would separate families, yet chose to pursue it broadly.The immigration portion of the debate spanned several subjects. Asked about the Obama Administration’s immigration policy—which included record deportations— Biden sought to create rare distance between himself and the President he served.“We made a mistake,” Biden said of their immigration agenda. “It took too long to get it right. Took too long to get it right. I’ll be President of the United States, not Vice President of the United States.” Notably, the reason an immigration overhaul did not move forward during Obama’s tenure was because a Republican-led House refused to take up the bipartisan immigration deal passed by the Senate in 2013.Biden said Thursday he was committed to creating a pathway to citizenship for more than 11 million undocumented people. He specifically nodded to DREAMers, whose status the Trump Administration has challenged.Trump is known for his racist and xenophobic comments, and has a long history of making them against immigrants. His biases were on full display during the immigration portion of the debate. During a discussion about “catch-and-release,” which allowed undocumented immigrants to return for a court date rather than be held in custody, Trump said: “Only the really — I hate to say this — but those with the lowest IQ, they might come back.”Biden criticized Trump on his immigration agenda. “It makes us a laughingstock,” Biden said. “It violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”‘Kids in cages’: It’s true that Obama built the cages at the border. But Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy had no precedent.By Nick MiroffThe Washington PostOctober 23, 2020 phrase “kids in cages” has become a catchall for the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement in recent years, to the president’s evident frustration. As he pointed out during Thursday night’s presidential debate, he didn’t build the “cages” — the Obama administration did.When moderator Kristen Welker asked about the president’s “zero tolerance” policy in 2018 and the separation of thousands of migrant parents from their children, President Trump immediately tried to skirt responsibility by blaming former president Barack Obama.“They built cages,” he said, referring to the Obama administration. “You know, they used to say I built the cages. And then they had a picture in a certain newspaper and it was a picture of these horrible cages and they said, look at these cages, President Trump built them. And then it was determined they were built in 2014. That was him. They built cages.”Biden responded by stating, correctly, that the Obama administration did not systematically separate parents from their children at the border, a practice that generated such backlash that the first lady and Trump’s daughter Ivanka joined the groundswell of people who pressured him to end it.“Let’s talk about what we’re talking about,” Biden said. “What happened? Parents were ripped — their kids were ripped from their arms and separated and now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal. It’s criminal.”The two claims at the core of the exchange — that Obama built the cages and Trump did something unprecedented with them — were not wrong. But the wider context and history were missing.In spring 2014, Central American families, teenagers and children began crossing the border into the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, turning themselves over to U.S. agents in unprecedented numbers.Fleeing poverty, chronic violence and joblessness, the families also were spurred by smugglers telling them that children who cross the border could generally avoid lengthy detention and certain deportation. Those claims were accurate.By May 2014, thousands of Central Americans were streaming into Texas, overwhelming U.S. agents and leaving Border Patrol detention cells jampacked. More than 4,000 adults and children were arriving a day at the peak of the crisis.Border Patrol stations were so overcrowded that agents began using the “sally port” areas outside the stations — little more than outdoor garages — as holding pens. Mothers with babies and young children were left for hours in 90-plus-degree heat, sprawled out on concrete floors with little more than bologna sandwiches and Kool-Aid.The Washington Post obtained a video of the conditions at the McAllen station not long after the Breitbart website published photos showing the dire situation inside the facility.The Obama administration responded to the outrage by rushing to expand its capacity to handle the new migration wave at the border, to adapt an infrastructure built to handle single adult men, not families and children.The government acquired an empty warehouse a few blocks from the McAllen station and converted it into a sprawling new facility that opened in July 2014, a place that had capacity for 1,500 detainees. The new “Central Processing Center,” or CPC, was clean, spacious, air-conditioned and a major improvement over the cramped detention cells and sweltering garages.To keep different demographic groups safely apart — a standard practice in detention settings — the U.S. Border Patrol used chain-link fencing to create partitions in the cavernous warehouse. One area was designated for teenage boys, another for mothers with small children, another for entire family groups, and so on.The chain-link fencing was cheap, allowed for good ventilation and carried the benefit of allowing agents to supervise the entire facility, by affording them full visibility into the enclosures.Its grim, industrial appearance, however, was redolent of a livestock operation rather than a humane facility. Migrants and some agents soon derided it as “la perrera” — the dog kennel.The facility was controversial at the time, but it wasn’t until Trump’s zero-tolerance episode in spring 2018 that the facility came to symbolize the kind of administrative cruelty associated with the intentional separation of children from their parents by the government.As criticism of the separation practices grew, the government allowed television crews inside the CPC, intending to show that families were being treated humanely. It backfired. Instead, viewers were shocked and appalled at the sight of children staring back through the chain-links of a human warehouse.Trump ended the zero-tolerance efforts in June 2018, after six weeks. The controversy and attention the episode generated — and Trump’s declaration that children would no longer be separated — was something smugglers quickly seized on. They began telling would-be clients that children were a passport into the United States.A new migration wave built, and by May 2019 more than 144,000 migrants were taken into U.S. custody amid a record surge of Central American families and children. The CPC filled to nearly twice its capacity, and while the Trump administration occasionally allowed lawmakers and reporters inside, it imposed strict controls on filming and photography.The facility is mostly empty now, the result of emergency coronavirus enforcement measures that allow the Border Patrol to quickly “expel” most migrants to Mexico. But despite calls to replace the chain-links with plexiglass or another material, the warehouse and the chain-links — built by Obama, used in an unprecedented way by Trump — remain unchanged.*****************************************************RECENT EDITORIALSLet’s not mince words. The Trump administration kidnapped children.Opinion by Editorial BoardThe Washington PostOctober 21, 2020 TRUMP administration’s immorality, cruelty and bureaucratic malpractice in tearing migrant toddlers, tweens and teens away from their parents in 2017 and 2018 were the work of many co-conspirators, most of them faithfully carrying out the wishes of the president himself. A draft report by the Justice Department’s inspector general has made that clear. Perhaps even more shocking is that policy’s present-day legacy: More than 500 children who, having been wrenched from their families by U.S. government officials with no plan or mechanism ever to reunite them, remain separated.That is the case despite years of efforts to track down parents who were, in many cases, deported after their children were seized and placed with family sponsors in the United States. For all intents and purposes, these children were kidnapped by the U.S. government.In fact, it has not even been the U.S. government that has tried to reunite these sundered families. That has been the work of a court-appointed body organized by the American Civil Liberties Union, a nongovernmental organization. The ACLU, in effect, was put in charge of trying to fix what the Trump administration shattered — the lives of hundreds of children and families. Even now, the parents of 545 separated children cannot be located, despite the efforts of lawyers and advocates, according to a new court filing.To its authors in the Trump administration, the child separation policy was justified in the name of inflicting such emotional trauma on migrant families that further illegal crossing of the southern border would be deterred.That was the clear takeaway from the report of the Justice Department’s inspector general, a draft of which was reviewed by the New York Times. The report, whose final contours are unlikely to change significantly, paints a stomach-wrenching portrait of indifference and indecency on the part of U.S. officials. In the end, the policy was abandoned only when Americans, in overwhelming numbers, expressed their outrage at images and accounts of children torn from their families.In what the Times cites as a 32-page response to the report by Gene Hamilton, a top Justice Department lawyer, the impetus for the family separation policy comes into focus. It was Mr. Trump himself who, in an April 2018 meeting with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, demanded a blitz of prosecutions to deter further border crossings.Some federal prosecutors along the border balked at bringing charges against migrant parents whose children would automatically be removed from their care. But at Justice, top officials washed their hands of ethical responsibility regarding the children’s welfare. “I just don’t see that as a [Justice Department] equity,” Rod J. Rosenstein, then-deputy attorney general, told the inspector general.In a sense, Mr. Rosenstein was right: The job of protecting blameless children from emotional trauma is not a government “equity”; it is a human obligation. It is basic human decency, which was lacking in all the senior officials who helped implement this unspeakably callous policy.Do we tolerate the kidnapping of children? This election is our chance to answer.Opinion by Eugene RobinsonThe Washington PostOctober 22, 2020 kind of people are we? As a society, are we so decadent and insecure that we show "toughness" by deliberately being cruel to innocent children? Is this what our nation has come to? Or are we better than that?This election demands we answer those questions. The choice between President Trump and Joe Biden is not just political. It is also moral. And perhaps nothing more starkly illustrates the moral dimension of that decision than the Trump administration's policy of kidnapping children at the southern U.S. border, ripping them away from their families — and doing so for no reason other than to demonstrate Trump's warped vision of American strength.We learned this week that some of those separations will probably be permanent. As NBC News first reported, 545 boys and girls taken as many as three years ago — the children of would-be immigrants and asylum seekers, mostly from Central America — have not been reunited with their parents and may never see their families again.These are not among the nearly 3,000 families separated at the border in 2018, when children were kept in cages like animals or shipped away to facilities across the country, hundreds or thousands of miles from the border. We now know, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union and other pro bono lawyers, that an additional 1,500 children were torn away from their families beginning in 2017, when the Trump administration conducted a trial run of the separation policy.Please think about that. The shocking scenes we saw two years ago did not result from a sudden spasm of presidential anger. They didn't stem from a Fox News segment Trump might have seen one evening. Rather, the administration rehearsed this form of cruelty.What the administration did not plan for was how to reunite the children taken in 2017 with their families. Many of the parents were deported, and their children were placed in shelters around the country, then ostensibly released to parents or guardians, placements that the ACLU is still trying to confirm.The ACLU and other organizations have sent investigators to towns and villages in Central America in an attempt to find the kidnapped children's families — an effort complicated not just by time and distance, but also by the covid-19 pandemic. Parents of 545 children have not been found, the ACLU reported this week.Disturbingly, the Department of Homeland Security suggested that some of the parents declined to get their children back so they could remain in the United States. Keep in mind that most of these families were seeking asylum from deadly violence in their home countries. The Trump administration changed immigration guidelines to make it unlikely that the families would ultimately be allowed to stay in the United States, but federal law gives them the right to apply for asylum and to have their cases heard. They did nothing wrong. They should never have been asked to choose between parenting their children and getting them to safety — not by their home countries, and not by the United States.Trump's racism and xenophobia have been hallmarks of his presidency from the beginning, so perhaps it should be no surprise that he would preside over such an outrage. But he didn't do this by himself. He had plenty of help.Former attorney general Jeff Sessions seized an opportunity to make his rabid antipathy toward Hispanic immigration into policy. White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide in the Senate, was the architect of Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy. Then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said in 2018 that the children taken would be "taken care of — put into foster care or whatever." Former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said last year that she regretted that "information flow and coordination to quickly reunite the families was clearly not in place" — but not the separations themselves.If you have minor children, imagine taking them on a harrowing trek across Mexico in search of safety and opportunity. Imagine having your kids snatched away by anonymous agents of the U.S. government. Imagine being summarily sent home, not knowing where your children are or when you might see them again. Imagine hearing nothing for three long years from the people who took your children.Then tell me why somebody shouldn't go to jail for this.It is easy to engage in hyperbole about the Trump administration — the worst this, the most outrageous that. But I honestly never believed my country would treat defenseless children this way. I never believed we would tolerate a president capable of such evil. Soon we will find out whether I was right or wrong.545 children are still separated from their families. What if one of them were yours?Opinion by Ruth MarcusThe Washington PostOctober 23, 2020 is the number of children still separated from their families by the Trump administration — separated deliberately, cruelly and recklessly. They might never be reunited with their parents again. Even if they are, the damage is unimaginable and irreparable.545.Even one would be too many. Each one represents a unique tragedy. Imagine being ripped from your parents, or having your child taken from you. Imagine the desperation that the parents feel, the trauma inflicted on their children.545.That number represents an indelible stain on President Trump and every individual in his administration who implemented this policy, flawed at the conception and typically, gruesomely incompetent in the execution. It is, perhaps in the technical sense but surely in the broader one, a crime against humanity. It is torture.545.That number — I will stop repeating it, yet it cannot be repeated enough — represents a moral challenge and responsibility for the next administration. If Joe Biden is elected president, he must devote the maximum resources of the federal government to fixing this disaster. The United States broke these families; it must do whatever it takes to help them heal.Nothing like that would happen in a second Trump term, because Trump himself doesn’t care. He doesn’t grasp the horror that he oversaw. He doesn’t comprehend the policy, and he is incapable of feeling the pain it inflicted.Those truths could not have been clearer cut than during Thursday night’s debate.Moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News asked the president a simple question: “How will these families ever be reunited?”First, Trump misstated the situation: “Their children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they’re brought here, and they used to use them to get into our country.”No. These are children separated from their families, not separated from smugglers. They are children brought by their parents in desperate search of a better life, desperate enough that they would take the risk of the dangerous journey.Then Trump pivoted to the irrelevant: “We now have as strong a border as we’ve ever had. We’re over 400 miles of brand new wall. You see the numbers. And we let people in, but they have to come in legally.”Welker persisted: “But how will you reunite these kids with their families, Mr. President?”Trump responded by pointing his finger at his predecessor: “Let me just tell you, they built cages. You know, they used to say I built the cages, and then they had a picture in a certain newspaper and it was a picture of these horrible cages and they said look at these cages, President Trump built them, and then it was determined they were built in 2014. That was him.”This is typical Trumpian deflection, bluster undergirded by ignorance. The “cages” are ugly but irrelevant to the topic at hand: the deliberately cruel plan to deter border-crossing by separating children from parents. That was a Trump administration special, implemented with callous sloppiness and so extreme that even the Trump administration abandoned it.Welker, for the third time: “Do you have a plan to reunite the kids with their families?”At which point Trump made clear that he did not: “We’re trying very hard, but a lot of these kids come out without the parents, they come over through cartels and through coyotes and through gangs.” The children, he added later, “are so well taken care of, they’re in facilities that were so clean.”Wrong, wrong and wrong. Wrong that the administration is “trying very hard” — the efforts to reunite the children that they separated from their families are being driven by court orders and outside groups. The Trump administration has been “trying very hard” only to prevent reunifications, arguing in court that it didn’t need to provide additional information about some of the separated children because they had already been released from federal shelters and were living with sponsors.Wrong that “a lot of these kids come out without the parents” — the children Welker was asking about came with their parents, from whom they were deliberately separated by the Trump administration. As a draft report by the Justice Department inspector general quotes former attorney general Jeff Sessions instructing prosecutors: “We need to take away children.”Wrong that the children “are so well taken care of.” By definition, they are not; the ones that Welker was asking about have been separated from their parents, some at unconscionably early ages. And in reality, they are not; the conditions in some facilities are appalling.Biden, the Democratic nominee, gets it. “Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated and now they cannot find over 500 of sets of those parents and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal, it’s criminal.” The situation, he said, “violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”*****************************************************RECENT DEVELOPMENTSTop of FormBottom of FormTrump administration pressures CDC to back detention of migrant children in border hotels amid coronavirusCDC career officials have pushed back on what they see as an effort to use government scientists to advance the president’s political agendaBy Lena H. Sun and Nick MiroffThe Washington PostOctober 23, 2020 Trump administration has been pressuring health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to endorse the use of border hotels to hold migrant children before deporting them, a practice the government halted last month under court order, according to federal health officials.Career CDC officials have declined to sign off on a declaration requested by the Department of Health and Human Services affirming that the use of hotels to detain migrant children is the best way to protect them from the spread of the novel coronavirus, according to one HHS official who has seen the declaration.HHS has the responsibility for overseeing a network of shelters that care for underage migrants who arrive to the United States without an adult. The minors typically remain in the shelters until they are deported, or the government releases them into the custody of a sponsor, who is often a relative.“CDC career scientists should not be pressured to sign a legal declaration justifying the administration’s treatment of unaccompanied minors,” said the HHS official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “Our federal scientists are understandably refusing to sign a document lending support to the administration’s immigration policies and practices.”The request from HHS is the latest example of the administration’s efforts to use government scientists and physicians to advance the president’s political agenda. Under pressure from the White House, the CDC has repeatedly delayed and watered down guidelines on how Americans might protect themselves from the coronavirus, including the safest ways to reopen churches and schools.The situation involving the border hotels is similar to the standoff that occurred this spring when White House officials, seeking to implement sweeping emergency border controls, asked the CDC to produce a public health justification by saying the plan would stop the spread of the coronavirus across the border. CDC experts balked, and the justification was passed up to CDC Director Robert Redfield, a Trump appointee, who eventually signed it, according to a CDC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations.That action resulted in a public health order that has effectively allowed the Trump administration to waive standard immigration proceedings for protected groups, including minors, to implement rapid border “expulsions” known as Title 42 processing.The CDC declined to comment. HHS spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley also declined to comment on matters that she said are in litigation.Immigrant advocates and rights groups have sued the government, arguing that the expulsions violate legal protections for minors designed to prevent child trafficking and abuse.Homeland Security officials have insisted the emergency measures are needed to prevent outbreaks inside Border Patrol stations, immigration jails and child shelters, where several outbreaks have occurred, as illegal immigration rose to a 13-month high last month.Since the March order establishing the rapid expulsion rules, more than 90 percent of illegal border-crossers taken into U.S. custody along the southern border have been returned to Mexico in a matter of hours.The number of minors in HHS custody has increased to about 1,900 this month, up from 800 a few months ago, according to one administration official with knowledge of the figures who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide unpublished statistics. More children are crossing the border, and DHS is transferring more of them to HHS shelters, the official said.Dolly Gee, a federal judge in California who oversees the court-managed rules governing detention of underage migrants known as the Flores settlement, ordered the government last month to halt the use of hotels. The practice peaked during the summer, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement began renting rooms along the border for use as temporary holding facilities.Between March and July, the government used hotels to detain at least 577 minors, according to court filings. Of those, 436 were held for three days or more. The government is required to report any case in which a child is held longer than 72 hours without being transferred to HHS custody.Gee said the Trump administration had failed to establish a public health justification for keeping minors in hotel rooms, instead of the licensed shelters overseen by HHS where they are normally sent while awaiting deportation or release to an approved sponsor or custodian. Because the hotels remain open to the public, they also don’t provide a safer place for the children to avoid infection, she stated.The Trump administration “cannot seriously argue in good faith that flouting their contractual obligation to place minors in licensed programs is necessary to mitigate the spread of COVID-19,” Gee wrote in her order.The minors are typically watched over by contractors who perform a babysitting role, while the youths remain in hotel rooms watching television or playing video games.Gee raised concerns about the quality of the supervision provided by private contractors “who receive a mere two days of training, only a fraction of which are dedicated to child development and care, before being placed alone in a room with a tender age child for hours at a time.”ICE officials said the practice was limited and has been consistent with the care and custody rules established under the Flores settlement, and the use of the hotels protects children from possible exposure in a more crowded shelter setting.“U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) only temporarily houses minors in hotels in limited circumstances consistent with the order of the district court in Flores, including as needed to alleviate overcrowding at Border Patrol stations pending expulsion flights,” ICE spokeswoman Danielle Bennett said in a statement.“While the agency does not comment on pending litigation, ICE complies with binding court orders,” Bennett added.The government said it had stopped using the hotels in early September, according to court filings. CBP referred inquiries about the use of hotels to ICE.Administration officials said the transfer of children to HHS-managed shelters does not foreclose the government’s ability to expel them. But in practice, an expulsion becomes less likely once a child is in HHS care, with better access to attorneys and child migrant advocates.“In the hotels, the kids are held pretty much incommunicado, and to operate behind closed doors is an advantage to the government,” said Carlos Holguín, an attorney who represents child migrants under the Flores settlement. The government doesn’t “have to contend with meddlesome lawyers trying to stop the expulsions, because they know they’re on shaky legal ground.”Holguín said the government’s public health case for the use of hotels is undermined by its often casual approach elsewhere.“They’re insisting they needed to use the hotels as means of controlling infection, but that’s inconsistent with everything the administration has done, like holding mass rallies,” he said. “Their public health rationale seems to be confined to people coming across the border, whom Trump has never liked anyway. So they have a hard time selling this as a public health measure.”The most recent enforcement statistics published by U.S. Customs and Border Protection show a significant increase in border crossings by underage migrants who arrive without an adult. CBP took 3,756 minors into custody along the Mexico border in September, the highest one-month total since July 2019, statistics show.To address the court’s request for a public health justification for keeping minors in hotel rooms, HHS turned to the CDC in recent weeks for a scientist to sign a declaration, according to two federal health officials familiar with the request who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions.CDC officials in several different offices declined, and the request was sent to Redfield, according to the HHS official who has seen the document. It is not known whether Redfield has signed it.The declaration asks for someone at the CDC to attest they have reviewed the court’s orders regarding the use of hotels and the government’s infection control procedures, the HHS official said.The infection control procedures at the hotels, the document says, do “not create an increased risk of covid-19 infection” among the minors, DHS personnel or the general public. It also says that DHS’s coronavirus procedures are informed by the latest epidemiological information.Migrant parents could face fateful choice: Be separated from their children or stay together in jailBy Nick MiroffThe Washington PostOctober 23, 2020 federal judge who oversees long-running litigation about the treatment of migrant children in U.S. custody ordered the government Friday to finalize its procedures for providing parents a fateful choice: allow their children to be released to a designated guardian, or remain together in immigration jail.Such a decision, known informally as “binary choice,” could transform the family migration dynamics that have confounded the Trump administration and the Obama administration before it as successive waves of Central American families crossed the border and overwhelmed U.S. capacity to process their humanitarian claims.Most important, it would shift the nature of the decision about whether to separate children from their families at the border. Instead of it being up to the government, as it is now, it would be up to the migrant parents.Judge Dolly Gee, who oversees the legal case dating to 1997, known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, told the government and the attorneys who represent migrant children to hammer out the framework for advising parents of their rights, as well as the procedures for implementing the binary-choice model.“It’s incumbent on both sides to come up with procedures that are appropriate and thoughtful and effectuate the rights contained in the agreement that doesn’t cause children to be lost,” Gee said.Gee cited reports this week that attorneys and rights groups have been unable to contact the parents of 545 minors whom the Trump administration separated from their families. Attorneys for the Justice Department disputed claims that the children were “lost” — they said that the children were placed with legal guardians in the United States and that in many cases parents have not wanted to claim the children, for fear that they would be removed from the country. The government also said the coronavirus pandemic has hampered efforts to locate the families.Gee said her concern about the binary-choice model is that the government might fail to properly vet sponsors and could lose track of children who go to designated caregivers.“I don’t want some bureaucratic snafu requiring another large effort to put children back in touch with their parents,” Gee said during a virtual hearing Friday in the case, which is in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. “I don’t want to be party to a system that will engender that type of disorganization.”The idea of a binary-choice model circulated widely in the aftermath of the “zero tolerance” policy the Trump administration used to separate thousands of children from their parents. Democratic lawmakers have opposed such a model, but attorneys say that while the Flores Settlement grants minors the right to a quick release from immigration detention, it does not afford their parents the same right.The Trump administration has been trying to terminate the Flores Settlement in favor of keeping families detained together until courts decide whether they have a valid legal claim or should be deported. That process currently takes several months, or longer, but the government also has proposed fast-tracking the process to reduce the amount of time families are in detention.In a statement Friday, the Justice Department said it opposes what it called “the family separation requirements” in the binary-choice model Gee has ordered. The government “intends to maintain family unity to the greatest extent practicable,” it said.Gee said that claim was “ironic, to say the least,” noting that the Trump administration previously “had a policy to involuntarily separate families,” referring to the government breaking up nearly 3,000 families during a six-week span in 2018.Carlos Holguin, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, said the government “should consider releasing families as a whole, but what the government has wanted to do is decide for families.”“What we’re trying to do is figure out how parents and families can have the ability to make these decisions rather than have ICE decide it for them,” he said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.The Obama administration dealt with this challenge by creating “family residential centers” at three locations where parents could remain in custody with their children. But the limitation on the amount of time children could be held in ICE custody — 20 days — meant that parents typically were released from detention along with their children to await a court hearing.Trump administration officials blamed this “loophole” for the family migration surge that began in 2017 and led to the White House trying to thwart it through the zero-tolerance policy. Under that initiative, the government separated parents to prosecute and jail them, while placing their children in shelters. President Trump called a halt to the practice in June 2018 amid a public outcry, ordering that families be kept together. An even larger family migration wave followed.More recently, the administration has cited the coronavirus pandemic to implement a system of rapid “expulsions” that have largely shut the door to asylum seekers at the border.The binary-choice model Gee is expected to impose would give migrant parents the option of allowing their children to be released to another designated sponsor — such as a family member — or waive their children’s right to release. ICE could also choose to grant provisional release to a family or utilize electronic monitoring equipment, such as ankle bracelets with GPS trackers, so they would not have to remain in custody.If the family’s claim is rejected and they are ordered to be deported, the family would leave the United States together.“It is a tough decision for parents,” said Peter Schey, one of the lead attorneys representing migrant children in Flores Settlement litigation.Such a move would partly aid the government’s enforcement goals, because parents who opt for the release of their children would be taken out of the family immigration jails, where space is limited, and instead would go to ICE adult detention facilities.Schey said the government and the plaintiffs are in agreement on most aspects of the binary-choice framework. Gee told the parties to iron out their differences and scheduled a new hearing for Dec. 4.*****************************************************PAST, OVERLOOKED EDITORIALSThe family-separation crisis is not overOpinion by Editorial BoardThe Washington PostJune 21, 2018 FAMILY-SEPARATION crisis that President Trump created is not over. The executive order Mr. Trump signed Wednesday purporting to end the routine tearing of children from their undocumented parents stands on uncertain legal ground. U.S. border agents took more than 2,300 children from their families during a five-week period. Confusion mounted Thursday about the status of the root problem: Mr. Trump’s zero-tolerance policy at the border. And a failed immigration vote in the House underscored that Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and his Republican majority remain a long way from useful or humane legislation on the immigration issue.The executive order shifted Trump administration policy from separating children when their parents are sent off to detention to keeping children with their families as they are all placed in custody. Practical and legal questions abound. Where would these families be held, given that detention facilities are already packed? Will a judge allow the administration to hold children longer than 20 days as their parents await hearings, the limit currently prescribed by judicial decree? It seems unlikely; why would a judge approve the indefinite stockpiling of families in federal custody simply to enable federal authorities to prosecute parents on minor misdemeanor charges of illegal border-crossing?Meanwhile, the government must reunite the families it has already split. Mr. Ryan assured reporters Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services were working to put children back in their parents’ care, while placing the adults’ cases first in line for adjudication. Yet U.S. Customs and Border Protection indicated Thursday that the children will be kept apart until their parents’ prosecutions are settled. The nightmare scenario remains entirely too realistic: that some children and parents remain forever separated as a result of the administration’s bureaucratic bungling and hasty implementation of its zero-tolerance policy.A partial answer to most of these problems is backing off that policy. Not every illegal border-crosser must be held in custody pending prosecution. It would cost less, and it would avoid inevitable humanitarian problems, if people were released and fitted with ankle bracelets or subjected to other types of monitoring. According to NPR, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports that 99.8 percent of undocumented immigrants released with this sort of supervision show up for their court dates. Warehousing families simply is not necessary.Temporarily acquiescing to this reality, a senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official told The Post on Thursday that the agency would stop referring illegal border-crossers with children for prosecution — but apparently only until ICE had proper facilities in which to hold families. Yet the Justice Department said the zero-tolerance policy had not changed. And the president insisted with his habitual false and scaremongering rhetoric, “If we take zero-tolerance away … we would be overrun.”Capping a confusing day, the House on Thursday rejected a hard-line immigration measure and postponed until next week a vote on a more moderate yet still unlikely-to-pass bill. Each would address child separation and the fate of the “dreamers” — but at the price of big concessions to Trumpian immigration restrictionists. Yet that is not what the country needs or what most Americans want.Congress should pass a bill barring a return to Mr. Trump’s barbaric policy of child separation. It should give the “dreamers,” young immigrants brought here at a young age through no fault of their own, a path to citizenship. It should reject the demonization and division that Mr. Trump seeks to use to his political advantage.Reunifying the families Trump tore asunder will take a long, long timeOpinion by Editorial BoardThe Washington PostJuly 25, 2018 TORN migrant children from their families with no idea how they would be reunited — and almost no record-keeping that would facilitate reunions — the Trump administration is now laboring heroically to repair what it has broken. By “heroically,” we mean only that lower-ranking officials — most of them blameless in the mess created by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who proclaimed the “zero tolerance” policy that sundered families, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who oversaw the policy’s enforcement — are racing to meet a court-ordered deadline to reunify more than 2,500 children with their parents by Thursday.Hundreds of bureaucrats have spent weeks trying to match separated children with their parents, hamstrung by the absence of data that was either never recorded or inadvertently destroyed. The fact that Mr. Sessions, Ms. Nielsen and the lieutenants who serve them never anticipated this eventuality speaks to their callousness.Even as hundreds of parents and children have been rejoined in recent days and, in most cases, released (with parents wearing electronic-monitoring ankle bracelets), it has emerged that the stitching together of what the administration sundered may go on for weeks or months more. In court papers filed Monday, the government acknowledged that it may have deported more than 460 of the parents in question — although, incredibly, officials are not entirely sure. How and when those families might be reunited is anyone’s guess.U.S. District Court Judge Dana M. Sabraw, the Republican appointee who ordered that children be reunited with their parents, was characteristically understated when he called revelations of the government’s incompetence “unpleasant” and “deeply troubling.” He added: “But it’s the reality of the case, and the reality of a policy that was put in place that resulted in large numbers of families being separated without forethought as to reunification and keeping track of people.”In the chaos and confusion, parents in detention under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been presented with terrible and in some cases misleading choices. According to their advocates and lawyers, a number have been led to believe that waiving their asylum claims is the key to being swiftly reunited with their children. Doing so means near-certain deportation for parent and child — even if they could make a strong case for asylum.ICE officials have also presented some parents facing deportation orders with the agonizing option of being removed from the country with or without their children. In some cases, mothers and fathers have chosen to leave their children behind, evidently hoping their prospects will be better in the United States without a parent than in their home countries with one.From top to bottom, the Sessions-Nielsen zero-decency policy is a humanitarian outrage perpetrated in the name of the American people. Overall, illegal border crossings have been declining for decades, despite ups and downs and a surge this spring of Central American migrants fleeing violence in their home countries. Most Americans have recoiled from the gratuitous contempt and cruelty the administration has shown immigrants. That much is evident in the public outcry and judicial intervention that have forced the administration to retreat on family separation, the most noxious in a suite of venomously nativist policies.Hundreds of children are still separated from their parents. When will this end?Opinion by Editorial BoardThe Washington PostOctober 1, 2018 AN electrocardiogram or a stock ticker, filings in a California federal court case known as Ms. L. vs. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement provide a real-time and precise gauge — in this case, of the residual but ongoing cruelty visited upon children by the Trump administration’s family separation policy. In its fully realized form, that policy lasted just six weeks, but its remnants — in trauma inflicted, lives upended and tears — live to this day.More than three months after President Trump signed an order ending family separations, hundreds of children separated from their parents by U.S. officials remain apart. In the case of more than two-thirds of them, their parents were deported — often without knowing how or whether they might be reunified with their children.At this point, the parents of dozens of the children have waived reunification, opting to have their children pursue asylum cases in the United States. Several dozen more separated children have parents who are still in the United States; most are expected to be rejoined shortly. In about 100 other cases, however, the children remain separated from deported parents. Some may be rejoined in the coming weeks, but the majority have parents who have not been located, or for whom no phone numbers have been found, or from whom information is incomplete.Think of that number — about 70 by a running total compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union — as a Separated Families Misery Index (SFMI). True, the SFMI has been whittled down from more than 2,500 children systematically ripped away from their parents starting in April, before the president ordered the practice halted in June. But each of those remaining children represents an indictment of the administration’s zero-compassion policy.The progress made in reunifying children with their parents has been made thanks largely to the ACLU, whose lawsuit in the case of Ms. L., a Congolese woman whose 7-year-old child was ripped from her arms last year, galvanized outrage against Mr. Trump’s policy, and to a handful of nongovernmental organizations that are doing the thankless work of tracking down parents, often in remote areas of Central America. They, not government officials, have been tasked with fixing the mess created by the administration, which tore families asunder with no plan to reunify them.That cavalier cruelty is typical of an administration that also has shipped hundreds of children, mainly teenagers, to a remote tent encampment in West Texas, where they are warehoused for weeks at a time, awaiting placement with sponsors, without schools or other age-appropriate support. As the New York Times reported, the population of detained children at the tent camp in Tornillo, Tex., has swollen despite the fact that border crossings have been steady in recent months. That’s because sponsors with whom the children would have been placed in the past — in many cases, undocumented immigrants — have been scared away by the administration’s threats and policies. ICE last month acknowledged arresting dozens of people who applied to be sponsors.Children, parents, sponsors — all are candidates for cruelty at the hands of an administration carrying out a crusade against immigrants, a policy that diminishes the nation.Trump’s latest anti-immigrant gambit: Family separation 2.0Opinion by Editorial BoardThe Washington PostOctober 19, 2018 INSIST that, on the immigration debate, Democrats want an issue, not a solution. That seems a better way of characterizing President Trump’s own immigration approach, which he has publicly urged GOP candidates to weaponize in the midterm elections. In response to a caravan of migrants heading northward from Honduras, Mr. Trump threatened to deploy the military, close the southern border, tear up a just-concluded trade deal with Mexico and Canada, and sever aid to impoverished Central American countries.Even for a president to whom no issue is immune to overreaction, this latest temper-tantrum was an overreach; the last such migrant caravan from Honduras, in April, mostly dissolved before it reached the U.S. border. Still, Mr. Trump is delighted at the chance of deploying this latest migration as a cudgel. “Great Midterm issue for Republicans!” he tweeted Wednesday.A more serious concern is the much broader flow of family migrants from Central America — mainly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — that has lately become a flood at segments along the frontier in Texas and Arizona. As The Post’s Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey reported, Border Patrol agents arrested more than 16,000 migrants in family units in September, a record monthly tally. Most, citing a fear of returning to their home countries, apply for asylum in this country and are released pending an immigration court date.The September numbers have triggered alarms in Washington, and rightly so; it is in no one’s interest — not the United States’, and not Central American countries’ — to countenance a northward deluge of parents and children. However, the response under consideration by the administration, which amounts to a fresh push to break up families , is no solution. It would be a+nother manufactured humanitarian calamity that would further deplete U.S. prestige while doing nothing to address the epidemic of violence driving Central Americans to leave their homes.Family separation 2.0, as conceived by the White House, would present migrant parents with what officials call a “binary choice.” They could remain with their children in detention for months or years — the waiting period reflects the huge backlog in immigration cases — or give them up to the government, which would place them in shelters until other relatives or guardians could seek custody. Aside from the fact that there is nothing approaching the capacity in existing detention centers to absorb even a reduced flow of family migrants, the administration’s blueprint may not be legal. As a deterrent, it is also unlikely to work. Fiscal year 2018’s record number of family members detained along the southwestern border coincided with the uproar over family separations last spring.It’s worth bearing in mind that while arrests of families have soared, the overall number of apprehensions in the past year, at just under 400,000, is still among the lowest in the past 45 years. It’s also worth remembering that Congress would have happily given Mr. Trump a deal, allowing him to build his wall in exchange for legal status for “dreamers,” immigrants brought here as children who are American in all but their documents. As he inflames his base on the campaign trail, we’re seeing why the president wouldn’t take yes for an answer.Trump’s Family Separation 2.0 comes at a cost to immigrants and the governmentOpinion by Editorial BoardThe Washington PostMay 21, 2019 FAILED to effectuate migrant family separation on a mass scale last year, the Trump administration has settled on a new scheme to torment struggling migrant families — this time by threatening to take children who are U.S. citizens from their parents who are not. The proposal — call it Family Separation 2.0 — targets households of mixed-immigration-status families who receive federal housing subsidies. Under a proposed rule pushed by the White House, those families would be ineligible for housing assistance if just one member, including a parent or guardian, lacked documents.That would leave mixed-status families with the choice of breaking apart or becoming homeless. Legal residents could remain in their homes as undocumented members were evicted. More likely, according to an analysis by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, families would opt to vacate — and in many cases be left homeless. Ironically, HUD Secretary Ben Carson, whose mission includes combating homelessness, signed off on the proposal, even as his own department warned of the effects.According to a study by the Migration Policy Institute, there were 5.1 million children under 18?living in the United States with at least one undocumented parent during 2009 to 2013. About 4.1 million of them, nearly 80 percent, were U.S.?citizens, and many were in economically disadvantaged households.In targeting them, the proposed policy dovetails with the administration’s crusade of cruelty toward immigrants, legal and illegal. In the name of ridding assisted housing units of undocumented immigrants, President Trump and his policy adviser Stephen Miller would threaten about 25,000 households, with a combined population of 108,000 people. Of those, about 70 percent, or 76,000 residents, most of them children, are U.S. citizens and others legally eligible for benefits.Under existing policy, those households can receive federal subsidies, prorated to include only citizens and legal residents and exclude unauthorized immigrants; the subsidies amount to $8,400?annually on average for a family. If, under the proposed rule, those mixed-status families were evicted and replaced with households in which every member is eligible for federal housing assistance — meaning the federal government would no longer prorate subsidies — the cost to the government would increase by at least $193 million a year. So this is a policy of cruelty that would also cost the government.The blueprint devised by the White House encapsulates the administration’s approach to illegal immigrants. It seeks to make their lives miserable, specifically targeting children. It explicitly contravenes other stated goals, including combating homelessness. And it plays havoc with a departmental budget. A clean sweep of callousness for an administration notorious for coldheartedness.Only now do we understand the true cruelty of Trump’s family separationOpinion by Editorial BoardThe Washington PostOctober 29, 2019 THE spring of 2018, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had no system in place to track migrant children who were separated from their families. That was the case even though, it now turns out, the Trump administration, in its first months in office, had already begun wrenching scores of babies, toddlers, tweens and adolescents from their parents to deter illegal border crossings. Then, beginning in April last year, the administration doubled down, systematically breaking apart migrant families upon apprehension at the border — still with no means of tracking and reuniting the families it had sundered.Only now, 16 months after a federal judge ordered migrant families reunified, has the scale of the administration’s cruelty become understood. Most Americans thought the policy detestable. It was far worse than they imagined.Having resisted demands that it compile a definitive listing of the families broken apart by its policies, the administration finally relented this spring when U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw ordered a full accounting. Last week, hours before the deadline set by the judge, the government submitted the numbers to the American Civil Liberties Union, to whose volunteers it has fallen to clean up the mess created by President Trump, former attorney general Jeff Sessions, former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and others.No, it was not only the 2,814 traumatized children who had been separated and were in custody under the government’s policy of “zero tolerance” for unauthorized border crossers when Judge Sabraw ordered families reunified in June last year. It turns out that an additional 1,556 children had been separated in the preceding 12-month period, beginning in July 2017. Of those, more than 300 were 5 years old or younger.Imagine, if you can, the suffering visited upon those children, including many still in diapers and requiring afternoon naps, by the administration’s cavalier brutality and incompetence — the anguish of little girls and boys removed from their parents for weeks or months because of a president lacking a conscience and a government whose data systems were not suited to the task of reunification. Those wounds won’t heal easily, or ever.Incredibly, having shattered so many families, the administration threw up its hands and declared the task of reuniting them beyond its capabilities. Even now, volunteers working under the coordination of the ACLU are going door to door in Guatemala and Honduras, seeking to ascertain whether families have recovered their children.More than 1,000 additional migrant children have been separated in the past 17 months on the grounds, the government says, that their parents or guardians endangered or abused them, or were unable to care for them, or were criminals, or were not actually their parents. The ACLU maintains that in some cases, those separations are also unjustified, triggered by minor offenses committed by the parents, such as shoplifting or driving without a valid license. It has asked Judge Sabraw to set a narrow standard for separations.In all, the administration has taken at least 5,460 children from their parents. That is a stain on Mr. Trump, on the government he leads and on America.Trump must comply at once with the order to release all detained migrant childrenby Editorial BoardThe Washington PostJuly 2, 2020 MONTHS-LONG litigation over migrant minors detained with their parents during the pandemic is the latest chapter in the sorry saga of the Trump administration’s efforts to use children as leverage in its war on immigrants. On June 26, a federal judge ordered the release of the remaining scores of youths at the three family detention centers run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — but not before the coronavirus had begun taking a toll on residents and staff there.The facilities, two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania, are petri dishes for covid-19, as Judge Dolly M. Gee of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California warned in March, when the pandemic’s grip was tightening. At the time, the judge agreed with lawyers representing the detainees that “the threat of irreparable injury to their health and safety is palpable,” and she ordered ICE to “make continuous efforts” to free them.It’s true that since then, the great majority of children have been released from the centers or deported with their parents. But even now, more than 120 children remain, held by an administration that disdains what President Trump refers to as “catch and release” for migrants awaiting adjudication of their cases. Under Judge Gee’s order, they must be freed by July 17.What previous administrations regarded as humanitarian treatment of migrants is, in Mr. Trump’s view, little more than an incentive for more undocumented immigration. Under that theory, he has tried to overturn a 1997 court decree that puts strict limits on the conditions and time that migrant children can be detained — a decree grounded in data showing that detention causes lasting damage to minors. So far, the courts have blocked the administration from scrapping the decree, known as the Flores agreement. Yet despite a rule limiting detention of children to 20 days, many of the children now in the ICE facilities have been there for months, even as the pandemic intensified.Now, Judge Gee’s patience has run out. “The family residential centers are on fire, and there is no more time for half measures,” she wrote. Her order noted that the detention centers had failed to fully comply with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention designed to impede the spread of the virus in institutional settings, including social distancing, mask-wearing and quick medical attention for those who suffer covid-19 symptoms. In a court filing last week, ICE revealed that at one of the family detention centers, in Karnes City, Tex., 11 children and parents have tested positive for the coronavirus.Some of the families remaining in detention are appealing deportation orders; conceivably, some may not show up for court hearings after they are released. Yet as the Flores settlement established, putting children at risk by detaining them is inhumane and impermissible. That peril is now compounded by the coronavirus. Together, those risks outweigh the Trump administration’s interest in using the threat of inflicting suffering on minors as a warning to prospective migrants who might enter the country illegally.New report on Trump’s child separation policy makes it clear: Cruelty was always the pointOpinion by Jennifer RubinThe Washington PostOctober 8, 2020 response to feigned surprise over administration actions that result in human suffering and death, critics of the Trump administration have been inclined to respond, “cruelty is the point.” In other words, policy decisions are not made despite consequences for vulnerable people; they are made with the intent to inflict hardship so as to serve administration objectives (e.g., deporting “dreamers” to fend off future illegal immigration). Nowhere is this more evident than in the immoral and un-American child separation policy.The depravity of the policy was captured by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday night. Despite repeated public denials that the Justice Department had directed the policy, Horowitz learned that then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had made clear during a May 2018 conference call with U.S. attorneys that President Trump wanted a “zero tolerance” family separation policy. “We need to take away children,” Sessions reportedly said. One of the attorneys on the call put it down in notes: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.” The Times also reported: “Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.”There’s also this passage from the Times’s reporting, reminiscent of so many cases of human rights abuse around the globe: “Gene Hamilton, a top lawyer and ally of Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s assault on immigration, argued in a 32-page response that Justice Department officials merely took direction from the president.” Just following orders. If anyone in the administration bothered to pick up a history book, they might have figured out that it would have been better to quit than to carry out such immoral policies.Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden reacted as many Americans would — with horror and anger:These families fled persecution and violence to seek safety in the land of the free.But instead of providing refuge, the Trump Administration ripped their children away from them.The cruelty was the point — and it's reprehensible. — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 7, 2020Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also released a blistering statement: “The active participation of senior Department of Justice officials — including the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General — in President Trump’s plan to deliberately and callously tear apart immigrant families is another degradation of the Department," he declared. "The months-long delay in the release of the Inspector General’s final report, perhaps until after the election, suggests a Department still running political errands for the president. The American people need a full accounting of the damage this President has inflicted on our system of justice.”Horowitz’s revelations leave the impression that Sessions and Rosenstein were not only cruel but also cowardly. If they believed in the policy, why not claim ownership? Why deny there was a policy or shift blame to the Department of Homeland Security?Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman, tells me, “This report shows a complete lack of any moral leadership at the senior levels of the department. Even now, Rod Rosenstein is hiding behind a flimsy bureaucratic excuse to justify his role in a policy that was pure evil.” Miller adds, “The stain left by this horrific policy should follow everyone involved for the rest of their lives.”On one level, this discovery is just another piece of the picture of a Justice Department that has lost its way. Overrun by ideologues and lacking the professional and moral spine to push back on orders that undermined the rule of law, too many lawyers cooperated with or failed to ring the alarm as Sessions, Rosenstein and later Attorney General William P. Barr (who further politicized the Justice Department in spinning the Mueller report and intervening in the Roger Stone and Michael Flynn cases) misrepresented their work, acted as the president’s private attorney and refused to uphold the finest traditions of the department.Former federal prosecutor Joyce White Vance observes, “The IG’s report is a shocking reminder that DOJ lost its way long before Bill Barr took over as AG.” She adds, “The Justice Department is the only Cabinet level agency whose name is a moral virtue. Trump’s Justice Department failed to live up to it.”The Justice Department is going to need a top-to-bottom evaluation to see what, if any, laws were broken in this or other matters (including lies under oath to courts or Congress), what department procedures were broken and what professional responsibilities were ignored. Those who have brought disrepute on the department need to be fired, and, if warranted, an accounting of their actions should be submitted to state bar authorities for disciplinary action.If elected, Biden will need an attorney general willing to take this on, mete out appropriate discipline and then rebuild the Justice Department’s reputation. Right now, it is a disgraced and broken organization.*****************************************************PAST, PREVIOUSLY OVERLOOKED NEWS STORIESTrump digs in on false claim that he stopped Obama’s family separation policyBy Salvador RizzoThe Washington PostApril 10, 2019“President Obama had child separation. Take a look. The press knows it, you know it, we all know it. I didn’t have — I’m the one that stopped it. President Obama had child separation. … President Obama separated children. They had child separation. I was the one that changed it, okay?”— President Trump, in remarks at the Oval Office, April 9, 2019This is a Four Pinocchio claim, yet Trump keeps repeating it when he’s pressed on family separations.Repetition can’t change reality. There is simply no comparison between Trump’s family separation policy and the border enforcement actions of the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.The FactsThe Obama administration rejected a plan for family separations, according to Cecilia Mu?oz, Obama’s top adviser for immigration. The Trump administration operated a pilot program for family separations in the El Paso area beginning in mid-2017.In April 2018, the pilot took off. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions rolled out a “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting all adults caught crossing the border illegally. The next month, the Department of Homeland Security began to refer all illegal-crossing cases to federal prosecutors.This meant systematically separating all families caught crossing the border.Minor children can’t be prosecuted with their parents, so the government separated and reclassified them as unaccompanied children. A federal consent decree mandates that unaccompanied children be released within 20 days to a relative or child-care facility.The Trump administration has identified more than 2,700 children covered by a court order mandating family reunifications. But the real number is unknown and could include thousands more.“The total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is unknown,” according to a report released in January by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. “Pursuant to a June 2018 Federal District Court order, HHS has thus far identified 2,737 children in its care at that time who were separated from their parents. However, thousands of children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017 [in El Paso], before the accounting required by the Court, and HHS has faced challenges in identifying separated children.”So, parents were funneled into the criminal justice system and eventual deportation proceedings. Their kids were placed in shelters, relatives’ homes or in foster care while their cases worked their way through immigration courts.The Trump administration implemented this policy by choice, exercising its discretion to prosecute some crimes over others. But no law or court ruling mandates family separations. In fact, during its first 15 months, the Trump administration released nearly 100,000 immigrants who were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, a total that includes more than 37,500 unaccompanied minors and more than 61,000 family-unit members.The zero-tolerance approach is worlds apart from the Obama- and Bush-era policy of separating children from adults at the border only in limited circumstances, such as when officials suspected human trafficking or another kind of danger to the child or when false claims of parentage were made.Trump did not end that particular policy, which is still in effect. He issued an executive order on June 20 to end his own much broader policy of systematic family separations.“Prior to the Trump Administration, aliens apprehended between ports of entry who were not considered enforcement priorities (e.g., a public safety threat, repeat illegal border crosser, convicted felon, suspected child trafficker) were typically not criminally prosecuted for illegal entry but would be placed directly into civil removal proceedings for unauthorized U.S. presence,” according to a February report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.The CRS report added that “data are not available on the rate and/or absolute number of family separations resulting from illegal border crossing prosecutions under prior Administrations, limiting the degree to which comparisons can be made with the Trump Administration’s zero tolerance policy.”However, DHS officials said they referred to prosecutors an average of 21 percent of “amenable adults” who were detained between ports of entry from fiscal 2010 to 2016.How many of those adults were separated from their children? The data doesn’t say, and it’s important to note that Central American families began to migrate in droves to the United States beginning in 2014. (Before then, unauthorized migration to the United States was driven mostly by single men from Mexico.)Regardless, prosecuting 21 percent is much lower than prosecuting 100 percent. That’s what Trump’s zero-tolerance policy called for, because it applied to all adults, regardless of whether they asked for asylum or had children in tow.Here’s a look at all the times Trump has repeated this claim, drawn from our database of Trump’s false or misleading statements:“The Democrats policy of Child Seperation on the Border during the Obama Administration was far worse than the way we handle it now. Remember the 2014 picture of children in cages - the Obama years. However, if you don’t separate, FAR more people will come. Smugglers use the kids!” (Dec. 18 tweet)“Obama had a separation policy; we all had the same policy.” (Nov. 26 remarks)“.@60Minutes did a phony story about child separation when they know we had the exact same policy as the Obama Administration. In fact a picture of children in jails was used by other Fake Media to show how bad (cruel) we are, but it was in 2014 during O years. Obama separated children from parents, as did Bush etc., because that is the policy and law. I tried to keep them together but the problem is, when you do that, vast numbers of additional people storm the Border. So with Obama separation is fine, but with Trump it’s not. Fake 60 Minutes!” (Nov. 25 tweets)“Under President Obama, they separated children from the parents. We actually put it so that that didn’t happen. … President Obama separated the children, the parents. And nobody complained. When we continued the exact same law, this country went crazy.” (Nov. 1 remarks)“Now President Obama had the same law; he did the same thing.” (October 16 interview)“That was the same as the Obama law. You know, Obama had the same thing.” (October 14 interview)“You know we’re very tough on people crossing the borders illegally. And you know Obama had the same policy of separation. You know, people don’t realize half the pictures were taken of separation were taken where, most of the pictures, that pictures in ’14 of kids separated from their parents. That was all Obama. People don’t say it but Obama had the same law that I did and they separated parents from children.” (Sept. 3 interview)“I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated. It’s a problem that’s gone on for many years, as you know, through many administrations.” (June 20 remarks)After making these latest remarks in the Oval Office on April 9, Trump tweeted a video montage of news reports showing children in caged enclosures during the Obama administration in 2014. That doesn’t mean Obama systematically separated families, as Trump did.The Bottom LineWe’ve already given this claim Four Pinocchios. We’ve given Four Pinocchios to a related claim: that several laws and court rulings were forcing family separations. We also gave Four Pinocchios to the Trump administration for giving the public incomplete numbers on family separations and reunifications.We’ve given these claims as many Pinocchios as we can possibly muster. That is, except for the Bottomless Pinocchio, which is getting closer and closer.The Trump administration knew migrant children would suffer from family separations. The government ramped up the practice anyway.Internal emails and reports illustrate a chaotic attempt to track traumatized migrant children seized from parents.by Susan Ferriss, Center for Public IntegrityTexas TribuneDecember 16, 2019This story was published in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity. obtained government documents show how the Trump administration’s now-blocked policy to separate all migrant children from parents led social workers to frantically begin tracking thousands of children seized at the southern border and compile reports on cases of trauma.In June 2018, months after the Trump administration began its so-called “zero tolerance” policy to deter migrants trying to enter the United States, an employee working for the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement described a 5-year-old’s despair at a shelter. “Minor was separated at the border from his biological mother. Minor was tearful when he arrived and would not speak or engage in conversation with anyone,” the caregiver wrote in a report. This document and others shed light on a social experiment that was both cruel and chaotic.Reports of traumatized children were forwarded to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which is charged with ensuring that national security policies respect constitutional rights. A Center for Public Integrity and NPR investigation earlier this year found that the office failed to assist children whose suffering was documented in hundreds of similar complaints the office received last year.The most recent internal documents Public Integrity reviewed add to scathing criticism from the Homeland Security inspector general’s office, which reported on Nov. 25 that it couldn’t verify how many children were separated by the zero tolerance policy, which began gradually in late 2017 and ended in June 2018. Tracking was flawed because U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers didn’t accurately record possible family relationships between adults and 1,233 children detained between October 2017 and mid-February 2019, the inspector general concluded.Trump’s zero tolerance policy required CBP to separate children so that migrant adults, many of them seeking asylum, could be immediately held in immigration detention and prosecuted for illegal entry.Earlier this year, former Office of Refugee Resettlement Deputy Director Jonathan White told Congress that he’d heard in early 2017 a broad separation policy could be in the works, and that he and his colleagues told Homeland Security officials they were concerned “not only about what that would mean for children, but also what it would mean for the capacity of the program.”Internal records, however, show that such concerns date back further.Warnings weeks before TrumpAmong the documents Public Integrity obtained is a September 2016 email from a child refugee specialist signaling discomfort with Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations splitting up migrant families prior to zero tolerance.“The best thing that could happen is for the OFO to stop the practice of family separation,” a child refugee field specialist added to the top of an email containing instructions for reunifying families that he sent to colleagues on Sept. 20, 2016.Just 10 days after the specialist sent the email, a Homeland Security advisory committee issued a damning report on the damage children suffer when abruptly separated from parents. Separations were comparatively uncommon at the time, but they’d grown frequent enough to trigger a review, conducted by representatives of the American Academy of Pediatrics and civil rights groups.“Separation can be acutely frightening for children and can leave children in ad hoc care situations that compromise their safety and well-being,” the advisory committee warned. “It can also be traumatizing and extremely stressful for the parent.”The committee urged Homeland Security to separate parents and children as little as possible and instead place families in supervised release programs while their asylum or other immigration claims moved through the courts.Before Trump began zero tolerance in 2018, Customs and Border Protection had -- and still has -- the authority to separate parents and children under limited circumstances.But because zero tolerance required parents to be immediately detained, CBP was essentially forced to seize thousands of children, including infants and toddlers. Most families were arriving from Central America, a region the State Department has said is ravaged by predatory gangs and homicide rates that are among the highest in the world.The 2016 message from the field specialist is part of a collection of Health and Human Services emails and other internal documents shared with Public Integrity. Most were written in 2018 by officials at the agency’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The office is responsible for caring for unaccompanied migrant children, or children CBP officers separate from parents at the border. The internal documents show Health and Human Services staff members were unprepared for the unprecedented number of suffering young children transferred to their custody.The materials were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request submitted to Health and Human Services by the American Immigration Council, the National Immigrant Justice Center, Kids in Need of Defense, the Women’s Refugee Commission, and the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. All have experience providing legal services for migrant children.Child on floor cryingMost of the internal government emails reviewed by Public Integrity were written during the height of zero tolerance, which ended in late June 2018 after a court order and public outcry. Other documents show Refugee Resettlement staff or contractors’ observations, which then were forwarded to Homeland Security, about distraught children placed in shelters.A 10-year-old held in a shelter for two months was found on the floor, crying and holding his hand. “My hand hurts because I got mad about my case and I hit the wall,” the boy reportedly said in July 2018. A 12-year-old boy reported “suicidal ideations” after separation from an aunt and a cousin in June 2018, according to a document. In a July 2018 report about a 9-year-old, a case worker wrote the girl “reported that her uncle was murdered by a local gang.”After a federal judge ordered Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Refugee Resettlement on June 26, 2018, to reunite families, emails and other documents show refugee office staff and contractors were pressed into service.“All resources available to comply with court order,” reads a summary of what’s labeled as a meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. “We must do everything to identify parents, contact them, and make strides to reunify them or [allow children] to go to another sponsor if the parents want.”Given the poor quality of records, Health and Human Services officials rushed to use DNA testing to match parents and children.“DNA kits,” a message to staff advised, “will be sent to programs with separated children 0-4 on week of July 2nd and DNA kits will be sent to programs with separated children 5 and up on week of July 9th.”DNA collection is controversial. News reports in July featured mothers and a director at a migrant mothers’ shelter claiming they were told parents would have to pay for DNA testing. Health and Human Services denied it was charging fees for the testing and said it was covering costs for collections.Documents also show that social workers anxiously sought supervisors’ guidance on how to respond to Central American U.S.-based consular officials, who were asking for information about migrant children scattered nationwide.Robert Carey, a Refugee Resettlement director in the Obama administration, told Public Integrity that most of the office’s staff are social workers who were put in an “ethical” dilemma with the zero tolerance policy.“Not only was it inhumane,” he said, “it was extraordinarily poorly managed.”When he was in charge, Carey said, the average minor in Refugee Resettlement custody was about 15 years old. A “large part” of what the office would do, he said, was vet sponsors, often relatives, so children could be released from group shelters or foster homes.Trump’s zero tolerance has ended, but CBP continues to have the authority to separate children from adults who are not legal guardians, including aunts, uncles and grandparents. It also has the authority to separate children based on a parent’s prior immigration violations, if CBP wants to refer that parent for prosecution. Officers have also separated children due to parents’ criminal histories or suspected ties to gangs -- decisions that at times have been based on false allegations.James De La Cruz, the Health and Human Services employee who wrote in 2016 that ending family separations would be “the best thing that could happen,” is still at the agency.His email included instructions for reunifying families and a contact sheet for Homeland Security staff assigned to supervise “alternatives to detention” programs. These programs -- no longer favored by the Trump administration -- monitored migrant families that had been released from custody to ensure they would attend court proceedings.Contacted by Public Integrity, De La Cruz declined to elaborate on his 2016 email or on problems Health and Human Services faced with the surge in family separations last year. The agency’s media representatives also declined to comment but sent a written statement emphasizing that “HHS is a child welfare agency, not a law enforcement agency. We play no role in the apprehension or initial detention of unaccompanied alien children.”Under Trump, however, Health and Human Services was forced into a central role in the administration’s zero tolerance policy because separating children from migrant parents was a key feature.Separating kids to block asylum seekersDespite evidence from the State Department and others supporting many migrants’ stories of escaping violent crime in their home countries, Trump accused migrants of gaming the asylum system, and he sought ways to block their entry. After he took office in 2017, his advisers suggested options that would require prosecuting every border crosser. Separating thousands of their children “would be reported by the media and it would have substantial deterrent effect,” previously released documents shared by NBC show.As a pilot program began in 2017, people who swam or walked over the border or who approached CBP officers at border gates were taken into custody to be prosecuted for illegal entry -- a misdemeanor the first time -- and their children were taken from them.Preparing for a blanket separation policy, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke out in defense of family separations in May 2018. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border,” he said.That same month, however, Refugee Resettlement officials were already sending out “high importance” emails related to the developing search for separated families.Like Homeland Security, the office had come under pressure because of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union three months earlier. The lawsuit accused Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Refugee Resettlement of violating due process and Homeland Security’s own directives for granting detainees’ release.The initial plaintiff was an African mother who was cleared at the U.S.-Mexico border to apply for asylum but was put into detention. She said she heard her daughter, 7, screaming as the child was taken away to be sent to Refugee Resettlement custody.Eventually, the lawsuit became a class-action effort to free and unite separated families.On May 16, 2018, a Refugee Resettlement email exhorted staff to find the parents of children in their custody -- one day after then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen testified in Congress that “we do not have a policy to separate children from their parents.”“It is very important to locate the separated parent for all UAC [unaccompanied alien children] in your program,” a Refugee Resettlement supervisor wrote. “For parents in ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] custody, you should be able to locate them and have a phone call with that parent as soon as possible.”That assumption proved far too optimistic.CBP, it turned out, was sending children to Refugee Resettlement with little information about parents. Infants and sobbing toddlers were too young to know parents’ names, as Public Integrity previously reported, much less the “alien number” that ICE assigns adult detainees and enters into a detention database.“The system totally broke down,” said Jennifer Podkul, an attorney with Kids in Need of Defense, which coordinates legal representation for migrant minors. Even lawyers who know the names of clients have a hard time using the ICE detainee tracking system because of misspelled names and other erroneous information, she said.One internal email warned social workers “to NOT engage directly” with the ACLU, as one caregiver program did, and instead follow “the chain of command” to prepare for a child’s release.‘Initiate contact with parents!’On June 26, 2018, the federal judge in San Diego presiding over the ACLU’s lawsuit admonished U.S. officials for tracking migrant children with less diligence than they track belongings the government seizes from people and keeps in storage. He placed a preliminary block on further separations, ordered officials to arrange phone calls between parents and children, and reunite them on deadlines by age group the following month.Emails show Refugee Resettlement staff discussed how to arrange and pay for collect calls from detained parents, and how parents were incommunicado while held in federal marshals’ custody, as many were at times.On June 28, 2018, two days after the federal judge ordered reunification of families, an email circulated advising Refugee Resettlement affiliates that Health and Human Services was designing a database to “eliminate the need to track information [on families] on spreadsheets.”At the same time, Refugee Resettlement managers were told, “Please do not wait for the database to go live to initiate contact with parents!”Homeland Security databases on parents -- some on their way to deportation -- had no information on whether children had been separated from them. The Homeland Security and Health and Human Services databases were not linked.As separations ramped up, documents provided to Public Integrity show, Refugee Resettlement staff also began sending more “significant incident reports” about separated migrant children to Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.The Public Integrity and NPR investigation found that during the first half of last year, Refugee Resettlement filed the majority of more than 800 family separation complaints logged by Homeland Security’s civil rights office. Among children who languished in shelters without the office’s help were blind or deaf children -- disabled children the civil rights office acknowledges it has authority to expeditiously assist.Meanwhile, fallout from the mass separations of families continues.On Nov. 5, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that the U.S. government should be held accountable for the impact of the zero tolerance policy. The government, the judge said, must provide mental-health services to thousands of traumatized migrant children who languished without seeing or being in contact with their parents, sometimes for months.“Q&A: Lomi Kriel on digging up child separation cases from the border”by Kristine VillanuevaThe Center for Public IntegrityDecember 21, 2019’re continuing our Q&A series on journalists who published powerful stories. In 2017, Lomi Kriel of the Houston Chronicle started to look into the strain of illegal immigration on the Texas court system. That’s when she first heard disturbing accounts of families being separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.Border courts often have specific judges to handle such cases. Public defenders have just a few minutes with each offender before they typically are charged and plead guilty in a mass court proceeding that plays out in about an hour. At the time, the Trump administration was expanding a program that funnels migrants into the federal justice system, where they can be held longer for deportation. Kriel started looking into how much more the courts can take. The Trump administration declined Kriel’s request for statistics, so she got busy. She obtained internal documents, spoke with advocates, and identified nearly two dozen cases of family separation at the border.How did you get the story and what led you to pursue it?I started hearing disturbing accounts from public defenders who suddenly reported that their clients had come with their children, who were removed after the adults were charged with improper entry, and the parents did not know where they were.In the past, the government typically only prosecuted parents with serious criminal or immigration histories, not first-time entrants, precisely because charging adults for the misdemeanor meant their children had to be placed in federal custody while the parents went through the criminal process. Minors cannot be held in prison.In November 2017, six months before the Trump administration officially announced its family separation policy, I revealed that the White House was broadly prosecuting parents and taking away their children without any process on how to reunify them later. Hundreds of parents were deported without their children.What were the challenges of reporting and how did you navigate them?It all played out in a black hole, with parents and children shuffled from one federal agency’s custody to the next, and little to no public access to them. Many officials in the different agencies had little idea of what was going on.In the fall of 2017, the Trump administration denied it was policy to prosecute parents and declined to release any statistics to me. In the absence of government data, I found nearly two dozen cases of parents with no prior immigration or criminal history who had been separated from their children. Advocates who worked with migrant children reported hundreds more. I obtained a Border Patrol lawyer’s emails about the policy.I profiled one separated mother with a really strong asylum claim. She was later released after my story ran, but all the other mothers in that case were deported without their children.In January 2018, the ACLU called me to ask how the separation process worked. One month later, it filed its pivotal Ms. L lawsuit that forced the reunification of separated parents and children in June 2018.“Family Separation, Two Years After Ms. L”By Leila Rafei, Content StrategistThe American Civil Liberties UnionFebruary 26, 2020 the ACLU filed Ms. L v. ICE exactly two years ago, it was clear what was going on at the border was shocking and unprecedented: A Congolese mother and her six-year-old daughter had been torn apart by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for seemingly no reason at all. ICE sent them to detention sites thousands of miles away from one another, where for four months they had hardly any contact and didn’t know whether they’d ever see each other again. It was an act of senseless cruelty -- a seemingly exceptional case that later turned out to not be so unusual after all.What ICE did to Ms. L and her daughter was hard enough to grasp on its own, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. There were thousands of Ms. Ls in detention sites across the country, separated from their children with no explanation, and what happened wasn’t a random act of cruelty but part of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.After months of litigation and a court order to stop the official practice, the Trump administration admitted that it had separated more than 2,700 children from their parents. But they didn't tell the whole story. What they left out were the children they separated who had already left government custody at the time of the court’s order. When the judge demanded the full picture, the government disclosed an additional 1,556 children separated since 2017. In all, that means the Trump administration separated over 4,200 children from their parents.The ACLU has managed to reunite over 2,000 families since the injunction in 2018. But the fight to stop separations and reunite families continues. The administration is using loopholes to continue separating some families with excuses including dirty diapers, expired driver’s licenses, and other minor offenses that would never justify separation under any U.S. child welfare laws. Today, the ACLU is fighting to stop these separations and locate every last family that remains separated.How ICE and CBP used fear and misinformation to deport parentsICE and CBP showed no mercy when they separated children from their parents. Border agents took one young boy with a vision impairment from his parents without letting him take his glasses case, which he needed to protect the glasses his family had saved up to afford. Several other separated kids had disabilities, including a deaf girl taken from her father.After separation, border authorities used a pattern of fear and misinformation to deport parents without their children. They often told parents they had no right to asylum and that they had two options: get deported with their child, or alone. Ultimately, hundreds of parents were deported without their children.Some parents knowingly chose to leave their children in the U.S., believing it was the child’s only chance to get asylum and protect them from the danger they originally fled in their home countries. These parents were forced into making an unbearable decision between protecting their child and staying together.Many parents were deported without understanding what they had agreed to, forced into signing papers in a language they couldn’t read. At times ICE and CBP agents told parents that their child would be waiting for them on the plane. When two parents learned that this was a lie -- that their children would not be coming with them -- officials had to physically force them onto the plane.One mother, Belen, fled to the U.S. in fear for her life, only to have her son taken away as soon as she arrived at the border. A survivor of sexual abuse, Belen pursued asylum after passing a credible fear hearing. Border officials later threatened her by telling her that pursuing asylum would only prolong separation from her son, so she abandoned her case. In the end, Belen returned to the country she fled, even though she had a strong case for asylum as an abuse survivor.Tracking down untracked parents in Central AmericaThe reckless way that ICE and CBP deported parents makes reunification difficult and in some cases nearly impossible. Border authorities deported hundreds of parents, and in many cases didn’t bother to keep any meaningful contact information, like a proper address or working phone number. In 2018, when a federal judge ordered the government to reunite all the families, the administration tried to shift the responsibility onto the ACLU instead.Reuniting these families is of course the responsibility of the people who separated them. But the Trump administration wasn’t acting fast enough, and the families were understandably reluctant to trust them again. That summer, the ACLU formed a steering committee to locate and help parents, along with partners at Kids in Need of Defense, the Women’s Refugee Commission, Justice in Motion, and the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.One of the reunited families was that of Ricardo and Luna, a father and daughter from Guatemala who were separated near McAllen, Texas in December 2017. Border officials sent three-year-old Luna to a Texas shelter and deported Ricardo, tricking him into believing she would soon join him. But Ricardo returned to Guatemala City with just a sheet of paper containing his daughter’s alien registration number. He was given a toll-free phone number to call for information about Luna, but each time he called, the operators told him they had no record of her in the system.“When I saw her, I felt my soul ache. She was skinny and sad for all the time she hadn’t seen us. It was a sad but at the same time very joyful moment.” -- RicardoLuna was part of the class of children under age five prioritized by the court order for reunification. But it wasn’t until a month after the reunification deadline that she was finally returned to her father. By then, the length of her detention was among the longest of any child affected by family separation.Seeking damages for lifelong traumaAfter months of separation, Ever Reyes-Mejia was reunited with his three-year-old son, Sammy. But Sammy seemed to have trouble recognizing his parents. Their difficult reunion was captured on video, showing us how separation causes trauma that reunification alone can’t fix.The trauma of separation will cause lifelong trauma for whole families, but children under the age of five, like Sammy, will feel the effects the most. To hold the Trump administration accountable, the ACLU filed another lawsuit last year seeking damages for these families, as well as the creation of a fund to pay for professional mental health services.At shelters in the U.S., children have been hospitalized for behavioral health issues that arose during detention, including suicide attempts. And like Sammy, children are showing signs of trauma even after reunification. One young boy would cry whenever his father left the room because he thought he was going to be abandoned again.Parents also face an increased risk of developing mental health disorders. Belen was described by a former asylum officer as “one of the most traumatized and vulnerable persons that I have ever interviewed.” During her separation from her son, she was in such distress that part of her face would become paralyzed for days at a time. She has since been reunited with her son, but due to the trauma of separation, she won’t leave her house unaccompanied.Detention itself is traumatic. Ricardo’s daughter Luna was held in a shelter plagued by sexual abuse allegations, and there is a well-documented history of CBP abusing children in its custody. Facilities are often overcrowded, with scarce food and water and no way to bathe or brush teeth. At several shelters, parents staged hunger strikes to protest the refusal of ICE and CBP officials to provide any information about their children.“I did not know what was happening and I had no idea where my son was.” -- EduardoThese traumas will stay with families for a lifetime, and it’s the Trump administration's fault. A July 2019 House Oversight staff report concluded that those responsible have “not been candid with the American people” about the horrors families faced, and that the separations were “more harmful, traumatic, and chaotic than previously known.”Where we stand two years after Ms. LMs. L and her daughter had traveled across ten countries and three continents seeking safety here, only to be traumatized with separation. Her daughter had to spend her seventh birthday in a detention cell, alone, not knowing whether she’d ever see her mother again. But they were among the fortunate ones: soon after the lawsuit filed on their behalf, Ms. L and her daughter were reunited.Family separation is just one of the ways the Trump administration has deliberately tried to stop people from seeking asylum here. The administration has also tried to gut asylum protections for immigrants fleeing domestic violence and gang brutality, ban people from applying for asylum outside of formal ports of entry, force asylum seekers into Mexico to await far-off court dates in the U.S., and bar asylum seekers who have passed through other countries without first applying for asylum in those countries. Poor infrastructure and instability in many countries in the region makes it incredibly difficult to live in safety, let alone go through the asylum process. The administration is trying to make the asylum process so torturous that people will continue to live in danger rather than seek safety.Denying protection for people fleeing danger is a violation of the law and basic human rights. The U.S. government must treat them with humanity and uphold their right to seek asylum.NOTE: All names have been changed to protect identity and safety.The Trump administration is rushing deportations of migrant children during coronavirusTheir father was missing. Their mother was miles away in Houston. Two sisters, ages 8 and 11, were survivors of sexual assault and at risk of deportation. With the nation focused on COVID-19, the U.S. government is rushing the deportations of migrant children.by Lomi Krielhe Texas Tribune and ProPublicaMay 18, 2020 seven months apart, a Salvadoran mother and her two young daughters were reunited in Houston in May, although the federal government is trying to deport the girls, both victims of sexual assault. Photo credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune/ProPublicaThis article is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.The girls, 8 and 11, were alone in a rented room in a dangerous Mexican city bordering Texas. Their father had been attacked and abandoned on the side of a road and they didn’t know where he was.For seven months the children had waited with their dad in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, to ask U.S. authorities for asylum. They had fled their home after death threats from local gang members and no help from police. They had also been victims of sexual assault.But in March, after their father suddenly didn’t return from his construction job, a neighbor took the children to the international bridge. He said they should present themselves to U.S. immigration authorities, who would reunite the girls with their mother in Houston.“Mami,” the eldest panicked in a brief call immigration agents made to the mother. “Daddy didn’t come home.”The mother, at work in Houston, said she nearly fainted.Before the coronavirus pandemic upended everything, the children likely would have spent a few weeks in the care of a U.S. shelter until they were released to their mother to pursue their asylum cases.Instead, government officials placed the children in foster care through a federal shelter for two months. In mid-May, they suddenly notified their caseworkers that they intended to deport the sisters in a few days to El Salvador, where they have no place to go and fear the gang members who vowed to kill the family. At the last minute, the girls were released to their mother Thursday, pending an emergency federal appeal of their deportation.As the nation remains focused on COVID-19, the U.S. government has aggressively begun to rush the deportations of some of the most vulnerable migrant children in its care to countries where they have been raped, beaten or had a parent killed, according to attorneys, court filings and congressional staff.While the deportation of children to dangerous situations is not a new phenomenon for U.S. authorities, what has shocked even veteran immigration attorneys is that the government is trying to so quickly remove, arguably against federal law, those most imperiled -- all during a global pandemic.At least two children deported in recent weeks have been tracked down by international refugee agencies after U.S. counterparts asked them for help because the minors face such danger, including a 16-year-old Honduran girl who had been raped back home.One boy is locked down in a relative’s home in Honduras, and said in an interview that he fears going outside because of abuse related to his sexual orientation. His mother is stuck in Mexico after her asylum case at the Texas border was denied and the pandemic halted travel across the Americas.Another teen was deported without his attorneys being notified and despite an immigration judge agreeing to reopen his case. At least seven more children are fighting deportation with last-minute federal court filings after their attorneys said the U.S. moved abruptly to put them on planes home.“These cases are probably the tip of the iceberg,” said Stephen Kang, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is monitoring the increasing reports.The sudden spike of deporting children comes as President Donald Trump’s administration has cited the global health crisis to largely shutter the border, including to almost all unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan told reporters last month that during the contagion even migrant children “pose an absolute, concrete public health risk to this country and everybody they come in contact with.”These deported children come on top of an additional 900 unaccompanied minors who under the emergency declaration have been turned back at the U.S. border in March and April, federal statistics show, often to danger.Federal authorities have stalled the release of migrant children in the U.S. to relatives in some cases and in late-night moves are attempting to deport them with scant notice to their attorneys. In particular, the government seems to be focused on children who have crossed the border alone after U.S. authorities forced them and their parents to wait for months in Mexico in their bid for asylum.Since March, the Department of Homeland Security has tried to quickly deport at least 15 such children, according to their lawyers, and removed at least six, including a 10-year-old. Another Guatemalan girl was set to be deported Monday, her attorney said.All had been required to stay in Mexico under a controversial 2019 Trump administration program named the Migrant Protection Protocols, in which most had no access to lawyers. Roughly one in two such returned migrants were ordered deported without being able to attend their immigration court hearings in the U.S. As violence surged in Mexican border towns, and some parents were assaulted, kidnapped or even killed, children streamed into the U.S. alone.The Office of Refugee Resettlement, in charge of unaccompanied migrant children, began tracking those whose parents remained in Mexico in October, and since then it has identified 571, including more than 300 who are 12 or younger. Of those, a spokeswoman said, the vast majority, 476, had been reunified with their relatives or a sponsor in the U.S. as of early May. Four had been deported by that date.The agency had about 1,450 migrant children in its care as of May 15, which includes the minors previously stuck with their parents in Mexico and others who came to the border alone or with relatives who are not their parents. That historically low number is partly because only 58 children were referred to the agency’s care after being allowed to cross the border in April. By comparison, more than 1,850 such children were permitted into the country in March.Despite the pandemic, asylum-seeking children who crossed the border alone are still being deported to their home countries, where many are at risk for violence, sexual assault or death. Photo credit: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune/ProPublica+The White House has long been trying to undo federal protections for immigrant families and children, who the administration contends are wrongly allowed to stay in the U.S. for years because of “loopholes” in federal law. The government, which tried separating immigrant parents from their children at the border before federal litigation halted the practice, is seeking changes to a settlement decree governing the care of migrant children, and expediting their cases in immigration courts.“We are seeing a wholesale attack,” said Jennifer Podkul, director of policy for Kids in Need of Defense, a national nonprofit advocating for migrant children. “They are using the pandemic as an excuse why they are expelling children.”April Grant, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement that children who enter the U.S. and have pending cases with their family under the Migrant Protection Protocols program will be given new cases as unaccompanied minors.But if children already had been ordered removed under their family’s case in that program they are subject to deportation when they cross the border again -- even if they do so alone and under completely different circumstances.“If the minor was ordered removed from the U.S. by an immigration judge as part of the family unit, prior to being encountered as an (unaccompanied child) then the minor is subject to the final order of removal,” Grant said.Attorneys in lawsuits across the country argue that is a violation of both a 2008 law intended to protect migrant children from trafficking and a 1997 federal settlement forcing the government to hold such minors in “safe” conditions and make “prompt” efforts to release them. The attorneys contend the government is breaking the law by not granting children entering the U.S. alone a new bid at asylum.“The law is very clear that the children are unaccompanied, they entered unaccompanied, the government itself designated them as unaccompanied, so they are entitled to all these protections” of the 2008 law and 1997 settlement, said Asra Syed, a New York lawyer helping litigate the case of the Salvadoran sisters in Houston. “The only thing that makes it gray is not a question of the law, it is a question of how ICE is behaving.”“We’re going to kill you and your family”The ordeal of the Salvadoran girls in Houston began last year when their father, a 33-year-old aviation mechanic in that nation’s capital city, used his savings to buy a handful of cars and rent them as taxis. Gang members forced him to pay a monthly extortion fee, which they steadily raised. The father, Mauricio, began struggling to meet the payments, said his wife, Maria, who asked that neither she nor her husband be fully identified because they fear retaliation from both the gang and the government.In March 2019, Maria said gang members pointed a gun at her husband’s head. He ran away, calling police, who arrested two of his assailants. That April, Mauricio and his wife briefly left the girls at home when the oldest phoned: “One of the cars is burning,” Maria recalled her saying.Mauricio alerted the police. Then the phone calls began: “We know where your wife works. We know where the girls are. If you don’t work with us, we’re going to kill you and your family.”In+ August 2019, armed men showed up at their house, threatening them again, so they filed another police complaint.That September, Mauricio’s wife flew to Houston on a tourist visa she already had and planned to stay with her brother. But she said Mauricio and the girls didn’t have months to wait for a tourist visa application, so they left the next day on a bus to the Texas border. When Border Patrol agents apprehended them crossing illegally near Brownsville that month, they were placed in the Migrant Protection Protocols program and forced to wait in Matamoros for their U.S. immigration court dates.Maria waitressed at a Colombian restaurant in Houston and sent them money so they could rent a room in the border town, to which the U.S. State Department has long warned against travel because of crime and kidnapping, classifying the state of Tamaulipas at the same danger level as war zones like Syria. Maria said she hired a Houston immigration lawyer to argue her family’s case, paying him $6,000 and sending copies of police complaints they filed.The family was far more fortunate than most of the 60,000 migrants forced to wait in Mexico under the program in the past year. Unable to afford rent, many stay in sprawling tent camps such as the one in Matamoros where children younger than 5 made up a quarter of its 2,500 residents, according to a tally by Human Rights First, an advocacy group.Unlike the Salvadoran family, only about 4% of migrants waiting for their U.S. hearings in Mexico have been able to secure an attorney to represent them, according to Human Rights Watch, an international nonprofit. By comparison, those in the U.S. are seven times more likely to find a lawyer -- crucial in winning asylum.During Mauricio and his daughters’ final hearing in January in the Brownsville immigration court, he told his wife that the lawyer poorly handled their asylum claim. The judge denied their case. That attorney declined to be interviewed.Mauricio began working construction in Matamoros because Maria was trying to afford another lawyer to appeal their case.In March, the father didn’t return from work. The girls waited all night and the next evening they said their neighbor dropped them at the international bridge. Knowing that migrants in Matamoros are often targeted by cartels, the neighbor feared the worst for their father.The Rio Grande as seen from a migrant camp in Matamoros, Mexico, on Friday. Photo credit: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune/ProPublicaU.S. authorities took in the girls, designated them as unaccompanied minors and placed them in the care of a shelter in downtown Houston. Caseworkers with the Office of Refugee Resettlement processed Maria’s application to receive her daughters, doing a home study of the apartment she shared with her brother to see if it met the government’s requirements, she said, and taking her fingerprints.Then the girls made a shocking disclosure to their caseworker, who relayed it to the mother: For years, they said, a relative had sexually assaulted them while Maria and Mauricio were at work. The man died in 2018, but the girls never revealed anything to their parents.The mother’s heart shattered.“That was the worst day of my life,” she said.She also feared for her husband.After he was left nearly for dead when leaving work that March evening, he eventually made it back to the room he had shared with his daughters. By then, they were already in the U.S.He has since escaped Matamoros for a different Mexican city because it was unsafe, Maria said. She has not had steady contact with her husband because he no longer has a phone or reliable place to live, but they talk when they can through Facebook.The mother doesn’t know what they are going to do, but has focused on getting the girls back.Maria underwent a mandatory course through the shelter triggered by her daughters’ sexual assault allegations, and in May, said their case worker told her everything had been approved. She even asked the mother to set up medical appointments for the girls.A few days before they were to be reunified, ICE officials suddenly announced that they planned to deport the sisters to El Salvador, said one of their pro bono lawyers, Elizabeth Sanchez Kennedy of YMCA International Services in Houston.The ICE official told shelter staff that the girls have final removal orders from the hearing with their father in Brownsville.The attorney submitted an appeal to reopen that case and start a new one for them as unaccompanied children. In a separate application for a temporary restraining order in a Houston federal court, she argued this was required under the law.El Salvador’s consulate general in Houston asked Maria where the girls could go if they were deported. The mother said the only family member left was related to the girls’ sexual assault allegations, and that they would not be safe. The consulate told her that ICE officials said if needed the girls could be sent to foster care in El Salvador.“We are seeing a pattern emerge”Lawyers across the country said it seems to be a coordinated new effort to target children who can easily and quickly be deported, particularly those in the Migrant Protection Protocols program, even though they contend the minors qualify for special safeguards.“We are seeing a pattern emerge where ICE is insisting on deporting unaccompanied immigrant children,” Syed, another lawyer in the Houston case, wrote in an email. “But we haven’t seen it happen to two such young children -- our clients are only 8 and 11 -- who have a parent in the U.S. ready to receive them, and no one in their home country to care for them.”Children have been deported to serious harm, including the 16-year-old girl who fled Honduras with her mother after her testimony landed her father in prison for rape and now faces retaliation from her uncle, a convicted killer.The girl and her mother waited in Matamoros for months, but in January their asylum cases were denied through a tent court hearing in Brownsville, her lawyers said. The migrant camp was dangerous, and she said cartel members tried to kidnap another girl.She crossed into Texas alone and was sent to a federal shelter. Attorneys with the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, or ProBar, filed a motion to reopen her old deportation order and argued that denial to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is pending.In April, the teen was abruptly taken to an appointment with ICE agents, who requested she sign her deportation documents, her attorneys said. They filed a temporary restraining order in a Washington, D.C., federal court to halt her removal, arguing the government had wrongly denied her protections for migrant children required under the 2008 anti-trafficking law. She was owed an independent chance at asylum, they said, apart from her mother’s ernment attorneys contended the law only required them to place such children in removal proceedings -- not necessarily grant them new cases as unaccompanied minors. They noted the girl still had time to fight her deportation order from her mother’s case.The judge decided he didn’t have the jurisdiction to block the girl’s removal, and she was sent to Honduras last month. San Francisco attorney Stephen Blake, who argued the federal case, said he was communicating with senior lawyers at the Justice Department and that he felt a “very conscious decision was made by ICE” to deport the girl.On her flight to Honduras was another child represented by the same attorneys from ProBAR. The boy told them he had fled an abusive father and gang members forcing him to join their ranks.When he arrived in Ciudad Juárez across from El Paso last year, he and his mother were forced to await their case in Mexico. His mother returned to Honduras, but the boy feared the gang would target him. Juárez was dangerous, so the teen followed acquaintances to Monterrey, and was not able to return for his U.S. court date. A judge ordered him deported in absentia.In January, he returned to Juárez, crossing alone and landing in a shelter where the ProBar attorneys began representing him. His lawyer, Julio Feliz, filed a motion to reopen his deportation case. On April 1, that was denied, but Feliz said he never received that notice. A few weeks later, the attorney filed supplementary evidence supporting that motion, and the immigration judge agreed to reopen the boy’s case.But ICE deported him that same day, Feliz said.He did not find out the boy had been removed until he was in flight. The teen is now in hiding with a relative in Honduras.“We’re extremely concerned about both of these children’s safety, and we wish we could have had the opportunity to have their cases heard properly,” said Carly Salazar, ProBAR’s legal director.Claudia Cubas, a lawyer with the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, a legal advocacy group in Washington, D.C., was one of the first attorneys to make these arguments in federal court after ICE tried to remove three Salvadoran children -- ages 9, 14 and 16 -- in March.They had fled to Matamoros with their mother in 2019 after members of the MS-13 gang slashed their father to death with machetes, according to court documents, and terrorized their stepfather. A relative connected to the gang beat the mother so viciously her “bone was visible through her skin,” according to a legal filing. Three relatives were killed by MS-13 in an attempt to discover the family’s whereabouts.The children’s stepfather came to the U.S. last year and was allowed to pursue asylum from Maryland, Cubas said. But when the children arrived at the Texas border with their mother, the family was placed in the Migrant Protection Protocols program and made to wait in Matamoros.One child was sexually assaulted in the camp, according to court documents. When their case was denied in January, the mother sent her children across the border alone to join their stepfather.“I have lived my life,” she told her lawyer.The children were placed in foster care through a federal shelter and were set to be reunified with their stepfather. At the last minute, Cubas said the government halted their release to him when ICE suddenly in March tried to deport them. Federal litigation has paused their removal and allowed them to be freed to their father, but only while their legal case is argued.“The government is removing very young children to no one,” Cubas said. “But our courts are in a state of emergency. Our media is COVID-19 all the time. We don’t even have congressional hearings right now in full force. There is less scrutiny.”“Uncanny” timing+Some lawyers fear the recent surge of such deportations is related to an April order in the landmark 1997 settlement agreement governing migrant children in detention. In response to concerns that they would be exposed to COVID-19, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in California found children should be quickly released from government facilities, which she called “hotbeds of contagion,” unless their removal was “imminent.”The government around that time seemed to escalate its enforcement of prior deportation orders for children, said Holly Cooper, an immigration attorney with the University of California at Davis, who is involved in litigating the federal consent decree. She called the timing “uncanny.”Parents in the Matamoros migrant camp worry what will happen to the children they sent across alone, said Maria Corrales, a Honduran asylum-seeker. Her 12-year-old daughter is in a New York shelter after the family lost its immigration case at the border and the girl entered the U.S. by herself.In the camp, Corrales said few parents still have their children with them because, by now, having lost their Migrant Protection Protocols cases or simply given up on the process, most have dispatched them across the border in desperation.“We’re all single parents here,” Corrales sighed. “We have almost no children left.”Federal litigation has forced the temporary reunification of some migrant children with their relatives and halted their deportations -- for now.“These are only band-aids,” said Sanchez Kennedy, who represents the Salvadoran girls in Houston.Late Thursday, the government granted her a provisional stay to argue their immigration appeal. A federal judge simultaneously blocked ICE from deporting the girls until this Friday, when attorneys will argue for a longer halt on their removal.While the litigation unfolds, the government late last week released the girls to their mother.They gushed when they saw her, hugging desperately.But the government could still deport them alone.Unpublished watchdog report continues to expose horrors of family separation policy, two years laterby Gabe OrtizDaily KosJune 2, 2020 years after the Trump administration made the state-sanctioned kidnapping of children at the border official U.S. policy, the horrors around this crime against humanity continue to be exposed. According to an unpublished Homeland Security watchdog report obtained by BuzzFeed News, officials ripped apart dozens of families who had asked for asylum at U.S. ports of entry in 2018, despite public assurances that certain parents and children there wouldn’t be targeted.“The report found that 40 children in this group were separated from their parents for at least four weeks, although one didn't see their family for more than a year,” BuzzFeed News’ Hamed Aleaziz reported. The report said that in one instance, officials separated a Guatemalan mother from all four of her children, including a 5-month-old infant. “The family was separated for seven weeks. The mother told inspector general investigators that she would no longer be able to nurse her child as a result,” Aleaziz reported.The BuzzFeed News report said that former Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen had claimed families arriving at a port of entry would be separated only under very specific circumstances, including if the child was at risk, saying: “DHS is not separating families legitimately seeking asylum at ports of entry. If an adult enters at a port of entry and claims asylum, they will not face prosecution for illegal entry. They have not committed a crime by coming to the port of entry.”But according to the unpublished Homeland Security inspector general report: “Between May and June 2018, Office of Field Operations staff, operating without clear guidance, separated at least 35 asylum-seeking families at ports of entry for reasons other than the children’s welfare or a ‘legal requirement,’ such as criminal warrants,” BuzzFeed News said. “One CBP official had said publicly in July 2018 that there had only been seven separations at the ports of entry during this time period.”To be clear, no family should have been separated, whether or not they arrived at a U.S. port of entry, and this report continues to expose a brutal and inhumane practice by federal immigration officials to terrorize families to this very day.Outraged advocates raised alarms last month that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were presenting parents detained with their kids at migrant family jails with a cruel “binary choice” -- either agree to have their kids released without them, or remain jailed together indefinitely. While ICE denied this, the agency’s own words said otherwise because a report it submitted to a court on the status of detained families lists row after row of “parent does not wish to separate.”Caught in the act, ICE officials jumped into denial mode, offering three statements on their separation attempts, immigration reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez tweeted. Nielsen lied, and so did ICE.Earlier this year, Physicians for Human Rights said family separation constituted “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” that rose “to the level of torture,” further concluding it was a form of enforced disappearance, “which is prohibited under international law in all circumstances,” they wrote. The physicians interviewed 26 adults and children who were separated by the administration, which ultimately kidnapped nearly 5,500 children in total. Some families, the physicians said, were ripped apart without so much as a chance to say goodbye.“Nine of the 17 parents reported to PHR clinicians that immigration authorities abruptly separated them from their children and that they were prohibited from saying goodbye or consoling them,” the report said. “Immigration authorities forcibly removed children from their parents’ arms, removed parents while their children slept, or simply ‘disappeared’ the children while their parents were in different holding cells or receiving medical care.”U.S. Must Release Children From Family Detention Centers, Judge RulesThe order, which cited the severity of the coronavirus pandemic, applies to children held in the nation’s three family detention centers for more than 20 days.By Miriam JordanThe New York TimesJune 26, 2020 the severity of the coronavirus pandemic, a federal judge in Los Angeles on Friday ordered the release of migrant children held in the country’s three family detention centers.The order to release the children by July 17 came after plaintiffs in a long-running case reported that some of them have tested positive for the virus. It applies to children who have been held for more than 20 days in the detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania.There were 124 children living in those facilities on June 8, according to the ruling.In her order, Judge Dolly M. Gee of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California criticized the Trump administration for its spotty compliance with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To prevent the virus from spreading in congregate detention facilities, the agency had recommended social distancing, the wearing of masks and early medical intervention for those with virus symptoms.“The family residential centers are on fire and there is no more time for half measures,” she wrote.Given the pandemic, Judge Gee wrote, ICE must work to release the children with “all deliberate speed,” either along with their parents or to suitable guardians with the consent of their parents.The order was the first time a court had set a firm deadline for the release of minors in family detention if their parents designated a relative in the United States to take custody. Recent orders had required their “prompt” release.“Some detained parents facing deportation brought their children to this country to save them from rampant violence in their home countries,” said Peter Schey, counsel for the class of detained children, “and would prefer to see their child released to relatives here rather than being deported with the parent to countries where children are routinely kidnapped, beaten and killed.”Judge Gee oversees compliance with the 1997 Flores settlement agreement that sets national standards for the treatment and release of detained immigrant children.The Trump administration has been trying to terminate the settlement for the last two years, but those efforts have been blocked by Judge Gee and are currently being appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.Eleven children and parents have tested positive for the coronavirus at a family detention center in Karnes City, Texas. Some migrants at a family facility in Dilley, Texas, are awaiting test results after workers there tested positive for the virus.Over all, about 2,500 immigrants in ICE detention have tested positive for the virus. The agency has said that it has released at least 900 people with underlying conditions and that it has shrunk the population in each facility to mitigate the spread of the virus.A spokesperson for ICE said on Saturday that the agency was reviewing the order.Judge postpones deadline for ICE to release minors from family detention facilitiesBy Camilo Montoya-GalvezCBS NewsJuly 16, 2020 federal judge in California on Thursday gave the Trump administration 10 more days to release migrant children who have been detained with their parents for more than 20 days, frustrating advocates who have raised concerns about the growing coronavirus cases among immigrant detainees.The initial deadline ordered by U.S. Judge Dolly Gee of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles was Friday, July 17. Now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has until July 27 to comply with Gee's mandate by releasing families from the three family detention centers together, or by asking the parents whether they would consent to their children being released to sponsors without them.The deadline extension had been requested Wednesday in a joint filing by the Justice Department and Peter Schey, the lead lawyer representing minors in litigation surrounding the Flores Settlement Agreement. Gee oversees the government's compliance with the 1997 court settlement, which affords certain protections to migrant minors in U.S. custody, including a requirement that officials continuously pursue their release to sponsors like family members in the U.S.NEW: US Judge Dolly Gee is postponing the deadline for ICE to release migrant children from family detention to July 27, granting a joint request by the DOJ and the lawyers representing minors covered under the Flores Settlement. @CBSNews.The original deadline was tomorrow. pic.YNtG4shPZr-- Camilo Montoya-Galvez (@camiloreports) July 16, 2020There are approximately 300 parents and children detained at two family detention facilities in Texas and one in Pennsylvania. At least 39 migrant family members at the Karnes family detention center in Texas have tested positive for the coronavirus. Several employees there and at the other facility in Dilley, Texas, have also contracted the virus, according to court documents.In her June order, Gee cited the coronavirus cases among migrants and staff at the family detention centers. But because the Flores agreement does not provide any rights to adults, she did not order the release of parents. Instead, she said ICE could, as one of the options, use its broad parole authority to free parents alongside their children.In recent court papers, however, government lawyers have signaled that ICE is not looking to release all the families that have children who have been detained for 20 days. Instead, ICE has been working to establish a process in which it can ask parents whether they would allow their children to be released without them.Schey and the Justice Department requested the extension because the two parties have not yet agreed on mechanisms to inform parents of their children's rights and forms to place minors with sponsors, if parents consent to such an action.In an interview with CBS News on Wednesday, Schey said "it's tragic that ICE, especially during this COVID pandemic, is unwilling to release a very small number of parents being detained with their children." But he added that some parents may prefer to have their children released, even if it means that they will be deported without them, rather than facing indefinite detention with them.But direct attorneys for the families have opposed this mechanism, calling it a coercive choice for parents that could lead to family separation. Shalyn Fluharty, the lead lawyer at Proyecto Dilley, a group of pro-bono attorneys representing families at the Dilley facility, said ICE should release parents and children together. She said the agency can't ask parents whether they would allow their children to be released to sponsors because it has failed to provide them with the information needed to make such a choice."Our moms don't know if they will be deported without their kids if they are separated. They don't know if their children are released, if they will have an opportunity to talk to an immigration judge," Fluharty told CBS News.Fluharty said she also opposed the 10-day deadline extension request made by Schey and the government."Every single day is one more day that a child could die in detention. The circumstances in all three family detention facilities are dire. The risk to our clients is grave," she added.ICE said it is complying with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines to protect migrants and personnel, screening those who may be at increased risk of contracting the coronavirus and offering tests to all detainees at the family detention facilities."As part of the Department of Homeland Security's homeland security mission, our trained law enforcement professionals adhere to the Department's mission and values, and uphold our laws while continuing to provide the nation with safety and security," an ICE spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News late Thursday.The spokesperson said the agency can't comment further because of ongoing litigation.Undeterred by the last uproar, Trump is again considering family separationOpinion by Editorial BoardThe Washington PostJuly 8, 2020 UNDETERRED by the uproar it triggered by separating migrant children from their families two years ago, the Trump administration is considering whether to push for more of the same. Again, teens, tweens, toddlers and babies may be removed from their parents, as a means of deterring further illegal immigration. Again, the president’s unbridled animus toward mainly brown-skinned migrants may result in an episode of cruelty that would shock the civilized world.The administration’s latest threat to break up families arises from a federal court order last month by U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee, in Los Angeles. Judge Gee, alarmed at the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus at family detention centers run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, gave the agency until next Friday to release scores of children held at the facilities. The judge’s jurisdiction in the long-running case does not cover detained adults, which afforded an opening to the administration to present migrant parents with a perverse choice: give up their children to sponsors or remain with their children inside facilities where the pandemic is tightening its grip. In a separate lawsuit brought by parents, the administration says that if forced to release children, it may not free their parents with them.Splitting up families would once have seemed unthinkable in most such cases, with the rare exception of migrant parents who might be criminals or abusive. In the Trump administration, it is all too thinkable — despite the trauma it imposes on children. Under cover of the pandemic, the White House has choked off legal and illegal immigration, and suspended the decades-long system of asylum under which persecuted individuals could apply for refuge in the United States. Since the spring, more than 2,000 unaccompanied minors who crossed the border hoping for asylum have been summarily expelled.The virus has already gained a foothold in two family detention centers in Texas run by ICE, where detainees and employees have tested positive. The contagion at the Texas centers, where CDC-recommended precautions are enforced spottily, prompted Judge Gee to conclude that the facilities “are ‘on fire’ and there is no more time for half-measures.”Despite her ruling, the government now seeks to prolong those half-measures. Administration lawyers argue that officials should be required only to address health and safety violations at the facilities, not release detainees. That’s a fair argument in theory; in practice, ICE has had months to comply with guidelines to protect staff and detainees from covid-19 but has failed to. Beyond the family detention centers it runs, where some 280 parents and children are housed, it holds more than 17,000 migrants at other facilities nationwide; of those, nearly 3,000 have tested positive for the virus, in addition to several dozen ICE employees.The United States is a fundamentally compassionate and decent country. Compassion and decency compel a clear path forward: releasing parents and children together from ICE custody. Sadly, very little in this administration’s makeup suggests it will do the right thing.Revealed: Rod Rosenstein advised there was no age limit on child separationsFormer deputy attorney general’s 2018 conference call with US prosecutors in border states shocked some participants, Guardian learnsby Stephanie Kirchgaessner in WashingtonThe GuardianJuly 23, 2020 Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, advised US attorneys implementing the 2018 zero-tolerance policy that there could be no blanket ban on prosecuting migrant parents who had children under the age of five, the Guardian has learned.The comments on a conference call in May 2018 privately shocked some border state prosecutors because, in effect, it meant that no child was too young to be separated from its parents under the policy, which called for all migrants entering the US illegally to face criminal prosecution.The family separations that followed are seen today by experts as one of the gravest domestic human rights violations to have occurred under the Trump administration.The policy was in place for six weeks and resulted in the separation of 2,814 children from their parents and guardians, about 105 of whom were under the age of five and 1,033 under 10.Rosenstein issued his guidance to US attorneys from states on the Mexican border about two weeks after the then attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued an order that there would be an “escalated effort” to prosecute all illegal entries into the US along the southern border, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian under the condition of anonymity.Previously, under the Obama administration, most families who crossed the border illegally were detained together if they were arrested or were released pending an immigration trial, but were only separated if authorities deemed children to be in danger.There were questions among the border state US attorneys at that time about how the zero-tolerance policy would be implemented and the conference call with Rosenstein sought to address those issues.On the call, one US attorney, John Bash of the western district of Texas, said he had declined to prosecute several cases that had been referred to him by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that involved children under the age of five.In response, sources familiar with the matter said Rosenstein told the US attorneys that they could not decline to prosecute cases based on the age of the children who would be separated from their parents because there was “no categorical exemption” under the order.During the call, Rosenstein was also asked whether prosecutors could decline to prosecute parents with children who only spoke indigenous languages, meaning they were unable to communicate in English or Spanish, or those whose children had intellectual disabilities. Rosenstein said that prosecutors could opt to decline to prosecute individuals with children under those two circumstances on a case-by-case basis, sources said.The comments were met with shock by some of the US attorneys, sources said, because there was concern that children who were under the age of five would not know their own names or their parents’ names and that it posed a risk of children potentially getting lost in the system.Lee Gelernt, a senior immigration lawyer, with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said: “Everyone, but especially the DoJ, should have known that tearing children away from their parents was patently unconstitutional. The ACLU should never have had to file a lawsuit to establish that obvious point.”Rosenstein, who retired from the Department of Justice (DoJ) in 2019 and is now a partner at King & Spalding, a top Washington law firm, said in a statement to the Guardian: “Federal prosecutors did not separate parents from children. The policy the attorney general adopted for the Department of Justice in April 2018 was unambiguous: every defendant the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] arrested and referred for prosecution would be evaluated by federal prosecutors without any categorical exemption.”Under the zero-tolerance policy, hundreds of parents were deported to their home countries without their children and the family separations were later deemed by a federal judge in California to be unconstitutional, “brutal” and “offensive”. The government’s conduct, Judge Dana Sabraw said, arbitrarily tore at the “sacred bond between parent and child”.The policy was in place from 6 April 2018 to 20 June 2018 when, facing intense legal and congressional pressure, it was ended by an executive order by Donald Trump.One former DoJ official defended the department’s actions and told the Guardian that the attorney general’s order had “no effect” unless the DHS referred cases, which the person claimed was solely under the DHS’s purview.“DHS repeatedly complained to the White House that DoJ was not prosecuting enough cases. They were driving the train,” the former official said.Kirstjen Nielsen, who served as DHS secretary at the time, has defended her actions in that period, saying she was “enforcing the law”.An investigation by the internal watchdog at the Department of Homeland Security found that CBP, a division of the DHS that enforces border controls, relied on “ad hoc” measures to record and track family separations and that it knew as early as November 2017 that its systems were deficient.The DoJ has so far received far less scrutiny for its involvement in the child separation policy than the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Health and Human Services, which had custody of the children once they were separated.The DoJ has consistently denied that it ever had a policy to separate children from their parents. But the new information suggests that the DoJ’s knowing cooperation facilitated the execution of the zero-tolerance policy and that it was fully aware that the immigration policy would result in children being separated from their parents, including those under the age of five.Other participants on the conference call included Iris Lan, an associate deputy attorney general who has been nominated by the Trump administration to fill a lifetime appointment as a judge for the southern district of New York, and Adam Braverman, who was serving as an acting US attorney in the southern district of California at the time and has been nominated to serve as a judge in that district. Their nominations have not yet been reviewed or approved by the Senate.Details about Rosenstein’s call with US attorneys have been shared with the inspector general’s office of the DoJ, which is conducting a review of the “planning and implementation” of the zero-tolerance policy by the department.A spokesperson for the DoJ said US attorneys had “maintained discretion to make prosecutorial decisions on a case-by-case basis”. It declined to comment on “internal deliberations” but, in response to questions sent to Lan by the Guardian, said that Lan would “have had no policy decision-making role”. The Guardian also requested a comment from Braverman but did not immediately receive a response.A spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in the western district of Texas declined to comment.Rosenstein is not believed to have been a driving force behind the zero-tolerance policy, which was launched by Sessions in conjunction with the White House as part of Trump’s campaign to crack down on undocumented migrants.He gained an unusually high profile in his role as the No 2 official at the DoJ because he had oversight of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.For many Democrats, Rosenstein’s longtime career at the DoJ and his institutional role was seen at the time as an assurance that the investigation would be protected from possible interference by the Trump administration. His role in the zero-tolerance policy has received far less scrutiny.Everyone, but especially the DoJ, should have known that tearing children away from their parents was unconstitutionalLee GelerntRosenstein publicly defended the zero-tolerance policy at an American Bar Association conference in August 2018, where he said he believed it was consistent with the rule of law and reflected a surge in illegal immigration into the US.“It would be wrong to say we’re prosecuting everyone without regard to the law,” he said, adding that the DoJ was committing resources to ensure that everyone was treated equally under the law rather than “picking and choosing” who will be prosecuted.Agencies in the federal government including the DoJ had already experimented with a “pilot programme” of child separation in the western district of Texas in 2017, which resulted in the separation of 1,556 children from their parents. Court-ordered efforts to reunite parents with their children in hundreds of those cases have largely “come to a halt” in Latin America during the coronavirus crisis, according to immigration lawyers at the ACLU, which has helped lead the effort. ................
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