[ad_1]
When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunite separate migrant families at the border, government clean-up teams faced an immediate problem.
They did not know who these families were. 19659002] The Customs and Border Protection databases have categories for "family units" and "unaccompanied foreign children" arriving without parents. They did not have a separate classification for more than 2,600 children who had been stripped of their family and placed in government shelters.
The agents thus found a new term: "suppressed family units".
sent this information to the Refugee Office at the Ministry of Health and Social Services, which was said to facilitate reunifications, the office database has no column for these families.
The crucial tool to solve the problem was paralyzed. Government social workers and health officials screened the records of all the children of nearly 12,000 HHS detainees who had arrived with their parents, where adults were imprisoned, and how to put them back together .
The cumulative failures of recording, classifying and tracking migrant parents and children torn apart by the "zero tolerance" border crackdown of President Donald Trump were at the heart of what is today largely considered one of the biggest debacles of his presidency. The swift implementation and sudden reversal of the policy has shaken several federal agencies, forcing the activation of an HHS command center ordinarily used to manage hurricanes and other disasters.
After 30 days to reunite "suppressed" families Dana M. Sabraw, US District Court Judge, blasted the government for its lack of preparation and coordination.
"There were three agencies, each with their own boss, and they did not communicate. said at a court hearing Friday in San Diego. "What was lost in the process was the family, the parents did not know where the children were and the children did not know where the parents were, and the government did not know either."
This account of the implementation of the separation plan and the sudden disappearance is based on the court records as well as interviews with more than 20 current and former public servants, lawyers and contractors, many of whom under cover of anonymity
Donald Trump officials insisted that they were not doing anything. Extraordinary and were content to enforce the law: the administration considered the separations as a powerful tool to deter illegal border crossings, and not anticipate the brutal emotional reaction of separating thousands of families to sue the parents for crossing the border illegally.
Most of these parents were charged with offenses and taken to federal courthouses where they were sentenced on time. At that time, their children were already in government shelters. The government did not consider the families as a discreet group, nor did they devise a special plan to reunite them, until Sabraw told them to do so.
One result was that more than 400 parents were deported without their children. Many others say that they went for weeks without being able to talk to their sons and daughters and, in dozens of cases, signed forms waiving their right to claim their children without understanding this. that these people were saying.
Scrambling to meet the timeline of reunification of the judge, government chaperones transported children from shelters scattered across the country to immigration jails near the border where they had been separated from their parents a few weeks or months before .10 days have passed since her client was informed that she would be reuniting with her 6 year old daughter and that she she remained in Texas custody, and neither she nor a social worker for her daughter, waiting in a New York shelter, explanation. "She looked at all the other words hers came out of her dorm Eileen Blessinger
In her file on Thursday, the government said it had gathered more than 1,800 children with their parents or other guardians, but 711 children would remain separated for the time being because their parents had been deported, had a criminal history or had not been allowed to recover custody.
Finally, Trump's decision to stop the separation of the families , followed by Sabraw 's reunification order, largely restored the status quo at the border, with hundreds of adults released to await immigration hearings when they live with their families. children in the United States
"If you are really, really pathetically weak, the country will be invaded by millions of people. And if you are strong, then you do not have a heart, "Trump seized his June 20 executive order, calling him" a difficult dilemma. "
Senior government officials said that they were making efforts to note which families had been broken and that they believed that the HHS system already in place would have allowed parents to recover their children and leave the country by accepting voluntary expulsion.
"There was still an intention of reunification." Sabraw, who was appointed to the federal tribune by President George W. Bush, said that even a short-term split was unacceptable.
"This was not to be a permanent condition." It is an act of separation from a parent, especially with young children, which counts, " he said to the government during a court proceeding
Since Trump took office, the president has railed out saying to the assistants, "This can not happen under my supervision." He criticized the secretary of the department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen.
Family units composed of at least one parent and one Border patrol members rated them as "non-impactable", which means that adults knew that arriving with children The agents on the ground have long been asking for a way to deter these border workers, believing that some are smugglers and that this allows them to go unpunished. invite more lawbreaking. According to the Department of Homeland Security, a quarter of all illegal border workers were family groups in the spring of 2001.
"We really felt that it was something we had to do," he said. said a senior DHS official. "Law enforcement for the right reasons is not a bad decision."
Suddenly, an idea deemed too extreme by the Obama administration was back, pushed by powerful supporters , including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and John F. Kelly, Chief of Staff of the White House.
But there were also senior officials from DHS and other agencies who warned that it could be disastrous.
"Some of us did not think Not because it would not work, but because it does not reflect American values and because it would mean a huge backtrack," said James Nealon , a former DHS international policy advisor who resigned in February. previously, separated parents were more limited, for example when traffic was suspected or the relationship with the child was in doubt.
Last year, the administration piloted a mass separation system in the El Paso region. . When illegal crossings jumped this spring, Trump signed a general policy for the entire border.
"If you smuggle a child, we will sue you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law" Sessions said in a May 7 Arizona speech. "If you do not like that, do not pass children over our border."
A senior Border Patrol official said they had received orders not to send their parents away for criminal prosecution. As the system grew, thousands of children were directed to shelters supervised by the HHS, so the agency had to set up a tent camp outside the HHS. El Paso and plan others on military bases.
"I think CBP and ICE would have preferred a more progressive plan, starting in some places, or with specific groups," said Stewart Verdery, Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security under Bush, referring to Customs and Border Protection and Immigration. and the customs enforcement. "Something that could be done in an adjusted manner, so you could know exactly where people were physically and with regard to litigation status."
Two days after Sabraw's reunification order, DHS officials held a conference call from its Homeland Security Advisory Board, a group of security experts and alumni officials who provide recommendations and advice to the secretary. One member, David A. Martin, said the officials had few answers when the dismayed members asked how they planned to bring back the families: "They said," Well, we are working on it. "Two weeks later, he and three other members resigned with disgust."
In his resignation letter, Martin stated that the separations were "executed with staggering negligence on the accurate monitoring of family relationships – as if reunification eventual was deemed improbable or at least "
Another member who resigned, Elizabeth Holtzman, stated that the impossibility of creating records to track parents and children demonstrated" total depravity ".
"This is a kidnapping, simple and simple" Senior officials felt that any controversy generated by family separations could be used as leverage for negotiations with the Democrats on the program of action deferred for Obama 's children' s arrivals and the financing of the border wall, according to the current and former EDS. officials involved in policy planning.
Instead, the fire poisoned the well from a distance, said Verdery, who now runs a lobbying firm. "If you are a democrat or a moderate, and that a proposal is categorized as a family break between DHS, it will not be a case."
Broken systems
Long before the arrival of Trump, people inside and outside The Office of Refugee Resettlement of the HHS acknowledged that the database on the measure used since 2014 to track migrant children under its care was clumsy and flawed.
The Portal of Unaccompanied Children has often been crushed, according to several people having access to it. And because he sometimes failed to record information, social workers were trained to copy into a word document what they were trying to write about a child.
Most seriously, the portal was not built to allow ORR to add categories of data. or quickly sort the information that it contains, according to three people who know it. If HHS staff wanted to compile specific information, such as a list of all pregnant teenagers in shelters, "it would take months and months," said a former ministry official.
Because the system was not designed would need to find the detained parents of his children, the portal did not include a place to type information about the identity of the parents, the l? location or file number
A 2015 Government Accountability Office report concluded that "the interinstitutional process of referral and transfer [unaccompanied children] from DHS to HHS is inefficient and vulnerable to errors as it relies on e-mail and seizure manual data, and documented standard procedures, including defined roles and responsibilities, do not exist. "
official said, then secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell" was frustrated, because, many times we have just had to say, "We can not get that data," or "We can get it, but it will take a few weeks."
The department hired a government contractor who makes recommendations to improve the system and add more staff. Some improvements were made, but it was near the end of the Obama administration, and the old guard ran out of time. "We left a plan for the new administration to pick up," said the former manager. "To my knowledge, nothing happened."
Just before Trump's swearing-in, a group of immigrant advocacy groups released a report deploring a slow increase in the number of separated families at the border. He warned that "government agencies have little political guidance on family unity and separation, and no consistent or comprehensive mechanisms for documenting family status or tracing family members."
"said Michelle Brane, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program of the Women's Refugee Commission, one of the groups behind the report. "They insisted that they had no way of doing it."
A HHS spokesman said that a "data element" had been added to the system two weeks ago to clarify if a child was separated from a parent or guardian. to be apprehended. The system now has the ability to generate reports, as well as download Word documents and spreadsheets, the spokesman said.
Flip-Flopped Standards
HHS officials said that they participated in calls and meetings of the White House after zero tolerance was announced.
The Department's Refugee Office was overwhelmed by the number of children in its custody once the mass separations had begun and the files arriving from the Border Patrol were in disarray
. In some cases, border patrol officers had handwritten the parents' names and foreign numbers in the records of the children who were sent to the ORR, but according to the lawyers of several familiar children with the files, it was risky. ficial said that the records he looked at usually contained the parents' names but did not say where they could be located.
The underlying problem, however, was that the database containing problems was not assembled to bring the children together. Robert Carey, who was director of the ORR for the last two years of the Obama era
as one senior DHS official said: "We had a system designed to circulate in one direction. "
Four days before Sabraw's reunification order, HHS secretary Alex Azar took the responsibility of returning the children to their parents away from the ORR and handed them over to the interveners The agency "continues to pursue, to the extent possible, all cases that are submitted to them for prosecution," said Devin spokesperson O. Malley.
Although illegal crossings generally decrease during the summer, DHS officials report a drop in arrests Last month, the family separation system was operating before the president stopped him. [19659002] "Many facts surrounding enforcement efforts have been lost in the media and Congressional hysteria, misrepresentations, misrepresentations and lies the administration," said a senior official of the administration. "Facts and the rule of law have been in vain."
Border patrol officers privately predict that smugglers will be encouraged by flagrant standards of enforcement and that they are preparing to increase the number of smugglers. number of passages. With families once again largely exempted, officers reluctantly resorted to the same "capture and release" system that Trump promised to end the war. Patroller who shared the criticism of the White House on condition of anonymity. "You have to think everything before moving on to something like that, and when the pushback hits, you have to face the storm."
The American Civil Liberties Union, which instituted the lawsuit that led to the order of Sabraw, could take months to find hundreds of deported relatives and arrange to return their children. Some parents may be hard to reach or hide from the very threats that drove them to flee in the first place.
Meanwhile, the government will try to place their children with guardians. Otherwise, they will stay in the shelters.
"It will be a very hard detective job," said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrant Rights Project. "Let's hope we find them."
This story was originally published by the Washington Post.
