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For months, federal immigration officials along the 268-mile border that separates New Mexico and western Texas from Mexico have tested a policy of separating migrant parents from their children
. When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reconnect more than 2,600 children separated from their families after a national outcry, the two government agencies in charge – the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Welfare. Male services-have not had a firm hold on the number of children involved or exactly where they were.
There was no unified tracking system to track the location of parents and children. Computer systems could not communicate. Children as young as a few months have sometimes been sent thousands of kilometers away from their parents to federal institutions without any means of communicating with them. The Department of Health and Social Services, which already took care of thousands of other migrant children apprehended while crossing the border, manually sorted out nearly 12,000 cases to determine which ones were covered by law enforcement. court order
. Jonathan White, the head of health and social services in charge of family reunification, said at a hearing that the system was being created. "We are building a new logistics process," he said.
The chaos surrounding the gigantic reunification meeting, which had little precedent and no manual, shows what is happening on the ground when an administration does or flips a policy on the fly. Immigration lawyers and social workers who have long interacted with the government said they had rarely previously seen such disorder among federal agencies.
The US government has struggled for years to cope with the influx of entire families seeking asylum, rather than adult men and women who traditionally came to work. Under the Obama administration, a federal judge limited efforts to detain parents with their children when their cases were considered. Since then, parents who arrive with children have been allowed to leave detention and blend into the general population, sometimes for years.
In this case, the Trump administration wanted to use family separation as a deterrent. .
Now, four weeks after the San Diego judge's order, the government managed to reunite nearly 1,900 children with their parents again, claiming that it was meeting the court-imposed deadline . Yet, more than 700 children are still separated and the reunion did not go well. A 12-year-old Honduran spent a sleepless night in a car parked outside a South Texas immigration jail while waiting for her mother's release. Another Honduran mother was reunited with the 10-year-old bad girl
Homeland Security and Health and Human Services officials defended their management of the process, saying the existing system for unaccompanied minors guarantees that No child is placed. "Every step of our process is necessary to protect children," said Chris Meekins, a senior health and social services official, to reporters. Two weeks ago, lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday in court that some parents who the government said were willing to be deported without their children were misled and did not understand. not the papers they signed. The filing included several parents who stated that they had no intention of leaving their children in the US and that they believed that signing the document was the only way to recover their children. In some cases, according to the ranking, parents are illiterate or speak an indigenous language and do not understand Spanish.
"There was a lack of communication, a lack of care, which was clearly not thought through," said Sister Donna Markham, head of Catholic Charities USA, a national network that helps the government. to take care of families after reunification.
The Obama administration has envisioned the separation of families on the basis of a recommendation Immigration and Customs Law Enforcement in the United States during a 2014 surge of migrant families.The administration chose not to implement the policy.It instead opened a small number of family detention centers, before a Federal Judge states that children could stay there for no more than 20 days.
Officers return to previous proceedings, usually arresting adult men while leaving women and children at the beginning of Trump's administration, fonctionnai ICE members have made the same recommendation to Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, John Kelly, according to a person familiar with the case. Last summer, federal immigration officials had begun quietly testing the idea as part of a pilot program that had hardly caught the attention from the country.
In March, Customs and Border Protection officials met with non-profit groups to talk to them about a new feature they were putting in place: a family tracking number that would allow to keep an eye on the members of the same family. They welcomed the initiative, which they hoped would help ensure that separated family members would not get lost in the bureaucracy. "I told everyone in our offices across the country," said Jennifer Podkul, director of policy for children in need of defense, who works to represent children in the courts of the country. 39; immigration.
They quickly realized that the family tracking number did not translate beyond the customs system and border protection. In practice, the numbers were useless when a child or parent left the custody of the agency.
In April, the chiefs of CBP, ICE and US Citizenship and Immigration Services sent a memo to the Homeland Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen. the border should be removed for criminal prosecution, including parents traveling with their children.
Officials cited the pilot program, saying it was an effective deterrent against illegal ferries in this region.
At the time Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to San Diego in May to announce that the government had the intention to criminally prosecute all adults crossing the border illegally, including parents, there were already 700 separated children
. prosecutions have intensified, as have separations. After the arrest of the families, they were grouped together in a border patrol processing center. When the adults were brought to justice for felony charges, the children were considered "unaccompanied minors" in their absence and were taken in charge by the HHS Refugee Resettlement Office
. about 80% of them had crossed the border on their own. It is a program that the government hoped to take care of separated children, a familiar administration official of planning.
Under this program, the government sends unaccompanied children to one of the country's 100 shelters. Then, social workers start locating a local sponsor – typically a parent or other parent already in the United States. This process takes about two months and may involve DNA testing to verify the legitimacy of adult sponsors. Meanwhile, children usually stay in a shelter.
"The reunification plan would be as it always has been," said Thursday to AFP Matt Albence, senior immigration and customs officer. had been "built to reunite the children separately, not loose," White told District Judge Dana Sabraw at a hearing in San Diego earlier this month. He said that identifying children and their parents was a complicated task. The children fell into the custody of the ORR. The parents were detained by ICE. Customs and border protection was responsible for the separation.
Mr White said the government needed to bring together a data team consisting of representatives from the three different agencies, as well as a handful of HHS data experts. Meanwhile, officials at his office manually reviewed each child's file by hand to determine if there were any red flags before deciding if a family could be reunited. Mr. White clarified that the record would include details about a child's life in his home country, with whom he traveled and details about the family structure.
The department originally relied on detailed procedures prohibiting parents from imprisoning either the Department of Immigration or the criminal law to sponsor their own children for reunification.
On July 12, the Office of Refugee Resettlement told the shelters that it intended to "meet or exceed the deadline." were on the call or made aware about it. The next day, an HHS official told the court that the agency would speed up reunifications by streamlining the process, including not using DNA to confirm relations, but they warned that Immigrant children may be at risk, possibly placed with adults who are not their parents.
Lawyers relied on the government's online detainee locator to monitor clients, said Christie Turner, deputy director of legal services at the KIND legal group. The system has not always been reliable, she said, and it has become even worse because ICE is struggling to update the data fast enough.
"Things are constantly changing, it's very difficult for us to get information about what happens to some of the children or adults we work with," said Turner. "Some people have disappeared from the system. "
Houston lawyer Pierre Grosdidier represents a Honduran mother who was first reunited in a South Texas prison with a child who was not his. and his child, whom he refused to identify, were reunited hours later in the day.
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, who oversees the care of separated children, referred the questions on this case to the Department of Homeland Security.ICE stated that there "is no evidence that this alleged incident has occurred" and can not investigate without specific information.
Outside Port Isabe Detention Center l in South Texas, a 12-year-old Honduran nested in the back seat of a car with three other children last Monday.
For the next 13 hours, she sat down, unable to sleep, clutching a stuffed rabbit to pass the time, said her mother in an interview, relaying what she said to her girl. her.
The mother said that she was removed from her room on Monday afternoon, that she had been released to meet her daughter. She ended up spending the night in a treatment cell where she said it was clear that her papers were not ready. She settled on a block of concrete and tried to sleep
When the mother was released the next morning at 9:30, she met her daughter in a nearby hut and said her daughter had asked her, "Why n & # Did you not come to me? "
" I told him, if I could come to you, I would have done it.I got here as fast as possible. "
In a written statement, ICE blamed the processing times for the confusion. The agency said it has since improved the prison's treatment capacity and that most children are reunited with their parents in the hours following their arrival
"Safety and well-being Being children is our top priority – order as quickly as possible, "said the agency.
-Arian Campo-Flores contributed to this article.
Write to Nour Malas at [email protected] and Alicia A. Caldwell at [email protected]
