Trump administration family separation policy
The family separation policy under the first Trump administration was a controversial immigration enforcement strategy implemented in the United States from 2017 to 2018, aimed at deterring illegal immigration by separating migrant children from their parents or guardians. The policy was presented to the public as a "zero tolerance" approach, intended to encourage tougher legislation and discourage unauthorized crossings. In some cases, families following the legal procedure to apply for asylum at official border crossings were also separated. Under the policy, federal authorities separated children and infants from parents or guardians with whom they had entered the U.S. The adults were prosecuted and held in federal jails or deported, and the children were placed under the supervision of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Prior to their transfer to HHS, some children spent three weeks or more in overcrowded border control centers, where they reported minimal food, no access to clean clothes or bathing facilities, and no adult caretakers; girls as young as ten were taking care of younger children.
Family separations began in the summer of 2017, prior to the public announcement of the "zero tolerance" policy in April 2018. The policy was officially adopted across the entire U.S.–Mexico border from April 2018 until June 2018. The practice of family separation continued for at least eighteen months after the policy's official end, with an estimated 1,100 families separated between June 2018 and the end of 2019. In total, more than 5,500 children, including infants, were separated from their families.
By early June 2018, it emerged that the policy did not include measures to reunite the families that it had separated. Scott Lloyd, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, had directed his staff not to maintain a list of children who had been separated from their parents. Matthew Albence, head of enforcement and removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had told his colleagues to prevent reunification even after the parents had been processed by the judicial system, saying that reunification "undermines the entire effort". Following national and international criticism, on June 20, 2018, Trump signed an executive order ending family separations at the border. On June 26, 2018, U.S. district judge Dana Sabraw issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against the family separation policy and ordered that all children be reunited with their parents within thirty days. In 2019, a release of emails obtained by NBC News revealed that although the administration had said that they would use the government's "central database" to reconnect the thousands of families that had been separated, the government had only enough information to reconnect sixty children with their parents. The administration refused to provide funds to cover the expenses of reuniting families, and volunteer organizations provided both volunteers and funding. Lawyers working to reunite families stated that 666 children still had not been found as of November 2020, and by March 2024 the American Civil Liberties Union increased the estimate to 2,000 children.
History
Previous U.S. policy
Prior to the Trump administration, the United States did not routinely separate migrant parents from their children. Rather, previous administrations used either family detention facilities or alternatives to detention. Families traveling together were generally only separated under narrow circumstances, such as suspicion of human trafficking, an outstanding warrant, or fraud. For decades, the government did not pursue criminal charges for illegal entry, which had been a misdemeanor offense since 1929. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 led to a significant change in U.S. immigration, with increased immigration from regions including Mexico and Central America, including an increase in child immigrants. Starting in the 1980s, increasing numbers of unaccompanied minors migrated to the United States from Central America.Flores Settlement Agreement
In 1984, the director of Western Region of the INS introduced a new policy that a detained immigrant unaccompanied minor "could only be released to a parent or legal guardian". This resulted in minors allegedly being detained in poor conditions for "lengthy or indefinite" periods of time.Starting in 1985, in response to these allegations of mistreatment of unaccompanied minors in INS facilities, a series of lawsuits was initiated. In 1997, following years of litigation over these lawsuits which included Flores v. Meese and Reno v. Flores, a consent decree or settlement called the Flores Settlement Agreement was reached. It set strict standards regarding the treatment of minors by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The government agreed to keep children in the least restrictive setting possible and to ensure their prompt release from detention. The settlement required minors to be provided with "food and drinking water as appropriate", "medical assistance if minor is in need of emergency services", "toilets and sinks", "adequate temperature control and ventilation", "adequate supervision to protect minors from others", "contact with family members who were arrested with the minor and separation from unrelated adults whenever possible".Bush Administration
In 2005, President George W. Bush launched Operation Streamline, a "zero-tolerance" program targeting a stretch of the U.S.–Mexico border that referred unlawful entrants for criminal prosecution and expedited their deportation. Operation Streamline was later renamed the Criminal Consequence Initiative. Parents traveling with minor children were typically exempt from the policy. In 2006, Congress designated a single facility—the T. Don Hutto Residential Center—to house families together, and that facility opened in 2006. Children were nonetheless sometimes separated from their parents as a result of child welfare practices and immigration policies; a 2011 report estimated that 5,100 children were in foster care while their parents were detained or deported.Obama Administration
The Obama administration initially rejected family detention and shuttered the Hutto Center. But, after the 2014 American immigration crisis, which was a surge in women and unaccompanied children seeking entrance to the U.S., Obama assembled a multiagency team tasked with crafting new immigration policies. This occasioned the first discussion of a family-separation policy, which was proposed by ICE official Thomas Homan, though the proposal was quickly rejected. Instead, the administration opted to expand the detention policy and built new family-detention facilities, meant to hold families indefinitely pending deportation. The journalist Caitlin Dickerson described Homan as the "intellectual father" of family separation policy.''Flores v. Lynch''
In 2016, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Flores v. Lynch that, pursuant to the Flores Settlement Agreement, both unaccompanied and accompanied minors could only be held in detention for a short time—roughly, 20 days. The Obama administration complied with the order, and, facing intense criticism, it also reversed course on family detention, adopting new rules that took into account the interests of parents and re-focusing the detention policy on immigrants who had previously committed crimes in the United States. Few families were ever separated under the Obama administration, and such families were generally quickly reunited once identified. Unaccompanied children were kept in holding cells, separated by age and gender, while appropriate placements were found. Supporters of Donald Trump would later claim that his family separation policy was equivalent to policies under the Obama administration, but non-partisan groups and journalists have described the assertion as false.Trump administration
While running for president in 2016, candidate Donald Trump said ending "catch and release" was the second of his two priorities for immigration reform, after walling off Mexico. After taking office in January 2017, Trump demoted Daniel Ragsdale as director of ICE and replaced him with Thomas Homan, who had long advocated for the separation of children from their families as a means of deterring illegal immigration. While Homan's ideas had previously been dismissed, they were well received within the Trump administration. The journalist Caitlin Dickerson described Homan as the "intellectual father" of child separation, based on her Pulitzer-prize winning investigation into the policy. Trump's senior adviser Stephen Miller was also a driving force behind the Trump administration's family separation policy. NBC News reported that officials in attendance of a meeting of senior advisers said that "Miller warned that not enforcing the administration's zero tolerance immigration policy 'is the end of our country as we know it' and that opposing it would be un-American."Initial proposals (Feb-April 2017)
Two weeks after Trump was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2017, the administration reviewed the idea of separating immigrant children from their mothers as a way to deter asylum-seekers. In March 2017, it was first reported that the Department of Homeland Security was considering a proposal to separate parents from their children if they were caught attempting to cross the border into the United States.John Kelly, then Secretary of Homeland Security, confirmed that the policy was under consideration, but later denied it. Speaking on Democracy Now! the director of the National Immigration Law Center said that the policy, if implemented, would amount "to state-sanctioned violence against children, against families that are coming to the United States to seek safety" and that the administration did not act with transparency in explaining what was being proposed.
On April 5, 2017, the DHS said they were no longer considering the policy partly due to the steep decline in mothers attempting to travel to the U.S. with their children.