The left and the NeverTrumpers on the right believe they have a winner in the drumbeat against “family separation” of illegal immigrants. You can tell by the coverage, which is widespread and emotional, culminating in propaganda like this:
Former CIA director Michael Hayden defended Monday his comparison of the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement policy to the treatment of concentration-camp prisoners in Nazi Germany.
Hayden, who tweeted a picture of the Auschwitz concentration camp Saturday with the caption “other governments have separated mothers and children,” said during a Monday appearance on CNN’s New Day that he made the incendiary comparison because “he wanted to grab people’s attention.”
Well, d-uh.
If I want to grab people’s attention, should I tweet a photo of Goebbels next to one of Hayden, and write “separated at birth?” ?
The full-court press is on because the visuals are so heart-rending. After all, who would want parents to be separated from children? Do the reasons matter? Of course they do, but not to propagandists and not to those whose hearts rule their minds.
If you want a statement of the reasons the problem and the policy exists, and its pros and cons as well as the alternatives and possible solutions, look here for a very quick summary take:
The separations have been attacked as immoral by congressional Democrats and a handful of Republicans, who advocate a return to the previous policy of releasing individuals awaiting trial for trying to immigrate illegally with their children. But Nielsen placed blame for family separations squarely on lawmakers, citing legislative inaction on immigration reform as the central obstacle to changing the system. She also suggested that previous administrations are partly to blame for incentivizing child trafficking by providing “free passes” to adults who try to cross the border with children.
“From October 2017 to this February, we have seen a staggering 315 percent increase in illegal aliens fraudulently using children to pose as family units to gain entry into this country,” she said. “This must stop. All this does is put the children at risk. To address these issues we’ve asked Congress to change the law to allow for the expeditious return of unaccompanied children, regardless of their country of origin. We are also asking Congress to allow us to keep families together while they are detained.”
Don’t sit on a hot stove till Congress does something about this. It’s much too valuable as a talking point and photo-op, I’m afraid.
See also this:
To be clear, there is no official Trump policy stating that every family entering the US without papers has to be separated. What there is is a policy that all adults caught crossing into the US illegally are supposed to be criminally prosecuted ”” and when that happens to a parent, separation is inevitable.
That’s not necessarily true, by the way, because people asking for asylum (a large group) are not necessarily criminally prosecuted; they must await a hearing on the merits of their asylum claims, which might indeed be granted, and it’s during the wait that their separations occur.
(And by the way, when a citizen parent is incarcerated for any reason there is a separation from his or her children, and this happens every day, although the children themselves are not detained by the government.)
The Trump administration’s policy is meant to correct the previous Obama administration approach, described here:
When an influx of families and unaccompanied children from Central America arrived at the border in 2014, Barack Obama’s administration detained families.
This was harshly criticized and a federal court in 2015 stopped the government from holding families for months without explanation. Instead, they were released while they waited for their immigration cases to be heard in court. Not everyone shows up for those court dates, leading the Trump administration to condemn what it calls a “catch and release” program.
This Vox article says: “Trump’s insistence that family separation is happening as a result of a Democratic ‘law’ is simply not true.” But that’s way oversimplified. This more in-depth article explains more:
For the longest time, illegal immigration was driven by single males from Mexico. Over the last decade, the flow has shifted to women, children, and family units from Central America. This poses challenges we haven’t confronted before and has made what once were relatively minor wrinkles in the law loom very large.
The Trump administration isn’t changing the rules that pertain to separating an adult from the child. Those remain the same. Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings.
It’s the last that is operative here. The past practice had been to give a free pass to an adult who is part of a family unit. The new Trump policy is to prosecute all adults. The idea is to send a signal that we are serious about our laws and to create a deterrent against re-entry. (Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, illegal re-entry a felony.)
When a migrant is prosecuted for illegal entry, he or she is taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. In no circumstance anywhere in the U.S. do the marshals care for the children of people they take into custody. The child is taken into the custody of HHS, who cares for them at temporary shelters.
The criminal proceedings are exceptionally short, assuming there is no aggravating factor such as a prior illegal entity or another crime. The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE.
If the adult then wants to go home, in keeping with the expedited order of removal that is issued as a matter of course, it’s relatively simple. The adult should be reunited quickly with his or her child, and the family returned home as a unit. In this scenario, there’s only a very brief separation.
Where it becomes much more of an issue is if the adult files an asylum claim. In that scenario, the adults are almost certainly going to be detained longer than the government is allowed to hold their children.
That’s because of something called the Flores Consent Decree from 1997. It says that unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so.
So it may be that what Trump is claiming is that the family separations of the children are a result of the Trump enforcement of our immigration laws coupled with its compliance with a ruling of the 9th Circuit concerning the 20-day limit. The 9th Circuit is a liberal court—thus, the “Democratic law”?
I’ve just spent about an hour trying to sort out the real origins of the complex laws regarding the separation policy (Democrat or Republican or bipartisan) and whether previous administrations followed similar practices on a smaller scale. I really cannot find a definitive answer. The best article I’ve found, however, is this one written about three years ago during the Obama administration, which discusses the history of such policies:
While the treatment of immigrant minors has been protected by legal settlements and codified into law, the lack of family detention standards beyond the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) discretionary power has reignited court battles over the applicability of an 18-year old legal settlement known as the Flores Settlement Agreement. The Flores Agreement created legal standards for the detention and treatment of immigrant minors, which generally grants them a “policy favoring release” without unnecessary delays. If detained, children should be placed in the least restrictive setting possible in “unsecured” facilities licensed to care for children.
So Flores was originally a court settlement, not a law passed by either party in Congress (although the 20-day limit was a ruling by a liberal court, as previously discussed). Here’s more:
Immigration detention is the practice of holding unauthorized immigrants in detention facilities while they wait to appear in immigration court or are removed from the United States. The federal government has broad authority to detain unauthorized immigrants, and detention has been used throughout the country’s history. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prioritizes detention space for immigrants that are subject to mandatory detention, pose a risk to public safety if released, or are at risk of absconding.
Family detention refers specifically to holding unauthorized immigrant parents and children in detention facilities awaiting their immigration court hearing. According to ICE, “like single adults, family units apprehended at the border may be placed into expedited removal proceedings and detained,” but this practice has been limited because DHS generally maintained only 90-100 beds for family units in the Berks Family Residential Facility in Pennsylvania. Additionally, before the early 2000s, family units were hardly ever detained, but rather processed and released with a notice to appear at immigration court, especially if they met the credible fear of persecution criteria for a claim to asylum. After the September 11 attacks, ICE began to tighten its “catch and release” policy for all apprehended unauthorized immigrants, including family units, citing their failure to appear in court and concerns that adults were renting or taking children to pass off as a “family.” Due to lack of space, ICE began detaining parents while transferring children to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is common practice for unaccompanied children.
Congress in 2005 became aware of the practice of separating children from their parents and directed DHS change their policy and encouraged the agency to release families or use alternatives to detention whenever possible, adding, “When detention of family units is necessary, the Committee directs DHS to use appropriate detention space to house them together.”
Although Congress seemed to indicate that detention should be a last resort, ICE expanded their detention capacity by opening the T. Don Hutto Correction Center in Texas in 2006. The Hutto facility, which was previously a medium-security prison, added 512 beds to ICE’s family detention capacity. After settling lawsuits brought forward by ACLU, which accused DHS of holding children in prison-like conditions in violation of the Flores Agreement (discussed below), and critical news coverage, ICE stopped detaining families in the Hutto facility in 2009. Between 2009 and 2014, the small Berks facility was the only family dentition facility in operation.
Clearly, arguments over what to do about this have a long and complex history. One problem has long been a lack of family detention facilities (and the 20-day limit on keeping children in them), as well as a lack of facilities in general to handle the influx of illegal immigrants (and children) that were encouraged by the Obama administration. After that increase (2014) the pressure got worse, however, and there were other court battles over the issue:
In FY 2014, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended a total of 68,445 family units, a 361 percent increase over FY 2013’s 14,855. The administration announced that it would begin detaining families throughout the duration of their immigration proceedings. In addition to its small existing Berks facility, DHS opened family detention facilities in Artesia, NM (650 beds), Karnes, TX (532 beds), and Dilley, TX (2,400 beds). The facility in Artesia was closed in December amid a lawsuit on behalf of immigrants detained at the facility accusing DHS tactics of preventing families from exercising their right to seek asylum and attempting to rush removal proceedings. At the time, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson stressed that expanded detention was devised as part of a strategy to deter further immigrants from coming. In February of this year, however, a federal judge barred DHS from detaining immigrant families solely “for the purpose of deterring future immigration.”
While the detention of minors, particularly unaccompanied minor children, has long been codified in law and regulated and protected by legal settlements, the detention practices and standards involving families has been generally more ambiguous and left to DHS discretion and policy, leading to controversy and differing interpretation of applicable regulation. While ICE has its own guidelines for the detention of family units, there are no codified national family detention standards in law.
The treatment and detention of unaccompanied minors has primarily been regulated through the Flores Settlement Agreement of 1997 and the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. For the purposes of family detention, the Flores Agreement has been the most relevant [emphasis mine]: “The terms of the [Flores] agreement grant minors a “general policy favoring release” without unnecessary delays unless there is a public safety risk or a need to ensure appearance in court. The agreement also lays out specific legal standards when the temporary detention of children is necessary: children must be housed separate from unrelated adults in non-secure facilities that are licensed to care for children and meet minimum requirements to house them, including providing access to toilets and sinks, drinking water and food, medical assistance, temperature control, and contact with family members.”
There’s much much more, but it seems that both the Bush and the Obama administrations were practicing some family detention and at times separation of children from parents, that facilities were way too limited, and that both Bush and Obama claimed (for reasons I can’t glean from the article) that Flores did NOT apply to children who came with parents, but that the courts said otherwise.
The law supports the Trump administration’s separation of children from families. But it is a discretionary policy of the administration on illegal immigration in general—and how to treat illegal immigrants—that has resulted in the increase in the phenomenon. The policy is not focused on the children at all, but the children give the opposition tremendous talking points to oppose Trump as a cruel barbarian (and Nazi, of course).
Speaking of NeverTrumpers on the right, Former First Lady Laura Bush has written an op-ed on the subject that appeared in the WaPo. The entire Bush family hates Trump (for very good reasons, I might add) and are quintessential NeverTrumpers, and although I’ve always liked Laura Bush, she is failing to show understanding of what this policy is actually about and giving Democrats some wonderful talking points:
I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.
Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso. These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history…
2018, can we not as a nation find a kinder, more compassionate and more moral answer to this current crisis? I, for one, believe we can.
I would have had a lot more respect for Laura Bush’s op-ed if she had gone on to suggest some of these answers. I certainly don’t like the policy and would absolutely prefer to find a “kinder, more compassionate and more moral answer to this current crisis.” But such a policy can only be discussed by considering the reasons it has been instituted and the better alternatives, if they exist.
My own “better alternative” would be to immediately build more family detention facilities. That’s the only way to both protect the law regarding illegal entry and to keep families together—although I have absolutely no doubt that the left would paint such facilities as awful and as equivalent to those Japanese detention centers during WWII (which applied to many citizens, making it a false analogy).
But as best I can determine, under current law children could only be held in a family detention center for up to 20 days in cases of asylum (and not at all if the parent is arrested, although that process goes more quickly), and then another solution would have to be found. Perhaps that’s why both Bush and Obama didn’t want Flores to apply to family detention? If Congress passed a law allowing family-based detention of children in facilities, with their parents, for longer than 20 days, would that help or would the left just start opposing that, because what they really want is catch and release (I strongly suspect the latter)?
In short (although nothing about this post has been short!), the situation is complicated and fraught with difficulties, but propagandists are determined to simplify it.
