Family Separation May Have Hit Thousands More Migrant Children Than Reported
by Miriam Jordan
January 17, 2019
New York Times
PHOTO: Brenda
Garcia reunited with her 7-year-old son, K.G.G., at Dulles Airport
outside Washington in June, 34 days after they were separated by
officials after crossing the border into the United States
illegally. Credit: Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times
HOUSTON — The Trump administration most likely separated thousands more
children from their parents at the Southern border than was previously
believed, according to a report by government inspectors released on
Thursday.
The federal government has reported that nearly 3,000
children were forcibly separated from their parents under last year’s
“zero tolerance” immigration policy, under which nearly all adults
entering the country illegally were prosecuted, and any children
accompanying them were put into shelters or foster care.
But even
before the administration officially unveiled the zero-tolerance policy
in the spring of 2018, staff of the United States Department of Health
and Human Services, the agency that oversees the care of children in
federal custody, had noted a “sharp increase” in the number of children
separated from a parent or guardian, according to the report from the
agency’s Office of Inspector General.
As of December, the
department had identified 2,737 children who were separated from their
parents under the policy and required to be reunified by a federal court
order issued in June 2018.
But that number does not represent
the full scope of family separations. Thousands of children may have
been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the
accounting required by the court, the report said.
Thus, the
total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by
immigration authorities is “unknown,” because of the lack of a
coordinated formal tracking system between the Office of Refugee
Resettlement, the arm of Health and Human Services that takes in the
children, and the Department of Homeland Security, which separated them
from their parents.
“This report confirms what we suspected: This
cruel family separation practice was way bigger than the administration
let on,” said Lee Gelernt, who challenged the policy in court on behalf
of the American Civil Liberties Union. “We will be back in court and
ask the judge to order the government to explain these numbers,” he
said.
The family separations were a key part of the Trump
administration’s effort to deter migrant families from trying to enter
the country at the Southwest border, where they have been arriving in
large numbers, most of them fleeing violence and deep poverty in Central
America.
While the policy was framed as a decision to prosecute
those who entered the United States illegally, it resulted in thousands
of migrant parents spending months in agonized uncertainty, unable to
communicate with their children and in many cases not knowing even where
the children were.
Infants and toddlers were among the children
who were put into foster homes or migrant children shelters, often
hundreds or thousands of miles away from where their parents were
detained. Under separate policies, the administration also made it
difficult for relatives other than the children’s parents to take the
children into their own homes.
After a review of internal
government tallies, The New York Times found last year that more than
700 migrant children had been separated from their families in the
months before the government officially announced the zero-tolerance
policy.
On June 26, 2018, a federal judge in San Diego, in
response to the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, directed the federal government to
halt the separations at the border and to reunite children with their
parents. President Trump rescinded the policy that same month.
However, the federal inspectors found that separations have continued to
occur: As of November, the report found, Health and Human Services had
received at least 118 children who had been separated from their
families since the court order.
Officials at the Department of
Homeland Security, which oversaw the family separations at the border,
have said they have separated families only when necessary, such as when
a parent is facing a serious criminal prosecution, or when authorities
have reason to believe that the adult accompanying the child is not an
appropriate guardian.
“The report vindicates what D.H.S. has long
been saying,” said Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the department.
“For more than a decade it was, and continues to be, standard for
apprehended minors to be separated when the adult is not the parent or
legal guardian, the child’s safety is at risk, or serious criminal
activity by the adult. We are required under the law that Congress
passed to send all unaccompanied alien children to H.H.S.”
Ann
Maxwell, the Health and Human Services Department’s assistant inspector
general for evaluation and inspections, said the separations appeared to
have been occurring for a full year before the court issued its order.
“Thousands of children were separated from parents and guardians,
referred to H.H.S. and released from H.H.S. care before the court
order,” Ms. Maxwell said in a conference call with reporters.
“The total number is unknown,” she said. “It is certainly more than
2,737, but how many more, precisely, is unknown.” Moreover, that number
may never be known: Department officials, she said, had told her office
that there were “no efforts underway to identify that. It would take
away resources from children already in care.”
In an email after
the call, Ms. Maxwell’s spokesman confirmed that inspectors believed the
number of separated children may be “thousands” more than the 2,737
reported to the court.
The inspectors provided no precise data to
support that estimate, though Ms. Maxwell said that Health and Human
Services had noted a “spike” in the frequency of children being
separated from their families, from 0.3 percent of all apprehended
families in 2016 to 3.8 percent in 2017.
Family separations have
occurred for years, but they had previously been “fairly rare,” Ms.
Maxwell said, occurring only in cases where there were concerns about
child welfare. That changed in 2017, she said.
Ms. Maxwell said
that most of the families on the list of separated families had been
reunited, pursuant to the court order. But she said the figures
continued to evolve, for several reasons. The absence of an integrated
data system to track separated families through the two federal agencies
that oversee them was one problem, she said.
Also complicating
the issue, she said, was the complex problem of determining which
children should be considered officially “separated” from their
families. That meant that the list of families entitled to reunification
was still being revised as late as December 2018, more than five months
after the court order took effect.
The Department of Health and
Human Services, in its official response, said it had accounted publicly
for all children separated from relatives at the border and then
delivered to the agency for care.
“H.H.S. faced challenges in
identifying separated children,” the agency said. “The effort undertaken
by H.H.S. was complex, fast-moving and resource-intensive.”
The
inspector general’s report, the department said, “provides a window into
the herculean work of the H.H.S. career staff to rapidly identify
children in O.R.R. care who had been separated from their parents and
reunify them.” O.R.R. refers to the resettlement office.
The
department emphasized that the inspector general found “no evidence
whatsoever” that it had lost track of children in its care. Though there
were delays in linking children to parents, partly as a result of the
Department of Homeland Security’s tracking system. When immigration
agents separated families at the border, records that could have been
used to connect parents and children were automatically deleted because
the computer system had not been modified to account for separated
families.
In its response on Thursday, the Department of Health
and Human Services said that the inspector general’s report
“corroborates what H.H.S. has said all along: H.H.S. can determine the
location and status of any child in O.R.R. care at any time by accessing
the case management records for the child, or the O.R.R. online
portal.”
Glenn Thrush contributed reporting from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 17, 2019, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Many Families Split at Border Went Untallied. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
