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‘Deleted’ families
‘Deleted’ families: What went wrong with Trump’s family-separation effort
When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunify migrant families separated at the border, the government’s cleanup crews faced an immediate problem.
They weren’t sure who the families were, let alone what to call them.
Customs and Border Protection databases had categories for “family units,” and “unaccompanied alien children” who arrive without parents. They did not have a distinct classification for more than 2,600 children who had been taken from their families and placed in government shelters.
So agents came up with a new term: “deleted family units.”
But when they sent that information to the refugee office at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was told to facilitate the reunifications, the office’s database did not have a column for families with that designation.
The crucial tool for fixing the problem was crippled. Caseworkers and government health officials had to sift by hand through the files of all the nearly 12,000 migrant children in HHS custody to figure out which ones had arrived with parents, where the adults were jailed and how to put the families back together.
Compounding failures to record, classify and keep track of migrant parents and children pulled apart by President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border crackdown were at the core of what is now widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles of his presidency. The rapid implementation and sudden reversal of the policy whiplashed multiple federal agencies, forcing the activation of an HHS command center ordinarily used to handle hurricanes and other catastrophes.
After his 30-day deadline to reunite the “deleted” families passed Thursday, U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw lambasted the government for its lack of preparation and coordination.
“There were three agencies, and each was like its own stovepipe. Each had its own boss, and they did not communicate,” Sabraw said Friday at a court hearing in San Diego. “What was lost in the process was the family. The parents didn’t know where the children were, and the children didn’t know where the parents were. And the government didn’t know either.”
This account of the separation plan’s implementation and sudden demise is based on court records as well as interviews with more than 20 current and former government officials, advocates and contractors, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to give candid views and diagnose mistakes.
Trump officials have insisted that they were not doing anything extraordinary and were simply upholding the law. The administration saw the separations as a powerful tool to deter illegal border crossings and did not anticipate the raw emotional backlash from separating thousands of families to prosecute the parents for crossing the border illegally.
Most of those parents were charged with misdemeanors and taken to federal courthouses for mass trials, where they were sentenced to time served. By then, their children were already in government shelters. The government did not view the families as a discrete group or devise a special plan to reunite them, until Sabraw ordered that it be done.
One result was that more than 400 parents were deported without their children. Many other parents say they went weeks without being able to speak to their children and, in dozens of cases, signed forms waiving their right to reclaim their children without understanding what those forms said.
Scrambling to meet the judge’s reunification deadline, government chaperons transported children from shelters scattered across the country to immigration jails near the border where they had been severed from their parents weeks or months before.
One attorney said Friday that 10 days had passed since her client was told she would be reunited with her 6-year-old daughter. She remained in detention in Texas, and neither she nor a social worker for her daughter, waiting in a New York shelter, could get an explanation. “She watched all the other mothers go out of her dorm. There is only her and one other left,” said the attorney, Eileen Blessinger.
In court filings Thursday, the government said it had reunited more than 1,800 children with their parents or other guardians. But 711 children would remain separated for now, because their parents had been deported, had criminal records or otherwise had not been cleared to regain custody.
In the end, Trump’s decision to stop separating families, followed by Sabraw’s reunification order, has largely brought a return to the status quo at the border, with hundreds of adult migrants released from custody to await immigration hearings while living with their children in the United States.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.