Newly obtained government documents show how the Trump administration’s now-blocked policy to separate all migrant children from parents led social workers to frantically begin tracking thousands of children seized at the southern border and compile reports on cases of trauma.
In June 2018, months after the Trump
administration began its so-called Zero Tolerance policy to deter migrants
trying to enter the United States, an employee working for the U.S. Office of
Refugee Resettlement described a 5-year-old’s despair at a shelter. “Minor was
separated at the border from his biological mother. Minor was tearful when he
arrived and would not speak or engage in conversation with anyone,” the caregiver
wrote in a report. This document and others shed light on a social experiment
that was both cruel and chaotic.
Reports of traumatized children were forwarded
to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil
Liberties, which is charged with ensuring that national security policies
respect constitutional rights. A Center for Public Integrity and NPR investigation earlier
this year found that the office failed to assist children whose suffering was
documented in hundreds of similar complaints the office received last year.
The most recent internal documents Public
Integrity reviewed add to scathing
criticism from the Homeland Security inspector general’s office, which reported on Nov. 25 that it couldn’t verify
how many children were separated by the Zero Tolerance policy, which began gradually
in late 2017 and ended in June 2018. Tracking was flawed because U.S. Customs
and Border Protection officers didn’t accurately record possible family relationships
between adults and 1,233 children detained between October 2017 and mid-February
2019, the inspector general concluded.
Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy
required CBP to separate children so that migrant adults, many of them seeking
asylum, could be immediately held in immigration detention and prosecuted for
illegal entry.
Earlier this year, former Office of
Refugee Resettlement deputy director Jonathan
White told Congress
that he’d heard in early 2017 a broad separation policy could be in the works, and
that he and his colleagues told Homeland Security officials they were concerned
“not only about what that would mean for children, but also what it would mean
for the capacity of the program.”
Internal records, however, show that such concerns date back further.
Before the Trump administration escalated migrant family separations last year, pediatricians had already urged the Department of Homeland Security to strictly limit separations because they are so traumatic to children. Newly released documents show that social workers filed “significant incident reports,” or SIRs, that describe suffering among children who’d been separated and classified as “unaccompanied alien children,” or UAC.
Warnings weeks before Trump
Among
the documents Public Integrity obtained is a September 2016 email from a child refugee specialist signaling
discomfort with Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations
(OFO) splitting up migrant families prior to Zero Tolerance.
“The best thing that could happen is for the OFO to stop the practice of family separation,” a child refugee field specialist added to the top of an email containing instructions for reunifying families that he sent to colleagues on Sept. 20, 2016.
Just
10 days after the specialist sent the email, a Homeland Security advisory committee issued a damning report on the
damage children suffer when abruptly separated from parents. Separations were
comparatively uncommon at the time, but they’d grown frequent enough to trigger
a review, conducted by representatives of the American Academy of Pediatrics
and civil rights groups.
“Separation can be acutely
frightening for children and can leave children in ad hoc care situations that
compromise their safety and well-being,” the advisory committee warned. “It can
also be traumatizing and extremely stressful for the parent.”
The committee urged Homeland Security to separate parents and children as little as possible and instead place families in supervised release programs while their asylum or other immigration claims moved through the courts.
Before Trump began Zero Tolerance in
2018, Customs and Border Protection had — and still has — the authority to
separate parents and children under limited circumstances.
But because Zero Tolerance required parents to be immediately detained, CBP was essentially forced to seize thousands of children, including infants and toddlers. Most families were arriving from Central America, a region the State Department has said is ravaged by predatory gangs and homicide rates that are among the highest in the world.
The
2016 message from the field specialist is part of a collection of Health and
Human Services emails and other internal documents shared with Public Integrity.
Most were written in 2018 by officials at the agency’s Office of Refugee
Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services and known as
ORR. The office is responsible for caring for unaccompanied migrant children, or
children CBP officers separate from parents at the border. The internal
documents show Health and Human Services staff was unprepared for the
unprecedented number of suffering young children transferred to their custody.
The
materials were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request submitted
to Health and Human Services by the American
Immigration Council, the National Immigrant Justice Center, Kids in Need of
Defense, the Women’s Refugee Commission, and the Florence Immigrant and Refugee
Rights Project. All have experience providing legal services for migrant
children.
Child on floor crying
Most
of the internal government emails reviewed by Public Integrity were written during
the height of Zero Tolerance, which ended in late June 2018 after a court order
and public outcry. Other documents show Refugee Resettlement staff or
contractors’ observations, which then were forwarded to Homeland Security about
distraught children placed in shelters.
A
10-year-old held in a shelter for two months was found on the floor, crying and
holding his hand. “My hand hurts because I got mad about my case and I hit the
wall,” the boy reportedly said in July 2018. A 12-year-old boy reported
“suicidal ideations” after separation from an aunt and a cousin in June 2018,
according to a document. In a July 2018 report about a 9-year-old, a case
worker wrote the girl “reported that her uncle was murdered by a local gang.”
After
a federal judge ordered Homeland
Security,
Health and Human Services, and Refugee Resettlement on June 26, 2018, to
reunite families, emails and other documents show refugee office staff and
contractors were pressed into service.
“All resources available to comply with court order,” reads a summary of what’s labeled as a meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. “We must do everything to identify parents, contact them, and make strides to reunify them or [allow children] to go to another sponsor if the parents want.”
Given
the poor quality of records, Health and Human Services officials rushed to use
DNA testing to match parents and children.
“DNA kits,” a message to staff advised, “will
be sent to programs with separated children 0-4 on week of July 2nd and DNA
kits will be sent to programs with separated children 5 and up on week of July
9th.”
DNA collection is
controversial. News reports in July featured mothers and a director at a migrant mothers’ shelter claiming
they were told parents would have to pay for DNA testing. Health and Human
Services denied it was charging fees for the testing, and that it was covering
costs for collections.
Documents also show that
social workers anxiously sought supervisors’ guidance on how to respond to Central American U.S.-based consular officials, who were asking for information about migrant
children scattered nationwide.
Robert Carey, a Refugee Resettlement director in the
Obama administration, told Public Integrity that most of the office’s staff are
social workers who were put in an “ethical” dilemma with the Zero Tolerance
policy.
“Not only was it inhumane,” he said, “it was
extraordinarily poorly managed.”
“Not only was it inhumane. It was extraordinarily poorly managed.”
Robert Carey, Refugee Resettlement director in the Obama administration
When he was in charge, Carey said, the average minor
in Refugee Resettlement custody was about 15 years old. A “large part” of what the
office would do, he said, was vet sponsors, often relatives, so children could
be released from group shelters or foster homes.
Trump’s Zero Tolerance has ended, but CBP continues to
have the authority to separate children from adults who are not legal
guardians, including aunts, uncles and grandparents. It also has the authority
to separate children based on a parent’s prior immigration violations, if CBP
wants to refer that parent for prosecution. Officers have also separated
children due to parents’ criminal histories or suspected ties to gangs — decisions
that at times have been based on false
allegations.
James De La Cruz, the Health and Human Services employee
who wrote in 2016 that ending family separations would be “the best thing that
could happen,” is still at the agency.
His email included instructions for reunifying
families and a contact sheet for Homeland Security staff assigned to supervise
“Alternatives to Detention” programs. These programs — no longer favored by the
Trump administration — monitored migrant families that had been released from
custody to ensure they would attend court proceedings.
Contacted by Public Integrity, De La Cruz declined to
elaborate on his 2016 email or on problems Health and Human Services faced with
the surge in family separations last year. The agency’s media representatives
also declined comment but sent a written statement emphasizing that “HHS is a
child welfare agency, not a law enforcement agency. We play no role in the
apprehension or initial detention of unaccompanied alien children.”
Under Trump, however, Health and Human Services was forced into a central role in the administration’s Zero Tolerance policy because separating children from migrant parents was a key feature.
Blocking asylum seekers
Despite State Department and other evidence supporting
many migrants’ stories of escaping violent crime in their home countries, Trump
accused migrants of gaming the asylum system, and he sought ways to block their
entry. After he took office in 2017, his advisers suggested options that would require
prosecuting every border crosser. Separating thousands of their children “would
be reported by the media and it would have substantial deterrent effect,” previously
released documents shared by NBC show.
As a pilot program began in 2017, people who swam or walked
over the border or who approached CBP officers at border gates were taken into
custody to be prosecuted for illegal entry — a misdemeanor the first time — and
their children were taken from them.
Preparing for a blanket separation policy, then-Attorney
General Jeff Sessions spoke out in defense of family separations in May 2018. “If
you don’t like that, then
don’t smuggle children over our border,” he said.
That same month, however, Refugee Resettlement officials
were already sending out “high importance” emails related to the developing search
for separated families.
Like Homeland Security, the office had come under
pressure because of a lawsuit
filed by the American Civil Liberties Union three months
earlier. The lawsuit accused Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Refugee
Resettlement of violating due process and Homeland Security’s own directives
for granting detainees’ release.
The initial plaintiff was an African mother who was
cleared at the U.S.-Mexico border to apply for asylum but was put into
detention. She said she heard her daughter, 7, screaming as the child was taken
away to be sent to Refugee Resettlement custody.
Eventually, the lawsuit became a class-action effort
to free and unite separated families.
On May 16, 2018, a Refugee Resettlement email exhorted
staff to find the parents of children in their custody — one day after then-Homeland
Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen testified in Congress
that “we do not have a policy to separate children from their parents.”
“It is very important to locate the separated parent for all UAC [unaccompanied alien children] in your program,” a Refugee Resettlement supervisor wrote. “For parents in ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] custody, you should be able to locate them and have a phone call with that parent as soon as possible.”
That assumption proved far too optimistic.
CBP, it turned out, was sending children to Refugee
Resettlement with little information about parents. Infants and sobbing
toddlers were too young to know parents’ names, as Public
Integrity previously reported, much less the “alien
number” that ICE assigns adult detainees and enters into a detention database.
“The system totally broke down,” said Jennifer Podkul,
an attorney with Kids in Need of Defense, which coordinates legal
representation for migrant minors. Even lawyers who know the names of clients have
a hard time using the ICE detainee tracking system because of misspelled names
and other erroneous information, she said.
One internal email warned social workers “to NOT engage directly” with the ACLU as one caregiver program did and instead follow “the chain of command” to prepare for a child’s release.
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‘Initiate contact with parents!’
On June 26, 2018, the federal judge in San Diego
presiding over the ACLU’s lawsuit admonished U.S. officials for tracking
migrant children with less diligence than they track belongings the government
seizes from people and keeps in storage. He placed a preliminary block on
further separations, ordered officials to arrange phone calls between parents
and children and reunite
them on deadlines by age group the following month.
Emails show Refugee Resettlement staff discussed how
to arrange and pay for collect calls from detained parents, and how parents
were incommunicado while held in federal marshals’ custody,
as many were at times.
On June 28, 2018, two days after the federal judge
ordered reunification of families, an email circulated advising Refugee
Resettlement affiliates that Health and Human Services was designing a database
to “eliminate the need to track information [on families] on spreadsheets.”
At the same time, Refugee Resettlement managers were told, “Please do not wait for the database to go live to initiate contact with parents!”
Homeland Security databases on parents — some on their
way to deportation — had no information on whether children had been separated from
them. The Homeland Security and Health and Human Services databases were not
linked.
As separations ramped up, documents provided to Public Integrity show, Refugee Resettlement staff also began sending more “significant incident reports” about separated migrant children to Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
The Public Integrity and NPR investigation found that during the first half of last year, Refugee Resettlement filed the majority of more than 800 family separation complaints logged by Homeland Security’s civil rights office. Among children who languished in shelters without the office’s help were blind or deaf children — disabled children the civil rights office acknowledges it has authority to expeditiously assist.
Meanwhile, fallout from the mass separations of
families continues.
On Nov. 5, a federal
judge in Los Angeles ruled that the U.S. government should be held accountable
for the impact of the Zero Tolerance policy. The government, the judge said,
must provide mental-health services to thousands of traumatized migrant
children who languished without seeing
or being in contact with their parents, sometimes for months.
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