(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
“We Need to Take Away Children” [1]
['Michael Garcia Bochenek']
Date: 2024-12-16
This report is based on a review of public and internal government documents, legal proceedings, and the findings of DHS, DOJ, and HHS internal investigations, drawing on Human Rights Watch’s extensive interviews with forcibly separated children and parents in 2018 and 2019. It finds that the forcible separation of children from their parents was a deliberate, targeted policy choice taken even though the architects of the policy knew or should have known that it would inflict anguish and suffering on families.
Forcible separation of children from their families inflicted harms that were severe and foreseeable. Once parents realized they would not be immediately reunited with their children, they were distraught.
Some children sobbed uncontrollably. Many felt abandoned. Nearly all were bewildered, not least because immigration officials would not tell them where their parents were or gave responses that proved to be lies. Children forcibly separated from their parents experienced anxiety, had nightmares, regressed to earlier developmental stages, or found it difficult to trust others and form attachments. Some lashed out. Others stopped speaking.
The policy amounted, in the words of two doctors who served as experts for the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, to “an act of state sponsored child abuse.” A Border Patrol agent described his role in carrying out forcible family separations as “the most horrible thing I’ve ever done.”
By the time President Trump disavowed the policy in June 2018, forcible family separation had drawn worldwide condemnation. Former First Lady Laura Bush described it as “cruel” and “immoral.” Pope Francis, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Theresa May, and other world leaders denounced it. Four members of the US Homeland Security Advisory Council resigned, saying, “Were we consulted, we would have observed that routinely taking children from migrant parents was morally repugnant, counter-productive and ill-considered.”
It quickly became clear that the government had no plan for reuniting families after parents’ criminal and immigration cases concluded. Apart from the efforts of a few enterprising officials, notably in ORR but also including some in CBP, federal agencies were not tracking the parents and children they separated. DHS’s only systems to link family records in its databases were added on the fly by proactive border agents once they saw how the policy was being implemented. A federal judge observed the “startling reality” that “under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property.”
Reuniting children with their parents was a fraught process. One woman was initially handed the wrong baby.
To complicate matters, “[i]nstead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep them apart for longer,” the investigative journalist Caitlin Dickerson concluded in a 2022 in-depth article for The Atlantic.
As a result, unraveling the chaos created by the policy has taken time. In many cases, families have not yet been reunited.
In February 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought a court case that compelled the US government to disclose how many children were forcibly separated from their parents under the policy. Authorities struggled to provide this information, eventually telling the court that more than 2,800 children had been forcibly separated from their parents in May and June 2018.
By the end of 2018, forcible family separation had cost US taxpayers at least US$80 million, according to one conservative estimate. Even at that point, the true cost was certainly much higher.
The total number of children forcibly separated from their parents was also much higher than the government stated in its initial court disclosures. The policy’s true scope only became apparent after years of efforts to identify, locate, and reunite separated children and their parents. The government’s best estimate to date is that it forcibly separated more than 4,600 children from their parents between 2017 and 2021.
For instance, a government report published in January 2019 found that the policy went into effect much earlier than the administration had up to that point acknowledged.
The government also eventually acknowledged that forcible family separations continued well after the June 2018 executive order that purported to end the policy. In some cases, these were triggered by minor, nonviolent offenses, such as a 20-year-old nonviolent theft conviction in one case and possession of a small amount of marijuana in another, in cases reviewed by the New York Times. Most of these cases did not list detailed reasons for the separation. These figures did not include the number of children who were forcibly separated from relatives other than parents.
The government reached a settlement in October 2023 in Ms. L v. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the court case brought by the ACLU five years earlier.
More than six years after Attorney General Jeff Sessions publicly acknowledged in May 2018 that the Justice Department was working with Homeland Security to separate thousands of children from their families, the US government has gone to significant lengths to reunite these families, including by bringing many deported parents back to the United States and providing them with temporary status and work authorization.
But in 2024, as many as 1,360 children, nearly 30 percent of all known separated children, may remain separated from their parents. The architects of forcible family separation have not been held to account. The Family Reunification Task Force established by the administration of President Joe Biden in 2021 has not yet made public “recommendations to ensure that the Federal Government will not repeat the policies and practices leading to the separation of families at the border,” as mandated by the executive order that created it. A new administration will take office in January 2025, potentially meaning that the task force has only a few weeks to conclude its work.
The Ms. L settlement limits the circumstances under which children can be forcibly separated from their parents or guardians at the border. This protection remains in effect until 2031.
Even so, family separation still happens at the border—not as the result of improper entry charges, but in specific scenarios, including when a parent has a criminal record or when a child is travelling with an older sibling, a grandparent, or another relative. A criminal record is not automatic grounds for loss of parental rights in any other context, and there is no practical justification for routinely separating a child from a non-parental relative. These practices should end; DHS should instead adopt standards that presumptively keep families together, separating them only when in the child’s best interest, and Congress should enact these protections into law.
The forcible separation of children from their parents violated their internationally recognized rights to protection from harm and preservation of their family relations.
Many separations involved the government’s refusal, for days or even weeks, to disclose the fate and whereabouts of children to their parents, and as such were enforced disappearances.
Forcible family separations may also have resulted in torture, defined as the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering for an improper purpose by a state agent.
Enforced disappearance and torture are grave human rights violations. Even a single instance of enforced disappearance or torture is a crime under international law.
Effective remedies for the extraordinary harms the US government inflicted on these families require more than grants of temporary status and short-term access to mental health services. To the extent that forcible family separation amounts to torture or enforced disappearance, these particularly serious human rights violations require comprehensive redress.
Congress and the executive branch should consider extending these families permanent residence as partial redress for the wrongs they suffered. Supportive services, including mental health services, should be available on an ongoing basis to families who request it.
Fully reckoning with the serious human rights violations inherent in forcible family separations requires a public accounting, an apology, compensation, and other steps to ensure that these wrongs never recur. The task force should publicly report its recommendations. Congress should prepare a full report on forcible family separation, including its impacts, the extraordinary efforts required to address the severe harms it wrought, and safeguards against recurrence.
To the extent that forcible family separation rises to the level of torture or enforced disappearance, it involved crimes under international law for which the architects of the policy potentially bear individual responsibility. The US Department of Justice should investigate, and if appropriate prosecute, the architects of the forcible family separation policy for these international crimes.
Click to expand Image © 2024 Human Rights Watch
Glossary
Border Patrol: The United States Customs and Border Protection agency responsible for immigration and customs enforcement between official border stations (“ports of entry”).
CBP: US Customs and Border Protection, the branch of the US Department of Homeland Security that includes the Border Patrol.
DHS: US Department of Homeland Security, the federal department created in 2002 that includes US Customs and Border Protection, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with other agencies.
DOJ: US Department of Justice, the federal department responsible for enforcing federal law. The department is headed by the Attorney General and includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US Marshals Service, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, and other agencies, in addition to federal prosecutors.
HHS: US Department of Health and Human Services, the federal department that includes the Administration for Children and Families.
ICE: US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency of the US Department of Homeland Security that enforces immigration laws in the interior of the United States.
Migrant: This term has no precise definition in international law but is commonly used to refer to a person who moves away from their place of usual residence, whether within a country or across an international border, temporarily or permanently, and for any of a variety of reasons or combination of reasons.
ORR: Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency in the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families responsible for the care and protection of unaccompanied children.
Port of entry: An official border crossing point
Refugee: A person who has fled their country to escape conflict, violence, or persecution and has sought safety in another country.
Separated child: A child who has been separated from both parents, or from their previous legal or customary primary caregiver, but not necessarily from other relatives.
Unaccompanied child: A child who has been separated from both parents and other relatives and is not being cared for by an adult who, by law or custom, is responsible for doing so.
USCIS: US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of the US Department of Homeland Security that adjudicates visa petitions, naturalization applications, and asylum applications (other than those made in the course of a removal, or deportation, hearing).
Government Officials Behind the Forcible Family Separation Policy
L. Francis Cissna: Director, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), October 2017-June 2019
Gene Hamilton: Senior counselor to the secretary of homeland security, January-October 2017; counselor to the attorney general, October 2017-January 2021
Thomas Homan: Acting director, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), January 2017-June 2018
John Kelly: Secretary of homeland security, January-July 2017; White House chief of staff, July 2017-January 2019
Kevin McAleenan: Acting commissioner, US Customs and Border Protection, January 2017-March 2018; CBP commissioner, March 2018-April 2019; acting secretary of homeland security, April-November 2019. (The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in August 2020 that McAleenan’s appointment as acting secretary was invalid.)
Kirstjen Nielsen: Chief of staff under Secretary Kelly, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), January-July 2017; White House principal deputy chief of staff (also under Kelly), September-December 2017; secretary of homeland security, December 2017-April 2019
Rod Rosenstein: US deputy attorney general, April 2017-May 2019
Jeff Sessions: US attorney general, February 2017-November 2018
Matthew Whitaker: Chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, September 2017-November 2018; acting US attorney general, November 2018-February 2019
Chad Wolf: DHS chief of staff under Secretary Nielsen, July 2017-February 2019. Wolf was later acting secretary of homeland security, November 2019-January 2021, an appointment the GAO found invalid.
Methodology
This report reviews government memoranda, internal investigations, the statements of public officials, congressional hearings, court filings, and news reports on forcible family separation. It draws on Human Rights Watch interviews with separated children, parents, lawyers, and Border Patrol officials in 2018 and 2019 and Human Rights Watch’s observations during site visits of immigration holding cells during this time.
Human Rights Watch conducted interviews in McAllen (June 2018), Brownsville (July 2018), Karnes City (July 2018), Port Isabel (July 2018), Tornillo (October 2018), El Paso (July 2019), and Clint (July 2019), all in Texas; Santa Teresa, New Mexico (July 2018); San Pedro Sula and Yoro, Honduras (July 2018); and Homestead, Florida (March 2019).
The researchers who conducted these interviews also took part in inspections of and interviews at immigration detention facilities as part of periodic monitoring teams assessing immigration authorities’ compliance with the 1997 Flores settlement agreement. Court filings reviewed for this report include the sworn declarations collected by Flores monitoring teams in 2018 and 2019, including those collected by teams that did not include Human Rights Watch staff. These declarations are publicly available in redacted form on the federal courts’ electronic records system and, for the relevant period, on the website of Project Amplify.
Many of the memoranda and other government documents on the development and implementation of the forcible family separation policy were disclosed in litigation by the ACLU and other groups or in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, including those by the American Immigration Council and other groups, American Oversight, and
Caitlin Dickerson, an investigative journalist with The Atlantic. Others were leaked to journalists and described in news accounts.
Human Rights Watch researchers conducted interviews in 2018 and 2019 with separated children and parents in Spanish or Portuguese. We explained to all interviewees the purpose and public nature of our reporting, that the interviews were voluntary and confidential, and that they would receive no personal service or benefit for speaking to us, and we obtained oral consent from each adult interviewee and oral assent from each child interviewee.
This report uses pseudonyms for all migrant or asylum-seeking children and adults. Human Rights Watch interviews are assigned a pseudonym consisting of a first name followed by an initial (for example, “Edgar Q.”) and note the date and place of the interview. Sworn declarations collected by the Flores monitoring teams and other references to separated children or parents in court documents follow the form used in those documents, which in most cases identify children and their parents by initials.
Human Rights Watch has also withheld the names and other identifying information of some lawyers and government officials who requested that we not publish this information.
Human Rights Watch sought comment from each of the government officials we identified as having developed or approved the forcible family separation policy. As of December 2, 2024, when this report was finalized for publication, none of these officials had provided comments on our findings or answers to our questions.
In line with international standards, the term child refers to a person under the age of 18. As the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child and other international authorities do, we use the term unaccompanied children in this report to refer, in the context of migration, to children “who have been separated from both parents and other relatives and are not being cared for by an adult who, by law or custom, is responsible for doing so.” Separated children are those who are “separated from both parents, or from their previous legal or customary primary caregiver, but not necessarily from other relatives,” meaning that they may be accompanied by other adult family members.
This report uses refugee to mean a person who meets the criteria in the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, under which a refugee is a person with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” who is outside of the country of nationality and is unable or unwilling, because of that fear, to return. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has concisely restated this standard in these terms: “Refugees are people who have fled their countries to escape conflict, violence, or persecution and have sought safety in another country.” People are refugees as soon as they fulfill the criteria in the Refugee Convention and Protocol. UNHCR explains:
A person is a refugee within the meaning of the 1951 Convention as soon as he fulfils the criteria contained in the definition. This would necessarily occur prior to the time at which his refugee status is formally determined. Recognition of his refugee status does not therefore make him a refugee but declares him to be one. He does not become a refugee because of recognition, but is recognized because he is a refugee.
The term migrant is not defined in international law; our use of this term is in its “common lay understanding of a person who moves away from his or her place of usual residence, whether within a country or across an international border, temporarily or permanently, and for a variety of reasons.” It includes asylum seekers and refugees, and the term migrant children includes children who may be refugees or seeking asylum.
I. Systematic Separations in 2017 and 2018
A distraught but determined 6-year-old Salvadoran girl pleads repeatedly for someone to call her aunt. Just one call, she begs anyone who will listen. She says she’s memorized the phone number, and at one point, rattles it off to a consular representative.
—Ginger Thompson, “Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated from Their Parents at the Border,” ProPublica, June 18, 2018
Abrupt separation from primary caregivers or parents is a major psychological emergency.
—Jack P. Shonkoff, professor of pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, interviewed by Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker, July 13, 2019
Rolando B. and his son, Johan, then 11 months old, crossed the US-Mexico border into Texas on March 16, 2018, and turned themselves in to the Border Patrol. They were held for four days together in the chain-link cages of the Ursula detention center in McAllen. On the fourth day, an officer wearing a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) t-shirt told Rolando to hand over his child. “He said, ‘Say goodbye to your son, because you’re not going to see him anymore,’” Rolando told Human Rights Watch in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, in July 2018.
Well before March 2018, there had been ample indication that the US government was considering family separation. John Kelly, then secretary of homeland security, had publicly floated the idea 12 months before and then quickly walked it back. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions did not issue his “zero tolerance” policy until April 2018, and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not implement it along the border until the following month.
As Rolando and Johan’s case illustrates, however, the US government began separating children from families well before Sessions formally issued the policy. In addition to carrying out a targeted pilot program in New Mexico and western Texas, the US government had, elsewhere along the border, “quietly begun taking hundreds of children away from their parents to deter would-be asylum seekers from coming to the United States,” according to Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Just a few days after US border agents forcibly separated Rolando and Johan, the ACLU asked a federal judge to issue a nationwide injunction to stop the practice.
Most of these separations were of children from parents who had entered the United States irregularly. Improper entry is a misdemeanor, and the government used this minor federal charge to deem parents “unavailable,” transferring their children to shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In addition, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) separated dozens of children from parents who had requested asylum at ports of entry—cases that involved no improper entry—following vague guidance and in many instances for reasons that appeared to be inconsistent with CBP policy.
By June 2018, with “zero tolerance” in full swing, forcibly separated parents were arriving in federal court anxious to know when they would see their children again. “All the parents asked about their kids, but the judge said he was not there to handle the children. He was just there to sentence us for the crime of crossing the river,” a 28-year-old Honduran woman told members of a volunteer team of lawyers monitoring compliance with the Flores settlement agreement, which had set minimum standards of care for children in immigration detention.
Most parents later learned that their children had been or were about to be sent to an ORR shelter, but in at least one case, a woman returned from court to learn that her 13-year-old son had been returned to Mexico.
In some cases, parents spent weeks without knowing where their children were; in other cases, they were deported alone with no information about their separated children, who remained in the United States. Some parents said that immigration officials induced them to waive their rights, including to seek asylum, telling them it was the only way, or the fastest way, to be reunited with their children.
Similarly, many of the children interviewed by Human Rights Watch lawyers and others on the Flores monitoring teams said they did not know where their parents were, how long they would be locked up, or what would happen next.
Forcible separation was unquestionably devastating for children and their parents. Health professionals warned at the time that family separation inflicted severe, potentially lifelong psychological harm. Six years later, therapists who work with reunited families confirm that children and parents are still struggling with trauma stemming from their forcible separation.
The forcible family separation policy was rolled out along the US-Mexico border as President Trump described immigrants as “animals” and “rapists” and in other overheated, dehumanizing, and racist terms.
The government officials who developed the forcible family separation policy aimed to separate all families who crossed the US-Mexico border irregularly, or at least as many as possible.
When somebody is deprived of liberty, as all separated parents and children were, and the government then refuses to disclose the whereabouts of the person it has detained to the person’s family, the result is an enforced disappearance, a gross violation of human rights. As discussed in subsequent chapters, forcible family separation also may have met the constituent elements of torture.
The Mechanism
The forcible family separation policy deployed minor federal charges to transfer parents from the custody of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency within DHS, to that of the US Marshals Service, part of the US Department of Justice (DOJ). DHS and DOJ then interpreted a provision of federal anti-trafficking laws to treat their children as unaccompanied—even though DHS had apprehended the family together, would resume custody of parents facing federal charges within a few days, and knew at all times where the parents were.
The first step in this process was a federal criminal charge for improper entry. First-time improper entry is a misdemeanor—a federal magistrate judge described it as “quite literally one of the least serious federal offenses.” These cases are often disposed of in a matter of minutes and usually result in sentences of time already served. Improper entry charges had long been problematic: they were disproportionately pursued against people with no criminal record or whose only convictions were for minor offenses; they effectively criminalized efforts to seek asylum, in violation of international refugee law; and they inappropriately deployed criminal law to regulate migration. Criminalization of irregular entry is inconsistent with international standards.
Nonetheless, Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed federal prosecutors to make improper entry, along with several more serious charges, “higher priorities” in April 2017. DHS officials described these prosecutions as a means of deterring parents and other relatives from bringing or paying to have children brought to the United States. In early April 2018, Sessions instituted a “zero tolerance” policy for improper entry, publicly announcing the policy in a May 2018 speech.
Next, DHS and DOJ employed a strained interpretation of federal law intended to afford specific protections to unaccompanied children. Under federal anti-trafficking legislation and regulations, an “unaccompanied child” is an undocumented child under 18 who has no parent or legal guardian in the United States who is available to provide care and physical custody.
The parents charged with improper entry were still in the United States—they were in a federal courthouse, in many cases just a few miles from the CBP holding cells where their children remained. But at that point they were in the custody of the US Marshals Service, and DHS and DOJ treated this temporary transfer of custody as the basis for stating that charged parents were not “available.” The departments made no allowance for the fact that the parents would be back in DHS custody within days.
Finally, once DHS deemed their children “unaccompanied,” it handed the children off to ORR, the HHS agency responsible for the care of unaccompanied migrant children. ORR placed the children in shelters while it sought longer-term placements with other relatives already in the United States, other “sponsors,” or foster care.
In fact, as established in combination by official memoranda, emails, notes of internal discussions, and interviews by investigative journalists, the “zero tolerance” directive was a policy designed to systematically separate children from migrant parents who entered the United States irregularly.
Children in Cages
The children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever.
—White House chief of staff John Kelly, in a National Public Radio interview, May 11, 2018
DHS had done no real planning for how it would provide age-appropriate care for the hundreds of children it had abruptly and forcibly separated from their parents. Transfers of children to ORR are not immediate—DHS ordinarily has 72 hours to carry them out and is allowed more time in “exceptional” circumstances. In the meantime, the children were DHS’s responsibility.
CBP holding cells have no recreational areas, no place to run around and play, and no toys or books of any kind. “We’re not set up as a child-care facility,” an official in the Central Processing Center, on Ursula Avenue in McAllen, told Human Rights Watch in June 2018. That was stating the obvious: people held in the Ursula detention center usually called it the perrera, or “dog kennel,” because its rows of caged pens look like they might have been designed to hold animals.
Human Rights Watch lawyers and others taking part in Flores monitoring visits in June 2018 watched as hundreds of unaccompanied children—toddlers, teenagers, and all ages in between—sat in Ursula’s caged pens. Two boys, each about 10 years old, improvised a game with their water bottles, tossing them back and forth. Most of the children huddled under foil blankets for warmth. Some looked bewildered and lost.
The only staff we saw were uniformed guards—a handful assigned to a cluster of cages that each held 20 to 30 children. Their interactions with the children consisted almost entirely of barked commands, either for individual children to come forward or for everybody in a particular area to move to another or to line up for food.
The cages were very cold, as were holding cells in other border detention centers Human Rights Watch visited as part of the monitoring team. In fact, hielera, meaning “freezer,” is the term commonly used by detained children and adults, along with many border agents, to refer to Border Patrol holding cells other than Ursula, which is no less frigid but stood out for its distinctively inhumane cages. “Human heat was not enough to warm the babies,” a 23-year-old Honduran woman told the inspection team.
As in all immigration holding cells, the lights in the Ursula facility were on 24 hours a day and never dimmed, with potentially severe physical and mental health impacts. Children found the experience disorienting: when Human Rights Watch interviewed a 13-year-old boy in the early afternoon, he asked whether the sun had risen yet.
Immigration holding cells have specific rules that children and their parents struggled to understand. Guards sometimes ordered children not to touch each other. All but the youngest children were usually held apart from parents, and men and women are separated, so members of a single family might be placed in three different cells. At Ursula, guards told some women and children they would be “punished” or “deported right now” for looking at each other while they were in different cages.
Too often, border guards casually subjected children and adults to other degrading treatment in these holding cells. Commonly, this took the form of insults or other verbal abuse, but many of the parents and children in Ursula also described waking up to guards kicking them. In one case, guards refused to let an 8-year-old girl shower or rinse out her underwear after she soiled herself, forcing her to remain in that state for several days.
These and other longstanding inadequacies made border cells inappropriate and inhumane places for children. These cells were not designed for overnight stays—nor were they designed to house children, so they did not have beds and often did not have enough mats for everybody. Food typically consisted of microwaved frozen burritos, sometimes only partially thawed, or ham sandwiches, with no attempt to provide food adjusted to the needs and tastes of infants and toddlers. Guards usually confiscated toiletries, medication, and other personal items. Holding cells did not issue toothbrushes or toothpaste, often did not provide soap, and had limited access to showers. Children of all ages spent nights on concrete floors cold, hungry, and dirty, without parents or other caregivers to comfort them.
Click to expand Image Children in the Ursula processing center, McAllen, Texas, June 17, 2018. © 2018 Mil image / Alamy Stock Photo
Guards were not equipped to deal with children. At one point during a June 2018 visit, Michelle Brané, then the director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, interrupted her interview with a teenage girl to break up a squabble between two 5-year-old boys who had begun to sob. The lone guard standing 30 feet away had either failed to notice that two of his charges had been reduced to tears or had not bothered to intervene.
A 17-year-old who was in Ursula at about the same time of the monitoring team’s visit gave a similar account:
It felt like there were a ton of people in the cage with me. My guess is that there were 40 to 50 children in the cage with me. Some of them were teenagers like me. Others were much younger, including children only four and five years old. . . . They did not have their parents with them. There was no one to care for them. The guards did not care that the little kids were crying.
Brané also discovered that a group of teenage girls had been taking turns caring for a young girl in diapers for three days. The teens reported that guards had done nothing more than check off the girl’s name at roll call.
During the same monitoring visit on the same day, a Human Rights Watch lawyer spoke to a 5-year-old boy the lawyer had seen the day before with his mother. Asked about his mother, his face dropped. “I haven’t seen her since yesterday,” he said. “I don’t know where she is.” He had been sitting in a caged area for nearly 24 hours with older children he didn’t know; nobody had told him where his mother was or what would happen to him.
When children realized they were being separated from their parents, many were despondent and anxious. Some were furious—at their parents, whom they blamed for abandoning them.
Pablo Z., deported to Honduras without his 4-year-old son, told Human Rights Watch he could not communicate with the boy for two weeks. “He said he didn’t want to talk to me because he said I left him there,” Pablo said. “When he says this, it makes me cry. I can’t speak. I just want to see him and hug him.”
A 14-year-old Honduran girl said, “I found out my mother will be charged with a crime and I will be sent away to a shelter. I am very sad and afraid. I want to be with my mom. I don’t know what will happen to her.”
No Explanations, Outright Lies
I was worried when we weren’t in the same group. Then [Border Patrol] started putting us into vehicles. When I left and my dad wasn’t with me, they told me not to worry, that he would be coming in a moment. I went in the car and felt very relieved and happy that he would follow. But it wasn’t like that. He didn’t come. I haven’t seen him since then.
—S.C., a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy, Brownsville, Texas, July 13, 2018
CBP agents often did not tell parents they were forcibly taking their children from them. For example, in mid-June 2018, Michelle Brané of the Women’s Refugee Commission was in the middle of an interview with a man and his daughter in a McAllen immigration holding cell when officials started to pull the girl out of the room without explanation; when Brané determined that the officials were separating the family, she prevailed on them to give the two a few minutes to say goodbye. In another such case the same month, a man identified in court documents as F.G. said that guards asked his 17-year-old son to come with them without telling either F.G. or his son that they were being separated. He did not see his son again for more than 50 days.
In many instances, immigration agents simply lied about what they were doing, parents and children said. For example, Jessyca N., from El Salvador, told Human Rights Watch in July 2018, “The agents told us our children would be waiting for us when we returned from court.”
Edwin H., a 45-year-old Honduran man interviewed in July 2018, said, “When they took us to court, they said we would see our kids right afterward. I thought I would come right back and see my son again. When we realized we weren’t going back to where our children were, we all started crying and pleading.”
Héctor G., 28, from El Salvador, spoke to us a month after CBP forcibly separated him from his 6-year-old son on June 12, 2018: “They took me away from my son when we were in the hielera. They said I had to go to court and would see my son right after. I haven’t seen him since.”
Eduardo M., an 11-year-old from Guatemala, told Human Rights Watch:
After two days a guard came and called my name. He said come with him. When I asked why, he said so I could shower in another center. I asked if I could see my father and say goodbye and he said “no” and kept walking. They put me in a van and took me to another detention center.
A month later, Eduardo was in an ORR shelter in Brownsville, Texas, waiting to hear what would happen to him. Eduardo’s account of a border agent lying about taking him to a shower was not unusual. “It depends on who the agent is on that day. They’ll be told, ‘We’re going to separate your kids so they can bathe.’ And that’s not true,’” a public defender told CNN in June 2018. Such reports even reached the US attorney for the Western District of Texas.
In other cases, immigration agents took children from their parents in the middle of the night.
Limited or No Contact After Forcible Separation
Many children and parents said they had no contact with each other for weeks after their forcible separation. As one indication of the scale of this issue, ORR Director Scott Lloyd emailed senior DHS officials in June 2018 saying, “We have 790 kids in our shelters who are not able to contact their parents.” Those Human Rights Watch interviewed consistently described this period of uncertainty and dread as anguishing. For example, Erick P., a 15-year-old Guatemalan boy, told Human Rights Watch that after border agents separated him from his father in May 2018:
I didn’t know where my father was for over 20 days. . . . During those 20 days, I did not know if my father was dead or alive, if he was sent back home, or where he was. I was scared and sad. I asked everyone to help me find my father but they told me they could not tell me where he was.
Dozens of children gave similar accounts in sworn declarations filed with the judge overseeing the Flores settlement agreement. In one, a 16-year-old boy from Nicaragua said that he was separated from his mother on June 2, 2018, and had not seen her in six weeks. “After I was separated from my mother, I felt very afraid that I would never see my mother again. I feel terrorized, nervous, anxious and worried,” he told the judge. Another boy, 16 and from Guatemala, said he had no idea where his father was 40 days after they were separated: “I worry about him. . . . I am very sad because I don’t know where my dad is. I don’t know if he is okay.” S.C., a 16-year-old from Guatemala, reported that he was not able to speak to his father for a month after they were separated in May 2018, adding:
I have only spoken with my father a total of 20 minutes in these 45 days, and did not speak with any family at all for one month. I had absolutely no idea what was going on and have been very scared.
Other parents and children also described very limited contact with each other after their forcible separation: often just phone or video calls once a week for 10 minutes at a time. Many went for a week or longer without any word about where their loved ones were or how they were doing. For example, Jenri Q., separated from his father on May 19, 2018, told Human Rights Watch:
It is very stressful to be away from my father. We have been separated for almost two months and I have only spoken to him once. It was so great to talk to him so he could assure me he was okay and I could tell him that I was okay too.
Human Rights Watch heard similar accounts from separated parents.
Edwin H., detained in the Port Isabel immigration detention center in Texas, spoke to his 11-year-old son twice between June 11 and July 16, 2018. “I tried to call the number they gave me maybe five other times, but there was no answer,” he told us.
On July 16, 2018, Aurelio L., a Honduran man who was also detained in Port Isabel, told Human Rights Watch he had spoken to his 10-year-old son only once in the 33 days since they were forcibly separated.
Jessyca N., from El Salvador, told us she was not able to speak to her 9-year-old daughter for six days after they were forcibly separated in McAllen on June 14, 2018.
Héctor G. had no word on his 6-year-old son’s whereabouts or well-being for 20 days, until a guard in the Port Isabel detention center handed him a phone number on a slip of paper, without explanation. “Until then, I had no idea what had happened to him,” he told Human Rights Watch.
“We couldn’t see him on his first birthday,” said Rolando B., who was separated from his son, then 11 months old, and deported to Honduras. “We can only talk to him via video once a week for 20 minutes. It’s so painful.”
Calls from some immigration detention centers cost $5 or more for 10 minutes, an amount detained parents struggled to afford. ORR did not authorize shelters to accept collect calls from detained parents until May 31, 2018, and shelter providers then found that they did not have an easy way to authorize payment for collect calls.
Eduardo M., an 11-year-old from Guatemala, told Human Rights Watch that the cost of calls limited his communication with his father, from whom he had been forcibly separated, and added to the stress he felt:
I can only talk to my dad when he can call from detention but the amount of time we can talk is very short. Sometimes the phone cuts off, I think because he runs out of money to pay for the call. I’m so scared they will deport him and I’ll be here alone.
Until July 13, 2018, DHS required parents to pay for the cost of their children’s transport. Those costs were $1,900 in one case documented by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Pressure on Parents to Accept Deportation
Some parents told Human Rights Watch they agreed to deportation because officials told them they would be deported with their child or said they should waive their right to seek asylum in exchange for reunification. Others described being pressured to sign forms they did not understand. As discussed more fully later in this report, such practices violated norms of fundamental fairness, may have denied people the right to seek asylum, and risked refoulement (that is, return to serious harm), among other human rights violations.
In one such case, Edwin H., from Honduras, told Human Rights Watch:
An official gave me the results of my interview [an initial credible fear interview, the first stage in pursuing an asylum claim]. He pointed to a box and told me to mark it and sign the form. I said I wasn’t going to sign it because I didn’t know what I was signing. He got angry. “You have to sign. You don’t want to have your son back?” Under that pressure, I signed. I didn’t understand it because it was all in English.
When Human Rights Watch examined the document he signed, we saw that he had waived the right to see an immigration judge to explain the reasons why he feared returning to Honduras.
In another case, Pablo Z., also from Honduras, told Human Rights Watch he and his 4-year-old son had gone to the port of entry in Brownsville, Texas, on June 11, 2018. He said:
We were held for two days at the bridge. On the first day, the officers there asked me why I came to the United States. I told them I was coming to ask for asylum for me and my son and that I was afraid of returning to my country. I told them that we had both been threatened by a narco-trafficker. They told me to sign some papers, but I didn’t know what they were. They told me that the papers weren’t a deportation, so I signed them.
Pablo told us he never spoke with another official further about his claim of fear before he was deported without his son one week later.
Case workers at ORR shelters heard similar accounts.
Other parents said forcible separation from their children left them unable to focus on their asylum claims, despite officials’ insistence that they continue through adjudication procedures. Jessyca N., from El Salvador, interviewed by Human Rights Watch in a Texas detention center in July 2018, said:
The officials told me I would have to do an interview in the next few weeks. I want to have this interview, but right now all I can think about is how my daughter is and when I’ll see her. It’s not right to make me do that interview now because I can’t focus. I’m just thinking about my daughter.
Similarly, when Ariel P., from Guatemala, had a credible fear interview in an immigration detention center near San Antonio, he had not spoken to his son in more than 20 days and had not been told where his son was. He said the forcible separation and uncertainty left him despondent and affected his ability to concentrate on his interview:
All I could think about was how he was and when I would see him again. Every night when I went to sleep, I would think about where he was sleeping. At every meal, if there was some food I didn’t like, I would wonder if he was eating food he didn’t like. If I didn’t eat and felt hungry, I would wonder if he was also hungry that day. I kept returning to these thoughts, and it was impossible for me to focus on anything else.
No Plan to Reunite Children and Parents
The government readily keeps track of personal property of detainees in criminal and immigration proceedings. Money, important documents, and automobiles, to name a few, are routinely catalogued, stored, tracked and produced upon a detainees’ release, at all levels—state and federal, citizen and alien. Yet, the government has no system in place to keep track of, provide effective communication with, and promptly produce alien children. The unfortunate reality is that under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property.
—Judge Dana Sabraw, issuing a preliminary injunction in Ms. L. v. ICE, June 26, 2018
DHS had neither developed a plan for how to care for separated children while they were in its custody nor alerted ORR in advance of either the 2017 El Paso initiative or the 2018 border-wide separations policy.
In fact, DHS actively misled ORR. When ORR staff asked DHS in November 2017 about the increase they were seeing in the numbers of children reporting that they had crossed the border with a parent, “DHS officials stated that DHS did not have an official policy to separate families.” The separations ORR was identifying were the product of a pilot program in the El Paso area that ran from July to November 2017, an initiative that served as a model for border-wide forcible family separations in 2018.
DHS did not, on its own or with HHS, do any meaningful advance planning to enable families to reunite after parents returned from federal court. “Data systems maintained by Customs and Border Protection and by the Office of Refugee Resettlement did not include a designated field to indicate a child had been separated from a parent,” the Government Accountability Office found. CBP did not send Border Patrol agents guidance on how to document family separations until separations had already begun. DHS did not even begin discussing with HHS how the two departments would share information on family separations until April 2018. When senior DHS officials asked in June 2018 how many parents were reunited with their children after their improper entry convictions, they received the reply: “this is a mess. No tracking at all.”
As a result of this lack of coordination and other failures to prepare for the policy’s implementation, “[i]n June of 2018, no centralized system existed to identify, track, or connect families separated by DHS,” the HHS Office of Inspector General found in a January 2019 review.
After a federal judge ordered the US government to identify and reunite separated families, a government attorney admitted, “I can't say today that there is a formalized process” for communication among DHS, DOJ, and HHS on separated families. The judge eventually found:
Measures were not in place to provide for communication between governmental agencies responsible for detaining parents and those responsible for housing children, or to provide for ready communication between separated parents and children. There was no reunification plan in place, and [as of June 2018] families have been separated for months. Some parents were deported at separate times and from different locations than their children. Migrant families that lawfully entered the United States at a port of entry seeking asylum were separated. And families that were separated due to entering the United States illegally between ports of entry have not been reunited following the parent’s completion of criminal proceedings and return to immigration detention.
“As of March 2019,” the DHS Office of Inspector General found, a joint ICE-HHS working group that had been created in June 2018 “still did not have a formal reunification plan in place.”
Well before the El Paso pilot, nongovernmental organizations had already been warning of “the government’s lack of consistent mechanisms for identifying and tracking family members,” including children it separated from their parents. These problems were apparent once the El Paso initiative was underway:
This poor family reunification planning mirrored what occurred during the 2017 El Paso initiative. In a July 2017 draft memo, El Paso Sector management acknowledged concerns from local judges that Border Patrol, ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations, a component of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and ORR needed a coordinated reunification plan for rejoining and repatriating families. However, they never developed a plan and children separated under the El Paso initiative could have remained separated from their parents for long periods.
By mid-2017, ORR had begun seeing a significant increase in the number of children who reported that CBP had separated them from their parents. It tracked such cases, but its processes for doing so were informal; there was no integrated system between HHS and DHS for identifying and tracking separated families.
After April 2018, some CBP agents also added codes or notes to records in an attempt to link adults and children who, following their separation, had individual electronic records, they told Human Rights Watch and other members of the Flores monitoring team in June 2018. Describing these methods, the DHS Office of Inspector General wrote, “Border Patrol agents used ad hoc workarounds to capture the reasons for family separations.” The inspector general’s report continued:
The downstream effect of ad hoc typing in case notes became apparent when CBP headquarters began efforts to identify separated families needing reunification after the policy ended in June 2018. To locate and reunify family members, Border Patrol headquarters personnel had to review all separations coded as “Criminal History” or “Other Reasons” in the system, as well as all the accompanying case notes. This process was neither easy nor accurate.
As a result, government agencies struggled to identify all separated children and match them with their parents. In January 2019, the HHS Office of Inspector General reported, “The total number and current status of all children separated from their parents or guardians by DHS and referred to ORR’s care is unknown.” For its part, as of November 2019, the DHS Office of Inspector General still “could not confirm the total number of families DHS separated during the Zero Tolerance period.”
A Context of Racist Rhetoric
The senior government officials who developed and implemented the forcible family separation policy did so in a context of overheated, dehumanizing, and racist official rhetoric. Donald J. Trump had referred to Mexican migrants as “rapists” and “bringing drugs” when he announced his campaign for the presidency in June 2015, and he brought up those remarks again in April 2018. In a closed-door meeting in January 2018, he questioned why the United States would want to admit people from Haiti and “shithole countries” in Africa. In May 2018, he described immigrants as “animals,” later saying that he meant only MS-13 gang members. As criticism of the forcible family separation policy mounted in June 2018, he equated Latin American migrants with gang members, saying that they “pour into and infest our Country.” And at the end of 2018, he suggested that migrant caravans were filled with “tough people” who have “injured” and “attacked,” saying, “Some people call it an invasion.”
President Trump continued to describe migrants as security risks in 2019 and throughout his time in office. Assessing the claims he made in a January 2019 speech in McAllen, Texas, Houston Chronicle reporter Lomi Kriel wrote, “[T]he crisis he has repeatedly tried to portray — dangerous migrants pouring across the border, bringing massive drugs and crime— does not exist.”
II. Official Denials and Misleading Messaging
It’s strange to behold Trump distancing himself from the zero-tolerance policy (“the Democrats gave us that law”) while Nielsen claims it doesn’t exist (“it’s not a policy”) and Sessions defends it in speech after speech.
—Salvador Rizzo, “The Facts About Trump’s Policy of Separating Families at the Border,” Washington Post, June 19, 2018
Reporters increasingly sought comment from the government in April 2018 and the months that followed on whether it was separating children from their parents and, if so, why. In response, officials offered a combination of denial, deflection, and dismissal of the impact of their policy choices. Notably, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Kirstjen Nielsen, who had become secretary of homeland security in December 2017, appeared at times to contradict each other—and in Nielsen’s case, herself. Overall, the government’s approach to media inquiries and widespread criticism was to offer a variety of responses in turn, seemingly testing what would placate the public.
The government’s public statements were in many cases deliberately deceptive. In combination, they also reveal that officials sought to cover up what they were doing.
Nielsen advanced the most categorical of the denials. In mid-May 2018, she told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, “We do not have a policy to separate children from their parents. Our policy is, if you break the law we will prosecute you.” The following month, she posted on Twitter (now X), “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”
But the department she headed had already been qualifying its denials for several months. As an ACLU complaint on behalf of a woman and her daughter—the Ms. L case—was beginning to draw media notice, Chad Wolf, then Nielsen’s chief of staff, emailed Nielsen on March 4 to advise her, “We're receiving a number of press inquiries regarding an asylum seeking Congolese woman and her child who have been separated and are currently in detention facilities in the U.S.” Wolf told Nielsen that DHS was replying to the media with a statement that began:
DHS does not currently have a policy of separating women and children. However, we retain the authority to do so in certain circumstances—particularly to protect a child from potential smuggling and trafficking activities.
In April, James W. McCament, the deputy undersecretary of the Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans at DHS, repeated this line, telling a Congressional committee, “We do not currently have a policy of separating women and children.” Also that month, DHS told Caitlin Dickerson, a journalist then with the New York Times, that the department did not separate families at the border for deterrence purposes.
And in May, the government included the following carefully worded statement in a court brief:
ICE has no family separation policy for ulterior law enforcement purposes, and considers each case on the facts available at the time a placement decision must be made. In addition, such a policy would be antithetical to the child welfare values of ORR, which is not a law enforcement agency.
Even at the time, these qualified denials were telling: saying DHS did not “currently” have a policy, that separation was not “for deterrence purposes,” and that there was no policy “for ulterior law enforcement purposes” did not deny that there was a planned border-wide family separation policy for other purposes.
By early April, internal communications among senior DHS staff were focused on justifying family separation rather than disavowing it. In advance of Nielsen’s April testimony at a congressional hearing, her chief of staff sent an internal email with the subject line “Messaging on FAMU [Family Unit] Separation”:
In preparation for S1’s hearing next week, I want to develop a good narrative (supported by facts and cases) on the separating issue.
“Human smuggling” and “human trafficking,” both suggested by Wolf in early March, were two of the three narratives DHS landed on in response to the April messaging email. (The other was “unclear family relationship.”) In late April, after the leak of a DHS draft family separation memo, DHS spokesperson Katie Waldman told reporters:
DHS does not have a policy of separating families at the border for deterrence purposes. DHS does, however, have a legal obligation to protect the best interests of the child whether that be from human smugglings, drug traffickers, or nefarious actors who knowingly break our immigration laws and put minor children at risk.
Notwithstanding Wolf’s request prior to the April hearing for “support[] by facts and cases,” the internal emails make clear that DHS developed this messaging in the hope that facts would follow: just before Nielsen’s congressional testimony on April 26, staffers were still being asked for supporting “case examples” for these narratives. At an earlier hearing on April 11, Nielsen’s response to a question about family separation began, “When we separate, we separate because the law tells us to” and went on to refer generically to “instances where traffickers have used children to cross the border and gain illegal entry” without describing specific cases.
Nielsen’s reply at the April 11 hearing and the March line for media response misleadingly implied that the government separated families only in exceptional cases. But DHS had separated at least 700 children, and likely many more, from their parents in the previous six months.
As with attempts to deny the existence of the policy, the implication that family separation was rare was quickly disproven and served only to suggest that the US government was careless, deceitful, or both. When Dickerson, the New York Times journalist, asked HHS in April for official comment on the estimate of more than 700 separated children, shared with her by an ORR source, HHS initially claimed that the numbers did not come from ORR. Dickerson’s blistering response prompted a flurry of emails among half a dozen officials, including the ORR director, until one contacted a field supervisor who informed them that ORR had in fact been keeping statistics on separations and that by mid-April, the agency’s estimate had increased to more than 800 children separated by DHS since October 2017.
HHS ultimately responded to Dickerson with the anodyne comment, “When UAC [unaccompanied children] are referred to ORR, ORR is not routinely informed about how or when the UAC became separated from their parent(s) or the whereabouts of the parents.” The response continued:
For safety and other reasons children can be separated, by DHS, from their parents and referred to ORR. In some cases, after arriving in ORR care, UAC will disclose that they have been separated from their parent(s). In other cases, parents, attorneys and other relatives will also contact ORR looking for separated children. Since October 2017, ORR has collaborated with DHS in approximately 700 cases to locate parent(s) in DHS custody.
This and similar responses were by that point transparent attempts to avoid acknowledgement that the forcible family separation policy was different in kind and degree than previous instances of family separation at the border. In a message that was typical of the media inquiries DHS and HHS received in early March after the ACLU sued on behalf of Ms. L and her child, a Washington Post editorial writer asked:
Could you please shed light on why it isn’t possible to detain them together? And is it now the policy of DHS to detain asylum-seeking parents and children separately? If so, is this meant as a deterrent for future asylum seekers? Or for another reason?
Nonetheless, DHS continued such attempts at deflection long after litigation and leaks had begun to establish the true scope of the forcible family separation policy. In late July, as one example, Secretary Nielsen wrote to DHS staff:
For years—and under previous Administrations—adults and children have been separated at our borders in cases where DHS is unable to determine there is a custodial relationship, when DHS determines that an adult may pose a risk to the child, or when an adult is charged with a crime and transferred to a criminal detention setting.
Perhaps in recognition of the reality that denial and dissembling were ineffective, by May, DHS and HHS leadership had largely pivoted to talking points that attempted to justify family separation as a necessary and logical consequence of the rule of law. This approach brought DHS and HHS closer to the line Sessions was taking, as exemplified in a May 7 speech in which he stated, “We need legality and integrity in the system.” In late May, DHS deputy press assistant Katie Waldman suggested this public response:
Families with children that enter into the United States illegally will be separated when the parent is transferred to federal criminal custody. If parents do not wish to be separated from their children, they should not break the law.
An HHS fact sheet developed at the same time with Waldman’s input contained similar wording. Earlier in the month, President Trump had already taken up this line and added to it by claiming, untruthfully, that lawmakers from the opposing party were to blame: “We have to break up families. The Democrats gave us that law. It’s a horrible thing. We have to break up families.”
By mid-June, administration officials were frequently relying on variations on the rule-of-law line. Speaking to a group of law enforcement officers on June 18, Nielsen declared, “We will not apologize for the job we do.” Four days earlier, responding to reporters’ questions about why the government was separating families, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed, “Because it’s the law, and that’s what the law states.” The Border Patrol issued a five-paragraph statement elaborating on this theme. Sessions even quoted a New Testament verse in defense of family separation, saying, “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for the purpose of order.”
The government also promoted President Trump’s false claim that his administration was not responsible for family separation. For instance, a June 18 White House Twitter post claimed, “This Administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border.” Similarly, a June 22 message from Nielsen to DHS staff included the line, “Congress must change the law to provide a lasting solution to family separation.” In fact, the law Sanders, Trump, and presumably Nielsen were referring to, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, did not require family separation.
For his part, Sessions relied frequently on the anti-smuggling narrative as a justification for family separation. On June 7, he said, “I hope that we don’t have to separate any more children from any more adults. But there’s only one way to ensure that is the case: it’s for people to stop smuggling children illegally. Stop crossing the border illegally with your children.” On June 18, he included the following line in a speech to a conference of sheriffs: “We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws.”
Nielsen reiterated this anti-smuggling justification in her own remarks at the June 18 sheriffs’ conference, saying that DHS had seen “a staggering 315 percent increase in illegal aliens fraudulently using children to pose as family units to gain entry into the country.” This statement, perhaps the clearest articulation of the anti-smuggling rationale DHS had been advancing since March, is revealing: the statistic was technically accurate, but Nielsen did not specify that the total number of fraudulent cases was under 200, amounting to less than 1 percent of families apprehended at the US-Mexico border.
Nielsen’s defense of family separation in June was notable in another respect: while most senior officials and departmental spokespeople appeared to shift from one justification to another over time, she attempted to keep all options on the table. In a 20-minute press briefing in June, she alternately stated that family separation was a “long-existing policy,” that separation took place when “we cannot determine a familial or custodial relationship exists” or “if the adult is suspected of human trafficking,” and that family separation was “not a policy.”
III. Widespread Separations Continued into 2019
A Border Patrol agent came in our room with a two-year-old boy and asked us, “Who wants to take care of this little boy?”
—A 15-year-old girl held in the Clint Border Patrol Station, Clint, Texas, June 19, 2019
After images of children in cages, leaked recordings of border agents mocking crying children, and other news of the extent and impact of the administration’s policy prompted public outcry, President Trump signed an executive order on June 20, 2018, that he said ended family separation. Six days later, a federal judge halted systemic family separations and directed the government to reunite separated children and their parents.
President Trump’s executive order was not, however, a definitive directive to cease all family separation: it opened with the statement that the US government would continue to prosecute all instances of improper entry, the vehicle that the administration had used to separate parents from their children. The new policy it announced, family detention in the name of family unity, had foreseeable legal problems. (The order also falsely blamed Congress and the federal courts for the policy Trump’s administration had developed and implemented, continuing the narrative he had started to promote a month earlier.)
The judge’s orders, in turn, had significant caveats that gave the government broad latitude to continue separating families. Crucially, parents who DHS determined had a criminal history of any kind, even for minor offenses that had no bearing on their ability as caregivers, were not covered by the order. Nor were adult relatives other than parents, meaning that DHS could continue to separate children from their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and adult siblings.
Prior administrations had separated families on these grounds, and the Biden administration has continued to do so. But parent-child separations were rare before 2017. Under Trump, the US government made aggressive use of these grounds, particularly after the June 20 executive order. Between July 2018 and December 2019, the US government separated 1,150 children from their parents, HHS reports.
As with earlier forcible family separations, many of those that took place after June 2018 resulted in enforced disappearance and may have amounted to other forms of torture.
The continued use of forcible family separation led to other human rights violations. As a Flores monitoring team found in July 2019, separated children were held in immigration detention far longer than the regular 72-hour limit set by law—and in overcrowded, squalid conditions.
In fact, there is a direct line from the forcible family separation policy to President Trump’s alternative policy of family detention to other serious violations of migrant children’s rights in 2019. By normalizing neglect and abuse, the policy and the executive order enabled the prolonged mass detention of children in tents in the desert, a converted Walmart, a repurposed military base, and a border station so overcrowded that some children slept on a loading dock. The Trump administration only retreated from forcible separations in significant numbers as it developed and deployed alternative abusive means of migration management. These alternatives notably included its “Remain in Mexico” program and, after the Covid-19 pandemic, summary expulsions with no pretence of due process.
Continued Forcible Separation of Children from Their Parents
“The immigration agents separated me from my father right away,” a 5-year-old Honduran boy held in the Clint border station in Texas told lawyers in June 2019. “I was very frightened and scared. I cried. I have not seen my father again.” The boy did not know how long he had been separated from his father. “I am frightened, scared, and sad.”
In another such case, a 17-year-old boy said he had been separated from his mother in early June 2019 immediately after entering the United States:
We presented ourselves to border patrol agents, who then separated us. They refused to explain why they were doing so. Since that moment, I have not known where my mother is. I have not known if my mother was in the United States or elsewhere, or even if she was alive. I have been extremely worried about her.
Forcible separations dropped sharply the month after the federal court’s order, from 1,510 in May and 991 in June to 11 in July 2018. As the table below illustrates, however, DHS continued to forcibly separate children from their parents in significant numbers through the end of 2019, particularly between November 2018 (52 forcible separations) through August 2019 (49 forcible separations). DHS forcibly separated more than 100 children each month from March through June 2019, and nearly 100 in July 2019.
The June 2018 court order barred DHS from separating children from their parents “absent a determination that the parent is unfit or presents a danger to the child.” DHS interpreted the order to permit family separation because of health issues requiring hospitalization of either the parent or the child, danger to the child, concerns that the adult might not be the child’s parent, or because of a parent’s criminal history. In July 2019, for example, the first month for which a detailed breakdown is available, DHS separated 48 children from their parents because of “parent criminal history and immigration history,” 18 for “parent criminal history,” 5 for “parent cartel/gang affiliation and immigration history,” and 3 for “parent cartel/gang affiliation.” No children were separated from parents that month because of “parent fitness[]/child danger concerns” or because the family relationship could not be verified.
Separation was triggered in some cases by minor, nonviolent offenses by the parent, for instance, a 20-year-old nonviolent robbery conviction in one case and possession of a small amount of marijuana in another, analysis by the New York Times found. Most of these cases did not list detailed reasons for the separation. But as an HHS assistant inspector general told a House subcommittee hearing, “from a child welfare perspective, not all criminal history rises to a level that would imperil a child’s safety or preclude release back to their parents.”
Children Taken from Grandmothers, Aunts, and Uncles
Before and since the forcible family separation policy, CBP has regularly separated children from adult relatives who are not parents. The US government has never disclosed how many children it separates from these relatives, but Human Rights Watch identified many such cases in 2019 in our own interviews and the declarations we reviewed.
In one of these cases, an 8-year-old Honduran boy detained along with his 6-year-old sister in the Clint Border Station in Texas said, “They took us away from our grandmother and now we are all alone.” He did not know precisely how long they had been apart from their grandmother, saying only, “We have been here for a long time.”
In another, a 12-year-old girl who traveled to the United States with her grandmother and 8- and 4-year-old sisters said that border agents woke them up at 3 a.m. [in June 2019]:
[T]he officers told us that our grandmother would be taken away. My grandmother tried to show the officers a paper signed by my parents saying that my grandmother had been entrusted to take care of us. The officers rejected the paperwork saying that it had to be signed by a judge. Then the officers took my dear grandmother away. We have not seen her since that moment. . . . Thinking about this makes me cry at times. . . . My sisters are still upset because they love her so much and want to be with her.
Similarly, an 11-year-old boy who traveled to the United States with his 3-year-old brother and their 18-year-old uncle to escape gang violence in Honduras said that border agents separated him and his brother from their uncle when they were apprehended, saying, “I don’t know where they sent my uncle. We were not allowed to say goodbye to each other.” And a 12-year-old Guatemalan girl said that border agents separated her from her aunt and cousin when the three entered the United States at the beginning of June 2019.
In many of these cases, border agents separated children from relatives who were raising them. For instance, an 8-year-old told lawyers he had been separated from his aunt, who had been taking care of him back home in Guatemala. “I cried and they did not tell me where I was going,” he said.
Siblings Forced Apart
Similarly, US border agents regularly separate children travelling with adult siblings, a practice that began long before the forcible family separation policy. In one such case, a 14-year-old Guatemalan girl said that immediately after she and her 18-year-old sister crossed the river to enter the United States, border agents “lined us up and checked our skin and our hair. . . . That is when they took my sister away from me and now I am very worried about her. I don’t know where she is or if she is ok.”
A Salvadoran girl, 15, said that she and her younger brother, age 11, were separated from their 19-year-old brother. Similarly, two 11-year-old Salvadoran twin girls were separated from their 19-year-old sister and her 3-year-old son. In their case, the separation meant that they had not been able to call their parents, who lived in New Jersey, during the 13 days they had been in Clint:
When they separated us from my sister, we lost contact with my family. My sister had a paper with my parents’ address and phone number on it, and she also has that information memorized. I don’t know my parents’ number. I have asked the guards here twice if they can ask my sister for my parents’ phone number.
Detention in Inhuman Conditions
There are about 50 kids in [the room] and 8 or 10 beds. There are no workers inside to take care of us so the kids try to take care of one another. When the workers come to clean our room, we get to go out in the hallway. We have only been outside [in a concrete courtyard] twice.
We sleep on a mat on the floor. There are about 10 kids who sleep on our mat. There is another mat, too. Some children sleep directly on the floor. It is tile. We shared our mat with a teenage mom and her baby, but she left so now one of the kids who has been sleeping on the floor can now sleep on the mat with us.
My [9-year-old] brother and I have had one shower since we came here, but they have not called [my 7-year-old sister] for any showers yet. We have only brushed our teeth once. We take a shower in a big truck with three showers inside.
The toilet is inside of the room where we sleep. There is no separate room, just two stalls with no doors. The older girls try to cover themselves with a blanket so we don’t see them when they go to the bathroom. The bunkbeds are right in front of the toilet stalls and so the people from the top bunks can see the kids going to the bathroom, but they try to look away to give the person on the toilet privacy and the person using the toilet usually tries to cover themselves.
Nobody takes care of us here. I try to take care of my little brother and sister since no one will take care of them. There are little kids here who have no one to take care of them, not even a big brother or sister. Some kids are only two or three years old and they have no one to take care of them.
—an 11-year-old boy from Ecuador, describing the conditions he and his siblings faced during more than two weeks in the Clint Border Patrol Station, Clint, Texas, June 18, 2019
More than 350 children, some as young as 5 months old, were being warehoused in a packed border station in Clint, Texas, about 30 minutes southeast of El Paso, when a Flores monitoring team visited the facility in June 2019. (Three Human Rights Watch lawyers were part of the monitoring team.) Some had traveled to the United States on their own; others had been separated from parents, older siblings, or other relatives upon apprehension.
Most had been in the Clint border station for weeks. When the monitoring team asked Border Patrol agents why so many children had been held in Clint far in excess of the 72-hour time limit for most transfers to Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters, border agents replied that ORR shelters were at capacity as an ongoing consequence of the 2018 forcible separations.
The children the team saw were visibly dirty. In an account that was typical of those the team heard, one boy said he had been in the Clint border station for 11 days without being able to shower or change his clothes. Some children had matted hair, faces streaked with dirt, or clothing spattered with mud or vomit. When children did get access to showers, they were given three minutes to wash. “The stench of the children’s dirty clothing was so strong it spread to the agents’ own clothing—people in town would scrunch their noses when they left work,” the New York Times later heard.
Cinder-block cells held twice their capacity, a fact that children could readily see by comparing their numbers with the posted signs. Older boys were in a section of a loading area where staff had set up a row of triple-stacked bunk beds, they told the monitoring team. A 12-year-old Guatemalan boy said that in the 17 days he had been in the Clint station, his cellblock had held as many as 70 boys ranging in age from 3 to 17. Girls described cells so packed that many had to sleep on the concrete floor. Many children said they were not getting enough to eat.
In response to outbreaks of influenza, chickenpox, and scabies, border agents had begun to use some cells to quarantine sick children, meaning that the remaining areas were even more overcrowded.
Many children remained in these conditions for well over the 72 hours federal law ordinarily gives DHS to transfer unaccompanied children to ORR shelters. Another boy said he had been in Clint for 19 days; a third boy said he had been there for more than 14 days. Another 12-year-old, held together with his 4-year-old brother, had been in Clint for 13 days.
Children repeatedly told the monitoring team that they were left on their own, with nobody to care for them. In another such account, a 16-year-old girl, her 14-year-old brother, and their 16-year-old cousin reported:
There are very young children who are here all by themselves for many days. In the cell for boys, there is a four-year-old and his brother who is maybe seven or eight years old. They have been here for about 13 days. They do not have anyone to care for them. In the cell for girls, there are girls as young as three and four years old who do not have anyone to care for them.
A 15-year-old Salvadoran girl who was taking care of a 2-year-old boy at Border Patrol’s request described how guards punished everybody in her cell after one of them lost a comb:
Today a nurse got mad at us because a comb is missing. Two girls asked to use a comb, but only one was returned. We are not allowed to keep combs, so they came in and took out all of the beds and all of the blankets in order to punish us. Now we will have to sleep on the floor.
Other girls corroborated her account.
The same week the monitoring team was in Flint, a government lawyer argued in federal court that the legal requirement to hold children in “safe and sanitary” conditions did not include access to medicine, blankets, toothbrushes and toothpaste, or soap. One of the three judges at the hearing asked if she was serious. As awareness grew of the conditions children faced in CBP holding cells, Vice President Mike Pence faced questions about the position the government had taken at the court hearing. He confirmed that these items were “of course” basic necessities for children.
Conditions in Clint may have been even worse in the two months prior to the monitoring team’s June visit. In April and May, more than 700 children were held in the Clint border station, analysis by the New York Times and the El Paso Times found—twice as many children as there were during the team’s visit. Until about June, the station also held families in a warehouse.
Clint was not an aberration. Flores monitoring teams who went to CBP detention centers in the Rio Grande Valley earlier in June found substantially similar conditions. The reports they collected matched the findings of DHS inspectors from the same month, who observed dangerous levels of overcrowding in CBP detention facilities in the Rio Grande Valley; some cells were standing-room only. Children and adults had no access to showers. More than 800 children had been in the cells for more than 72 hours; 165 had been held for more than a week.
Nearly 30 incident reports obtained by NBC News documented alleged abuse, sexual assault, and mistreatment of detained children in Yuma, Arizona, between April and June 2019. In one of these reports, a 15-year-old Honduran girl said a male CBP agent put his hands inside her bra, pulled down her underwear, and groped her. In another, a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy said CBP agents pulled sleeping mats out of their cell in retaliation for complaints, an allegation of collective punishment that matched reports that the Flores monitoring team heard in Clint.
At least six children died while in or shortly after release from CBP custody between September 2018 and May 2019. One of these children, a 7-year-old girl held with her father, died in December 2018 from septic shock that “cascaded into multiple organ failure” after inadequate health screening by CBP and a four-hour delay in providing medical attention after her father requested it. In another case, a 16-year-old boy died after border agents placed him in a quarantine cell and then failed to check on him for at least four-and-a-half hours.
IV. The Serious, Long-Lasting Trauma of Forcible Separation
There may be nothing more frightening for a vulnerable child than to be forcibly separated from their parent. Even this short-term separation will have lasting impact on their physical and emotional well-being.
Separation of children from their parents threatens the parent-child relationship, especially if the child believes that the parent should have been capable of preventing the separation and thus any imagined or real subsequent injury. In a child's mind, a parent is supposed to protect them from evil and dangers. When the parent or primary caregiver is seen as impotent in a dangerous situation, this threatens their trust in that caregiver and will be difficult to restore.
—Dr. Marsha Griffin, a professor of pediatrics with extensive experience of providing clinical care to migrant children in the Rio Grande Valley, in a declaration filed in the Ms. L case, March 3, 2018
Children said everything about their forcible separation from their parents was profoundly distressing. Many had never been apart from their parents before.
For instance, a 15-year-old Guatemalan boy told Human Rights Watch in March 2019 that he felt “really desperate and heartbroken and worried” when he was forcibly separated from his father after border agents apprehended them six months earlier. He described the two months he had been apart from his father:
It is really difficult to be apart from my dad. I don’t know when I will be able to see him, and it makes me really sad. Because I am thinking about my dad and being apart from him, I have difficulty concentrating in class. It’s hard for me to pay attention to what I should be doing. I feel anxious and worried a lot. There are days I don’t have any appetite. I never had a problem eating before, and I think if I weren’t so sad about being apart from my dad I wouldn’t have a problem with eating now. . . . When I start thinking about what happened, I feel sad and I start to cry. This never happened before. . . . This is new. It’s caused by the stress I’m under now.
After they were reunited, parents told Human Rights their children had developed nightmares or mood swings. Some had mostly stopped talking; others blamed their parents for what had happened to them. Younger children became inconsolable if they were briefly out of sight of parents. Eight- and nine-year-olds had begun to wet their beds in the time they were separated. “When I met with one of the original families in the lawsuit after their reunification,” Lee Gelernt of the ACLU wrote, “the mother told me that her four-year-old was still asking her, two months later, whether anyone was going to come in the night and take him away.”
ORR staff recorded trauma reported by separated children in “significant incident” reports and other forms documenting children’s circumstances. For instance:
A 5-year-old boy from Guatemala who had been separated from his mother “was tearful when he arrived, and would not speak or engage in conversation with anyone.”
A 12-year-old Salvadoran boy “reported feeling sad for being separated from his mother and not knowing anything about her.”
A 12-year-old Guatemalan boy reported that he developed suicide ideation while in detention after his forcible separation from his aunt and 6-year-old cousin.
In some of these reports, as in the case of a 9-year-old Salvadoran girl’s forcible separation from her mother, ORR staff record the incident as “abuse in DHS custody.”
These accounts are consistent with research findings that family separation causes severe and long-lasting harm. As Dr. Martin H. Teicher, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, observed:
Forcibly removing a child from their parents is one of the most profound traumas a child can experience, since it undermines a pivotal foundation they require for self-regulation and resilience. Similarly, having your children forcibly taken, not knowing where they are, and not being allowed to contact them, is many parents’ worst nightmare.
Dr. Teicher and other researchers have found that separation from a parent or other caregiver is inherently stressful, particularly for young children. Dr. Colleen Kraft, then the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, noted:
[H]ighly stressful experiences, like family separation, can cause irreparable harm, disrupting a child’s brain architecture and affecting his or her short- and long-term health. This type of prolonged exposure to serious stress – known as toxic stress – can carry lifelong consequences for children.
Dr. Reshem Agarwal and Dr. Marsha Griffin, both pediatricians, explained, “This kind of stress makes children susceptible to acute and chronic conditions such as extreme anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, hypertension and heart disease.”
Migrant children who have been forcibly separated from their parents demonstrate greater emotional and behavioral difficulties than children who have never been separated, suggesting that “separation is associated with an increase in psychological distress.” As a 2020 study found, even short periods of separation are traumatic for children:
[T]hose who had been forcibly separated for shorter periods of time had similar rates of distress to those with longer duration of separation. This suggests that, regardless of how long a child is kept from their parent, the act of being separated may be particularly traumatic.
Separation also took a toll on parents. Parents repeatedly told Al Otro Lado, a legal services organization based in Tijuana, that forced separation from their children was “the worst thing they had ever experienced” and reported “continued disturbances in sleep, nightmares, loss of appetite, loss of interest, fear for the future, constant worry, hopelessness, and loss of the ability to concentrate.” In May 2018, a man killed himself after CBP agents forcibly separated him from his children.
Separated children spent days, weeks, or even months in immigration detention before US officials reunited them with their parents, allowed them to live with other relatives, or arranged foster placements. Such periods of immigration detention are an additional source of trauma. In fact, research has found that children find even brief periods of detention acutely stressful, with consequences that can persist months after release.
Mayra S., a 29-year-old woman from Mexico who was not separated from her children, told a Flores monitoring team how detention had affected her 9-year-old:
My son is badly traumatized. He has been wetting his bed and is fearful all the time. He saw someone bound with chains and asked me whether I would be chained in the same way. He also overheard a woman say that she had been separated from her children, and asked me whether we would be separated as well. He wonders when we will get to the United States. I do not tell him that we are already here. He wouldn’t believe that the United States would treat us this way.
The known harms to children of immigration detention are serious enough that the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American College of Physicians have opposed immigration detention of families with children.
The forcible separation of children from their parents at the border was different in kind and degree from other contexts in which children are separated from their parents, including the separation of families that results from a parent’s incarceration or deportation. As with Mayra’s 9-year-old son, many had arrived in the United States in the belief that they would find protection. Other than the minor offense of irregular entry, they had not committed a crime. Many arriving parents and children were asylum seekers, who should not be penalized for improper entry. More generally, the criminalization of irregular entry does not prevent or resolve irregular status and, under international human rights standards, exceeds governments’ legitimate interests in regulating migration. Border agents frequently lied to children and their parents about what was happening. In many cases, children did not know for days or weeks where their parents were, and vice versa. Once they did, they had very limited opportunity to communicate. Separated children often faced prolonged periods of immigration detention—including, as in Clint, in overcrowded and otherwise abusive conditions—before they were transferred to ORR facilities.
Dr. Jack P. Shonkoff, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, told Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker:
From the perspective of what we know about children’s health and well-being, what we know about trauma, abrupt separation is one area where we have a lot of research and a lot of evidence about its consequences. But prolonged institutionalization is a separate area in which we have an equally deep research base and knowledge about how damaging that kind of setting is for kids. We are dealing with two very well-studied, serious assaults on the health and well-being of children.
V. Efforts to Reunite Families
Numerous lawsuits challenged the 2017 and 2018 forcible family separations. Several of these were incorporated into a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), known as the Ms. L case. That litigation had immediate impact, including an injunction against systematic separations of parents and children in June 2018 and subsequent orders to locate and reunite many separated children with their families. Another case, J.P. v. Sessions, ordered the government to provide mental health treatment for parents and children who had been separated.
These efforts were still ongoing when President Joe Biden took office in 2021. That February, less than two weeks after his inauguration, President Biden established a task force to reunite the families separated by the US government during the Trump administration.
More than six years after the court ordered reunification of families, more than 1,300 of more than 4,600 children separated during the Trump administration remain unaccounted for.
The Struggle to Identify Separated Children
The US government’s failure to identify and prepare for the consequences of the forcible family separation policy, as described earlier in this report, meant that ORR scrambled to identify all separated children.
DHS had not consistently flagged for ORR which children it had separated. In fact, DHS maintained a “large number of data sets from the numerous information systems maintained by its various components, sectors, and offices . . . . that were neither de-conflicted nor integrated,” ORR found when it began to work with DHS in response to a court order.
Moreover, HHS recordkeeping systems were “not originally designed for aggregated tracking of separated children in ORR care,” Jonathan White, former ORR deputy director, told the court; instead, it was created to manage individual children’s care plans. As a result, “when the Ms. L. Court issued its orders on June 26, 2018, there was not an aggregated list of the children who had been separated by DHS and were then in ORR care.”
By August 2021, six months after President Biden ordered the establishment of the Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families, it had identified more than 3,900 children whom DHS separated from their parents at the border between July 2017 and January 2021. At that point, 2,073 children had been reunified with their parents either as the result of litigation or the task force’s efforts. These numbers increased as the task force continued its work.
Locating parents who had been deported was particularly challenging. Representatives of Justice in Motion, the nongovernmental organization that led many of these efforts, obtained and reviewed parents’ birth records and then sent representatives who spoke Indigenous languages to their places of birth to try to locate them. An August 2018 update to the court reported that nearly two months of “[t]hese efforts have reached six parents and will continue . . . .”
In 2022, nongovernmental organizations working with the task force and the Ms. L Steering Committee were still contacting families outside the United States. The task force estimated that it took 20 hours per family to make contact and register them. When Justice in Motion’s government contract ended at the end of April 2023, it continued its searches outside the United States using private funds.
Other factors impeded swift reunification. New background check requirements that ORR implemented in June 2018 required fingerprints from parents and all adults living in the household. Lengthy home studies also delayed the process until the court ordered the government to adopt a streamlined process.
As of March 20, 2024, the task force reported that 4,656 children had been separated during the Trump administration. Of that total, it had identified 3,225 children who had reunited with their parents—many as an outcome of the Ms. L litigation, others as the result of the task force’s efforts, and some thanks to their families’ or their own efforts. Another 71 children were in the process of being reunited with their parents. Some 1,360 children were still “without confirmed reunifications,” including 648 for whom the task force had no contact information.
The table below shows the number of children identified as having been separated along with the cumulative number of children reunified with their families by the dates given.
Reunification Progress
Date Number of Children Identified as Separated Number of Children Reunited with Parents 2018 July 12, 2018 81* 58 July 18, 2018 2,551 364 July 19, 2018 2,654 364 August 1, 2018 2,654 1,535 August 9, 2018 2,654 1,569 August 16, 2018 2,654 1,616 August 23, 2018 2,654 1,923 September 24, 2018 2,654 2,025 October 9, 2018 2,654 2,070 October 23, 2018 2,668 2,104 November 6, 2018 2,667 2,115 November 27, 2018 2,667 2,125 December 11, 2018 2,816 2,131 2019 February 1, 2019 2,816 2,155 February 13, 2019 2,816 2,155 March 4, 2019 2,816 2,155 March 25, 2019 2,816 2,159 April 11, 2019 2,814 2,162 May 6, 2019 2,814 2,166 June 4, 2019 2,814 2,167 July 7, 2019 2,814 2,167 August 13, 2019 2,814 2,167 September 6, 2019 2,814 2,168 October 9, 2019 2,814 2,168 November 4, 2019 2,814 2,168 2020 January 13, 2020 2,815 2,168 February 28, 2020 2,815 2,166 May 27, 2020 3,845 2,166 July 8, 2020 3,845 2,166 August 19, 2020 3,949 2,166 October 20, 2020 3,949 2,166 December 2, 2020 4,013 2,166 2021 January 13, 2021 4,013 2,166 February 2, 2021 4,013 1,779** June 2, 2021 3,913 1,786 August 1, 2021 3,914 2,073 September 23, 2021 3,948 2,221 November 17, 2021 3,951 2,248 2022 January 17, 2022 3,842 2,290 March 17, 2022 3,843 2,331 May 1, 2022 3,843 2,521 July 14, 2022 3,851 2,634 September 14, 2022 3,855 2,766 November 18, 2022 3,811*** 2,837 2023 January 17, 2023 3,923 2,896 March 16, 2023 3,925 2,969 May 16, 2023 3,927 3,033 July 16, 2023 3,932 2,092 September 15, 2023 4,227 3,126 November 14, 2023 4,227 3,147 2024 March 20, 2024 4,656 3,225
* The initial status report to the court focused on the identification and reunification of children under the age of 5; it did not report the total number of separated children the government had identified.
** Reunification numbers initially reported by the task force were lower than those reported to the court because the early task force numbers included reunifications that occurred while children were in government custody (for example, in ORR shelters) but not after placement with relatives or other sponsors.
*** As the task force reconciled overlapping government databases, the number of children it identified as separated decreased in November 2022 compared to the previous month.
Source: Ms. L. Status Conference Reports, July 2018-April 2021; Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families Progress Reports, June
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/16/we-need-take-away-children/zero-accountability-six-years-after-zero-tolerance
Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/
