The Trump administration’s practice of separating immigrant kids from their parents at the border with Mexico ended with President Trump’s executive order last week. But separation, as experienced by the 2,047 children the government is holding far away from their parents, is still very much ongoing with no immediate end in sight.
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Cough Up the Kids: A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to reunite immigrant children under 5 years old with their parents within 14 days, according to an injunction handed down by the District Court for the Southern District of California.
Judge Dana Sabraw, the George W. Bush appointee who ordered the injunction, lit into the administration for the slapdash way it took children from their families and wrote that "there is no genuine dispute that the government was not prepared to accommodate the mass influx of separated children" under its policy.
Quote of the Day: Sabraw also hit the government for its inability to track and reunite immigrant parents’ children with the same care and attention it reserves for their property.
“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.”
Ransom: Before the injunction came down, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told senators the Trump administration’s price for handing back the 2,047 children it’s holding is gutting detention regulations. Under current law, immigrant children can’t be held for more than 20 days in detention while waiting for their status to be adjudicated. That’s a problem for reunification because Trump, in a break with previous administrations, has chosen to criminally prosecute and detain immigrant parents—meaning children reunited with parents wouldn’t be able to stay with their parents as they wait for glacially slow immigration proceedings to play out.
“Until we can get Congress to change that law, the forcible separation there of the family units, we'll hold them or place them with another family relative in the United States,” Azar said.
Incommunicado: Azar told senators that HHS was fanning out Public Health Service officers to put immigrant kids taken from their parents back in touch with mom and dad within 24 hours of being separated and that kids can have a Skype or phone call with them twice a week. When pressed, however, Azar couldn’t offer specifics on how many of the children the Trump administration had taken.
That may be because the efforts as portrayed by the HHS chief don’t square with the results on the ground. NBC News spoke with a number of immigrant moms and dads who say the numbers they’ve been given don’t work and haven’t been able to reach their kids by phone.
Not Inspiring Confidence: Nor is HHS’ performance scoring points on Capitol Hill. Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX) told CNN that a conference call the department set up with legislators to brief them on reunification progress didn’t go off because “the phone number didn’t work.”
Reunited*: HHS says the department is running the same playbook for separated children they’ve taken from parents as those who arrived at the U.S. border without parents. If a kid in the custody of HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement has a relative in the U.S. with whom they can stay, the department will release them into that sponsor’s custody. HHS and Homeland Security have used “reunification” to describe this in relation to unaccompanied children placed with family members in the U.S. since at least 2014. When Trump administration officials are asked about how many kids have been reunited, be careful to distinguish between reunification as used to describe finding other sponsors in the country and reunification with the parents from whom they were taken.
Does Any of This Sound Funny to You? Apparently it does to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions enjoyed a good chuckle during a speech in which he blasted critics of the administration’s immigration policy and child separation. He argued that critics would only “be too happy to have you arrested and separated from your children” if you crashed an event they held, as both Sessions and the audience at the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Los Angeles broke into giggles and cheers.
Detention at Eavesdropping University: The Trump administration wants the Defense Department to pitch in on its immigration policy and provide space to house detained migrants. But as The Daily Beast’s Jim LaPorta and Spencer Ackerman wrote, one of the bases under consideration is where the Pentagon trains personnel on collecting signals intelligence. That’s raising privacy concerns among immigration-rights advocates and attorneys who fear their communications with clients could be collected, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Gearing Up: Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is building more infrastructure to detain immigrants prosecuted under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy. To give you a sense of scale, earlier this week ICE issued a request for information from vendors who could provide “potential facilities to accommodate up to 15,000 beds” for family residential units where parents and children could be detained together.
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