Government Watchdog Finds Hundreds of Parents Separated by Trump Never Given Opportunity to Reunify

The Division of Homeland Safety’s Workplace of Inspector Common (DHS OIG) lately discovered that the Trump administration deported as many as 348 dad and mom that had been separated from their youngsters with out ever giving them a possibility to reunify.

The blistering new report tracks deportations all through 2017 and 2018 in the course of the prior administration’s Zero Tolerance coverage and the pilot venture that preceded it. Senior DHS officers testified repeatedly to Congress that each dad or mum acquired the selection to reunify earlier than deportation—statements that the OIG’s report makes clear had been false.

Throughout Zero Tolerance, hundreds of households looking for asylum in the USA had been separated on the border, with Border Patrol officers at instances dragging youngsters from their dad and mom’ arms. Officers then despatched dad and mom to be prosecuted. In the meantime, the youngsters had been turned over to the custody of the Workplace of Resettlement as newly “unaccompanied” minors. After the dad or mum completed any legal sentence (normally a matter of days), they might be turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for the deportation course of – not launched or reunified with their youngsters.

When the nation expressed outrage about these separations, members of the Trump administration repeatedly insisted that no dad or mum had ever been deported with out the chance to reunite with their little one and be deported collectively.

Former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen went as far as to testify earlier than Congress in December 2018 that “Each dad or mum had the selection to convey the kid again with them once they had been eliminated.” Equally, she testified the following yr that “[T]right here was no dad or mum who has been deported, to my information, with out a number of alternatives to take their youngsters with them.”

Nevertheless, the OIG report discovered that this was false. Regardless of repeated claims by Secretary Nielsen and different DHS officers, there was no common course of for asking dad and mom about reunification previous to deportation. A course of was solely put in place after a court docket order in June 2018. In complete, OIG recognized 348 separated dad and mom the place there was no proof of any effort to ask them about reunification.

Even worse, the OIG report discovered that officers deported dad and mom who had informed ICE they wished to reunify when requested. One case documented by the OIG included a father who despatched a number of letters to ICE asking that he be deported alongside along with his son. ICE ignored the letters and he was deported again to his dwelling nation alone.

OIG additionally discovered information of one other 149 dad and mom who had supposedly agreed to be deported with out reuniting with their youngsters. However the paperwork was so incomplete—together with lacking signatures and primary details about the questions requested—that OIG couldn’t conclude that the dad and mom had acquired a significant likelihood to reunify with their little one.

The true scale of those cases could also be even increased. The OIG report solely analyzed the interval earlier than a federal court docket ordered ICE to reunify dad and mom with their youngsters. Nevertheless, an oversight criticism filed by the American Immigration Council in 2018 documented a number of cases the place ICE officers coerced dad and mom into signing away their proper to reunify with their little one even after the court docket order got here down.

The OIG report makes two factors clear. The horrors of household separation had been far worse than the Trump administration was ever prepared to confess. And officers’ core protection in the course of the backlash was riddled with holes. Because the Biden administration continues the work of its Household Reunification Process Power, it should decide to a full investigation of the harms accomplished beneath household separation and promise to completely compensate any household topic to the merciless coverage.

FILED UNDER: Donald Trump, household reunification, household separation, Workplace of Inspector Common