The Trump administration refused to allow hundreds of migrant children whom it had separated from their parents at the southern border to return to their home countries with their family and deceived the public about reunification efforts, according to government auditors.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General’s Office concluded Monday that 348 children were left in the United States after their parents were flown out of the country despite the parents having requested they be reunited and returned as a family. The findings validated the claims that migrant adults had made at the time, alleging that Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not allow them to bring their children when they were deported despite Trump officials’ claims otherwise.
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“Although [the Department of Homeland Security] and ICE have claimed that parents removed without their children chose to leave them behind, there was no policy or standard process requiring ICE officers to ascertain, document, or honor the parents’ decisions regarding their children,” the inspector general report stated. “ICE removed some parents without their children despite having evidence the parents wanted to bring their children back to their home country.”
In mid-2017, the Trump administration advanced a plan to prosecute all adults who illegally crossed the border. Historically, families at the border were placed in civil immigration proceedings and held together or released into the U.S. while those legal cases went forward. The decision to prosecute adults as criminals meant children would have to be separated from their parents because the children could not be held in jail. The administration rolled out the “zero-tolerance” program to show it would show no exceptions for illegal immigrant families, including those who might seek asylum while in custody.
When a pilot version of the Trump plan was put into place in mid-2017, Border Patrol agents took children away from their parents and transferred them to the Department of Health and Human Services, which held the children until their parents’ cases were resolved. ICE detained the parents. Between July 2017 and July 2018, ICE failed to return 348 children whose parents wanted to be sent home together.
The inspector general also found that then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and other senior department officials wrongly claimed that migrants separated from their children had not wanted to be removed together. In a congressional hearing on December 20, 2018, Nielson said, “Every parent had the choice to bring the child back with them when they were removed. The ones who did not bring the children with them made the choice not to have the child accompany them.”
“ICE records reflect that in some cases, parents told ICE officers they wanted their children to accompany them back to their home country — but ICE nevertheless removed the parents without reunifying them, leaving their children in the United States,” the report states. “Therefore, at least some of ICE’s removals of parents without their children were intentional, and not just inadvertent incidents resulting from human error or inaccurate records.”
ICE agreed to investigators two recommendations: that it ensure supervisors approve each parent’s decision about being sent with or without their children before they are deported and that the agency must come up with a way to share information with other government agencies.
President Joe Biden in February created an interagency task force with the sole purpose of reuniting families that the Trump administration was unable to reunify. The move was in response to the American Civil Liberties Union’s federal lawsuit in San Diego.
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An estimated 5,400 families were separated at the border in the three months of 2018, which does not include the pilot phase in 2017, and more than 600 children have yet to be reunited more than two years later.
