The Department of Homeland Security began separating migrant families at the border in 2018 despite knowing it did not have a sufficient way to track and reunite the thousands of affected people, according to a new government watchdog report.
The DHS inspector general’s office report released Wednesday said then-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s department misreported the number of split-up families, and the decision to implement the policy did not lead to a decline in illegal crossings of families as the Trump administration had claimed would happen.
“Although DHS spent thousands of hours and more than $1 million in overtime costs, it did not achieve the original goal of deterring “Catch-and-Release” through the Zero Tolerance Policy,” the DHS OIG report states. “Instead, thousands of detainees were released into the United States. Moreover, the surge in apprehended families during this time resulted in children being held in CBP facilities beyond the 72-hour legal limit.”
Starting May 5, 2018, through June 20, 2018, the Trump administration began taking children from parents at the border after they illegally crossed into the U.S. from Mexico. The separations, as then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions explained in April 2018, were intended to deter adults from illegally crossing because they would no longer not be referred for prosecution because they had a child with them. Instead, the child would be taken away because the adult and child could not be housed in long-term immigration detention while the adult went through court proceedings.
DHS estimated 3,014 children were separated from the adults they arrived at the southern border with during that time span. The inspector general said it could not confirm the total number of separations because of the “deficiencies” in the computer system that lacked the means to track everyone who passed through its or Health and Human Services custody.
“DHS did not have the information technology (IT) system functionality needed to track separated migrant families during the execution of the Zero Tolerance Policy,” the report states. “U.S. Customs and Border Protection adopted various ad hoc methods to record and track family separations, but these methods led to widespread errors.” Agencies within DHS used different computer systems to track people in custody, so there was no streamlined way to look at a family’s status as it moved between CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the report reads.
The inspector general’s office also found U.S. Border Patrol, a component within CBP, had tried out a mini version of family separations in November 2017. DHS learned then it did not have the computer tracking systems needed to track separated families nationwide, much less in the small trial region, but expanded it the following spring anyway.
Because DHS could not track families that were broken up by Border Patrol agents after being arrested for illegally crossing into the country from Mexico, the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cared for the separated children, had a harder time reuniting them in the weeks and months that followed.
The DHS reunited 2,155 children in the seven months after the separations ended, after being ordered to do so by a federal district court judge. However, the watchdog office found that another 136 children had been separated on top of the 3,014 children. When it looked at the months leading up to and after the 45-day family separation in spring 2018, the office found another 1,233 children who appeared to have crossed the border with an adult family member and been separated.
The DHS separation numbers differ from those reported by the HHS inspector general. That office found in January thousands more children are believed to have been separated since 2017, including as the result of arriving with an adult who was not the parent, had a criminal record, or other reasons.
