American border officials are separating migrant families
It is unprecedented in American history or international practice
MIRIAN and her 18-month-old son fled Honduras after soldiers threw tear gas into their home. They requested asylum at the American border with Mexico five weeks later. Mirian surrendered her Honduran ID card and her son’s birth certificate, which listed her as his mother, whereupon immigration officers took her son. “My son was crying as I put him in the seat,” Mirian told a court. “I did not even have the chance to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat. I was crying too. I cry even now when I think about that moment.”
Since October, hundreds of children have been taken from their parents at the border and put in separate facilities. In March 2017, John Kelly, then secretary of homeland security, suggested his department would do that “to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network”. The administration has since backed away from the rationale of deterrence.
But this April Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, announced a “zero tolerance” policy towards illegal immigration, vowing to prosecute unlawful border crossings and to separate parents and children “as required by law”. Entering America illegally is a criminal misdemeanour, punishable by up to six months in jail.
America is not just imprisoning people who are in the country illegally. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), they are imprisoning asylum-seekers who present themselves at the border—in violation of international law, the Homeland Security Department’s stated policies and the Fifth Amendment’s due-process guarantee. And once they release border-crossers, the government appears to make little effort to reunite them with their children. Lee Gelernt, the lead lawyer in the ACLU’s case against the Trump administration over the separations, calls it “the worst thing I’ve seen in 25-plus years of doing this work”.
Separations also happened under previous administrations, but generally they were inadvertent. Under the Obama administration, says John Sandweg, a former acting director of America’s immigration police, “the overarching goal was family unity…even if we were enforcing the law against them.” Families were detained together while the government adjudicated their status.
One near-parallel to America’s current immigration practices came in 2005, when George W. Bush’s administration ramped up criminal prosecutions for border crossing, rather than just sending people back voluntarily or removing them through the civil immigration system. As a result, federal courts along the border found their resources strained. Prosecutions for people- and drug-smuggling declined as those for petty immigration violations rose.
Amnesty International, an advocacy group, has urged America to end the practice of separating asylum-seeking families—something done by few if any other rich countries. In the Netherlands, asylum-seeking families are detained together, and the children can attend school. Even Australia, which detains asylum-seekers arriving by boat in miserable conditions in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, does not take children from their parents.
