Consider This from NPR - How The Family Separation Policy Came To Be

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

In 2018, more than 5,500 children of immigrants were separated from their parents at the border.The Trump administration's "Zero Tolerance" policy, better known as family separation, was short-lived, ending in June of 2018 after facing condemnation from the public and members of Congress.For some families, it took years to reunite, and hundreds of families still have not been brought back together.Caitlin Dickerson's latest cover story for The Atlantic, titled, "We Need To Take Away Children: The Secret History Of The U.S. Government's Family Separation Policy", is an exhaustive investigation into how the policy came about.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org In May of 2018, President Trump's Attorney General Jeff Sessions had this message for parents hoping to cross the U.S.-Mexico border with their kids. If you don't want your child to be separated, then don't bring them across the border illegally. So we're sending a message to the world, really, the border is not open.

This was public acknowledgment of a policy that the administration called zero tolerance. To the rest of the world, the policy could be summed up as family separation. More than 5,000 children were forcibly removed from their parents at the border. For months, administration officials denied that it was even happening. Then they gave conflicting messages about exactly what the policy was. No, I'm not accepting the premise that we're using children as pawns in a deterrent game. Are Department of Homeland Security personnel going to separate the children from their moms and dads? Yes, I am considering an audit to deter. Are you intending for this to play out as it is playing out? Are you intending for parents to be

separated from their children? Are you intending to send a message? I find that offensive. No, because why would I ever create a policy that purposely does that? Perhaps it's a deterrent. No, it's... That last voice was the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen. After months of pressure, she signed the memo allowing the policy to take effect. It wasn't until June of 2018 that the public got a clear picture of what was really happening. ProPublica obtained audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility. Here, a six-year-old

Salvadoran girl is asking Border Patrol agents for her aunt. She has the phone number, but they won't let her call. Members of Congress from both parties began to demand answers and take action. People protested outside of detention facilities. I want to tell June of 2018, Trump reversed the policy. But it took years to reunite families. Hundreds of families still have not been reunited. Consider this. Even by the chaotic and extreme standards of the Trump administration's immigration policies, family separation was in its own category. A new investigation reveals how it came about and the ongoing trauma it's caused for those who were separated. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Tuesday, August 16th. It's Consider This from NPR.

Kids as young as infants were removed from their parents at the border, more than 5,500 children total. Caitlin Dickerson chronicled those events in real time, first for The New York Times and now for The Atlantic. Her latest cover story for the magazine is an 18-month investigation that The Atlantic describes as one of the longest articles it has ever published. I asked Caitlin why it's important for the public to have this sort of authoritative account of how the family separation policy came about. It's the culmination of an approach to securing the border that the United States government has taken really since 9-11. The idea it's known as consequence delivery.

It started with prosecuting individual adult border crossers, many get to the Trump administration, which, as you know, was very focused on trying to curtail immigration, both illegal immigration as well as asylum seeking. The reason this exhaustive an account we felt was necessary was because it's the most extreme implementation of consequences. You have parents who are crossing the border with their children being prosecuted and as part of that separated for months and sometimes years at a time. Some families, hundreds of them still have not been reunited today. was over, Trump administration officials actually actively worked to continue keeping the parents and children apart when reunification was possible and might have even been simpler. That's right. And it's a critical detail to point out because family separations began in the middle of 2017, and they went on for about a year before they were ever publicly acknowledged.

When the Trump administration finally did say that it was separating families, the argument became, well, we only want to prosecute the parents. We don't want to separate. It's just that we have to. And so we're going to get these prosecutions done as quickly as possible so that we can get kids back to their parents. And that is not the case. Documents show that, as you said, government officials, in fact, actively intervened to prevent those reunifications from happening. Before we dig into how this policy became reality, to give us a sense of what it felt like, can you tell us about a woman named Alma Acevedo who worked with an organization in Michigan called Bethany Christian Services? Sure. So Alma was a caseworker at a facility in Michigan where many of these separated children were dropped, you know, in the middle of the night, completely inconsolable. And she's someone who was trained

to work with traumatized children. She has a lot of experience, but she and other caseworkers said this was unlike anything they'd ever seen. Kids were completely inconsolable. They couldn't do anything other than play movies to try to keep kids calm. And she had no idea when they were going to be reunited. So to go into the bureaucracy, where this policy took shape, you basically say there were two kinds of people in the government, and there was a push-pull between them. There were the careerists and the hawks. What role did those groups play? It was no surprise that the hawks who are well known in the Trump administration,

people like Stephen Miller, Gene Hamilton, who's a little bit less known, but equally important, we're going to push for these really aggressive policies. But it's actually the bureaucrats, the career experts who went along with zero tolerance and family separations, who are really important. They told me in interviews, they were very concerned about separating families, didn't think it was a good idea, didn't think it was ethical and maybe even legal, but they stayed quiet. And when I asked why, they said, well, it wasn't strategic to speak up in these meetings or, you know, I couldn't alienate myself before Stephen Miller, given how

much power he had in the administration. They figured someone else would intervene. And because of that, this policy was put into place. So as you describe it, Stephen Miller at the White House was relentlessly pushing for this policy. He did not cooperate with you. He did not speak to you for this story. Somebody who did speak to you at length was someone who kind of became the face of the policy, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. And you write that throughout her tenure, she'd be accused by administration colleagues of being a squish, meaning not a true conservative. And each time she'd go a little further to appease her critics until eventually, you write, she followed them off a cliff. She told you in your reporting that she wishes she had not signed the memo authorizing family separations.

How do you understand her role? So Kirstjen Nielsen was the head of DHS, and she is the highest-ranking law enforcement official responsible for this policy. There's no way around that. But it's important to know that she didn't have good information when she made this decision. And again, someone like her comes into this role anticipating that Stephen Miller's going to be exerting pressure from above to impose these harsh immigration policies. But it's the head of ICE, Tom Holman. It's the head of CBP, Kevin McAleenan. Customs and Border Protection, yeah.

Thank you. Career immigration officials who are subject matter experts who said to her, not only is this a good idea, but we have systems and processes in place to ensure it's going to be implemented smoothly. And that wasn't true. And based on those, you know, their advice, she made that decision. There were so many things that the administration could have done to implement this in a more organized way. Like, why wasn't there an Excel spreadsheet, a document saying, this is the name of the parent, this is the name of the child, here's where the parent's detained, and here's where the child has been sent? It would have made reunification so much easier.

Why wasn't that done? It's so simple, right? This idea of trying to figure out how to keep track of parents and children if you're going to separate them in the first place. The best answer I have for you is that anyone with that consideration in mind, reunification, they weren't allowed into the room, into these discussions. So Kirsten Mielsen, as DHS secretary, was being assured, it's okay, it's fine, we have a system, we have a process. And meanwhile, people within the bureaucracy who could have implemented that process and developed it, they were left out of the discussion. And when they raised red flags and said, hey, we're not ready to do this, they were completely ignored. I want to try to understand where the

people pushing for this policy were coming from. And I think perhaps the most vivid defense of it came from a man who actually first floated it in the Obama administration. He was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement named Tom Homan. What was his rationale for why he thought this was a good idea? Tom Homan joined the Border Patrol in his early 20s. He's been in immigration enforcement his entire adult life. And he tells a story of in the early 2000s being called to the scene in South Texas where migrants were in the back of a tractor trailer with no air conditioning. Many of them died, suffocated. And, you know, his response to that was to say, I have to stop this from ever happening again. His idea was, let's introduce a consequence so severe

that no one wants to do this. No one wants to take their children on this dangerous journey. You know, what he's missing, though, is that this consequence delivery system imposed after 9-11 has actually been shown to increase the prevalence of these dangerous measures that migrant families take to get to the United States. You know, you don't get into the back of a tractor trailer and try to sneak into a country if you can go in the front door, if you can apply for a visa, or if you can wait in line and be processed in in a safe and humane way. And so he's got this, you know, laser focus on minimizing border crossings, but he only sees this one solution, which is punishment. There's one detail that you weave into the beginning and end of this article, and I'm curious why you included it.

You describe doing interviews with former Trump officials who were involved in family separation. And over the phone, you hear them interacting with their own kids, saying, I love you, or giving them their lunch or getting them off to school. You could have written the story without those details. Why'd you put them in? I wanted to include those details because I think that they reflect, again, why this moment in immigration enforcement and in American history is so worth remembering and paying attention to. People's kids are the centers of their lives. And, you know, they came up constantly in my interviews with people who would have to, you know, reschedule a conversation

because they had to help their child who had to, you know, put me on hold or give me a call back because they needed to go pick their child up from school. Then we would jump back into these interviews talking about, you know, very, very serious life-altering, you know, moments for the children and families who were separated at the border. And it was as if these officials completely kind of forgot the connection between their own families and the ones that they were describing. People became numbers and statistics and things that needed to face consequences. They couldn't see the connection that I so clearly did between their own children and those who were impacted by this policy. You describe this policy as a chapter of U.S. history, but as you chronicle the ongoing trauma that people subjected to the policy experienced, as you chronicle the desire by some former Trump administration officials to see this policy implemented again in the future, I wonder if history is really the right word.

It's very much not history. You're right, Ari. There are over 150 children whose parents still have not been found by the American government and hundreds of kids who still haven't been reunited. Therapists who are helping those families that have been reunited to move forward say they're in the very beginning stages of something that is just immensely destructive, you know, not only for the adults, but for the kids who were in this very early stages of development in many cases when they went through this really intense kind of hit to their ability to develop healthy attachment and just grow up and socialize. And so this is going to be a lifelong story for them. There are oral historians who are

recording their experiences to make sure that they're preserved, and we're going to be hearing from them for many decades. Kaitlin Dickerson's cover story for the latest issue of The Atlantic is published under the headline, We Need to Take Away Children, the Secret History of the U.S. Government's Family Separation Policy. Thank you for your reporting. Thank you so much, Ari. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.