The Daily - “Divided,” Part 2: The Chaos of Reunification

Episode Date: August 24, 2018

More than 2,000 children were separated from their parents at the border. After a judge ordered the U.S. government to promptly reunite the families, the government claimed it would be nearly impossible to do so. In Part 2 of our series, we look at why the government could separate families, but not bring them back together. Guest hosts: Annie Correal, who covers New York City for The New York Times, and Caitlin Dickerson, an immigration reporter at The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. When a judge ordered the U.S. government to reunite the 2,600 children and parents it had separated at the border, the government claimed it would be nearly impossible to do. In part two of our series,

my colleagues Caitlin Dickerson and Annie Correal tell the story of why the government could separate the families, but not reunite them. It's Friday, August 24th. Stop taking children! Stop taking children! Stop taking children! Breaking news out of San Diego, where a judge has ordered border authorities to reunite separated migrant families within 30 days. Overnight, a judge in California ordering the Trump administration to reunite all children with their families within 30 days.

Never again! Never again! Never again! The talk is ticking, and here on the ground, organizations and lawyers are telling us they're not seeing very much movement. Escucha!

Estamos en la lucha! Tonight, more chaos in the controversy over separating families at the border. The Trump administration now admits it needs more time to meet the court-ordered deadline for those families to be reunited. Today is the court-ordered deadline for children under five to be reunited with their parents. It is a deadline the United States government will not meet. The judge was very clear today. These deadlines are firm. The government has to follow them unless they have a good reason not to reunite.

Keep families together! Keep families together! The government acknowledged it hadn't even figured out who the parents are in some cases, much less actually bringing them back together. So here we are after one executive order, two deadlines, an unprecedented sprint to undo the work of this policy. Technically, the government manages to hit its final deadline and reunify all these kids who are eligible. But we still have hundreds of kids whose parents were deported without them and others who, for various reasons, are still in limbo. So this is far from over.

And there are no real consequences for that. The ACLU proposes ideas to the judge, like creating a fund to pay for mental health care for the families, but he still hasn't ruled on that. So the government has yet to answer, really, for failing to reunify all these families, let alone separating them in the first place. And all along, people have been asking, why was this such a mess? Because it's confusing. How could it have been so difficult to undo this work of separation? And I find out that there's a pretty clear answer. So when someone crosses the border, they're processed by border agents. They're put into a computer system, and the agent chooses from a drop-down menu to essentially characterize that person.

So they can be characterized as an unaccompanied minor, if it's a child who came in on its own. They can be characterized as an individual adult, if that's the case. Or they can be characterized as AWC, adult with children, if it's a family. And when a border agent chooses that category in the computer, it creates automatically an identification number for that family unit that goes into the immigration files of each member. And that number can be used to track them at any given time moving forward. This was the protocol for years. This is the way people were always dealt with when they crossed the border.

When family separation started, border agents started doing things differently. They would process families as AWC, adults with children, but then when it came time to separate them, which usually happened after a couple days, they would change the family's immigration records, and they would characterize the kids as unaccompanied minors and the adults as individual adults.

So added into this category of unaccompanied minors, which is usually teenagers crossing the border on their own, are these babies and toddlers, they also become unaccompanied minors. And by moving the little kids into this category of unaccompanied minor and moving their parents into the category of adults, that change deleted the family identification number from their records. So you could no longer link family members together. Essentially deleting the family unit from government computers. So when people hear this, they immediately picture something sinister. They think border

agents carrying out this policy were essentially trying to cover their tracks, They think border agents carrying out this policy were essentially trying to cover their tracks or intentionally make it impossible to link parents and kids after they were separated. But the officials who told us this were very quick to make clear this is not what was happening. You can think of border agents as essentially cops or frontline workers who are working along the border and carrying out orders from above. So they're not making policy. They can't change their computer systems in a way that would separate families but still hold on to that identification number, for example. They just don't have that much power on an individual level. But there is someone who had that power.

Well, good afternoon. It is my pleasure to be here because I would love to see if I can help explain some of what's going on and give you some of the facts. I know there have been a lot put out there, but hopefully we can clarify some things today. Secretary Nielsen, for one, and other high-ranking officials within DHS or within the Border Patrol, and they didn't use it. They didn't say, OK, here's how we're going to separate families in a way that still makes sure we can figure out where they are so that we can reconnect them at some point. And finally, DHS is not separating families legitimately seeking asylum at ports of entry. And there's a reason this didn't happen.

Remember, this is happening at a time when Secretary Nielsen is telling Congress and telling the public, we don't have a family separation policy. It's not a policy. Our policy at DHS is to do what we're sworn to do, which is to enforce the law. We do not have a family separation policy, essentially saying we're not doing this. And I want to correct the record. Here are the facts. First, this administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border. We have a statutory responsibility that we take seriously to protect alien children from human smuggling, trafficking, and other criminal actions while enforcing our immigration laws.

trafficking and other criminal actions while enforcing our immigration laws. So she couldn't very well turn around and send out a memo to her agency with instructions for how to carry out family separations in a thoughtful or organized way, because that would have required acknowledging family separations. And she wasn't going to do that. So there was a vacuum. There was no guidance. There were no instructions. And that left people on the ground to figure out for themselves how they were going to do this. And that's how we got to this point where we had thousands of children and thousands of parents strewn across the country. And in many cases, no way to connect them except for their word. We return to immigration and the complicated process of reuniting children and parents

who were forcibly separated at the border. No borders, no nations, stop deportations. Where exactly is the system falling down? It should not be a problem to find the child in the ORR system. We feel like it's forcing a crisis on top of a crisis that already existed. So when you try to reunify people in that situation, you have to start from scratch.

So we have this judge demanding week after week that the government lawyers explain, you know, why they're taking so long. And the answer is because matching these parents and children had to be done manually. There was no database that showed who belonged to who. So when they separated them, there was no thought of how to reunify them, how to bring them back together at the end of this process? Absolutely none. And of course, you've got various... Each record had to be scrubbed by hand.

And then after a match was identified, it had to be checked with background investigations and DNA testing and interviews to prove these really were families. This was a policy that was implemented with no thought given to how do you reunify families? How do you allow them to communicate? In the end, moving around thousands of people in custody, many of whom are kids, was never going to be easy. But the level of chaos and scramble and the mistakes that we saw during

this reunification effort were totally avoidable. They were the result of a problem the government created when it chose not to track these families that were broken apart. And with that, I'll take some questions. Yes. Secretary Nielsen, if you could, what you talked about there, DHS is no longer ignoring the law. You're calling on Congress to change the law. That is the big message here. Members of Congress on the Democratic side say that you are using children as a lever to try to get them to take legislative action.

What do you say? I say that is a very cowardly response. It's clearly within their power to make the laws. At this point, we've talked to people at each level of government, from the agents who deleted the records to people in the highest tiers

who were giving out orders. For the border agents who did the separations, my colleague Ron Nixon talked to a handful, and some of them said, look, when a cop pulls over a car

and learns that there's an outstanding warrant for the person who's driving, they have to arrest that person, even if they feel bad because there's a five-year-old crying in the back seat. They have to enforce the law. Other agents actually felt like they were protecting the kids because they felt parents had been so irresponsible in bringing them on this dangerous journey that they were actually unfit to take care of children. When we go through the official channels and ask DHS about the specifics of family separation, to this day, a lot of what I get is denial.

When I asked them about this description we got, for example, of how records were deleted at the border, they disputed it for my story, but since then, the Health and Human Services Department has confirmed that it's true. Madam Secretary, can you definitively say, are the children being used as pawns against the four wall? Yes or no? Can you say yes or no to that?

The children are not being used as a pawn. We are trying to protect the children, which is why I'm asking Congress to act. Yes. And then there are people in the middle who may not have had direct contact with the families, but who've been working day in and day out on family separation since it started. And I think disillusionment is the best way to describe what I hear from those people. Even the hardliners who supported family separation are frustrated by the haphazard

way that it was carried out because it led to what they see now as a lot of wasted time. And they believe the president backed off of family separation so quickly in the face of public pressure by signing his executive order that it was all for naught. And not just the work of reunification, but also this fierce public shaming they faced as a result of family separation weren't even worth it in the end, they feel, because the policy didn't deter people from crossing the border,

didn't even have an effect, which was the whole point of family separation in the first place. Either because word didn't reach Central America fast enough or people just didn't care, the numbers of people crossing the border are essentially the same. Over all these months since family separation started,

nothing has changed. This particular moment in time, come back. Come back. You told the administration that kids would suffer as a result, that pain would be inflicted, correct? So now that it's over, after all of this, politicians, Democrat and Republican, kind of wherever they stand on immigration, they're trying to understand how this could have happened and what the lasting

effects might be. Separation of children from their parents entails significant risk of harm to children. Well, it's traumatic for any child separated from his or her parents. Am I correct? I say that as a parent of four children. There's no question. There's no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child. And would I be correct in assuming that the answer to you was in effect? That's the whole purpose of the policy, to inflict pain so as to deter asylum seekers from coming here, correct? No, sir. We were advised that family separation

was not the policy. Family separation just happened to result from zero tolerance without anybody knowing in advance, even though you raised the concern, correct? Yes, we raised concerns about the effect on children as well as the effect on the program. So there was awareness that it would be the consequence, correct? You raised it. I did raise it. I'm asking again, what was the answer?

The answer I received is that family separation was not a policy I was advised that there was no policy which would result in separation of children from family units We'll be right back. We've been going flat out to just cover this story. And it's easy even for us to lose sight of what it really means. ¿Y cuando ustedes entraron, ¿ustedes llegaron en avión o en bus? ¿O cómo llegaron de la frontera? En avión. En avión.

¿Y ustedes alguna vez habían viajado en avión? No. ¿Era la primera vez? Sí. In a plane. In a plane. And have you ever traveled in a plane? No. It was the first time. Yes. Did you like it? Yes. Did it scare you? Yes.

Yes. When it was going up. Of course. It's easy to forget the kids and what they are going through, how this is going to affect them over the long term. And tell me, did you eat well in there? what they are going through, how this is going to affect them over the long term. I spoke to a lawyer in Colorado, and she described children who she said were really traumatized. They were the children of her clients. And she said they were asking their mothers,

what did I do to deserve this? She said there was a lot of self-blame. They were also asking their mothers, what did you do? They don't know why this happened or who made it happen. And that's just what's happening now. now. I had a 13-year-old, Wilson, who are sort of play-acting, being border patrol agents, and handcuffing each other or pretending to, you know, detain migrants. Wow. or pretending to, you know, detain migrants.

Wow. Que lindo. Todos los colores. Rojo, azul, verde, anaranjado. ¿Tú sabes cómo decirlo en inglés? ¿Aprendiste algunas palabras en inglés? Sí. Este se llama blue. ¿Eso se llama cómo? Blue.

Blue. Tienes toda la razón. Este. Orange. ¿Y este? Este no lo sé. Este es blue, orange. And this? This is blue, orange. Green. Red. The lawyer said that there are a lot of kids in very vulnerable situations. And in her words, when a six-year-old is the narrator,

you don't even know what's happening, and what pieces of what's happening they'll be able to digest as being wrong. So I think it'll be a long time before we're really aware of the long-term effects for the children themselves. And it'll be a long time before we're really aware of the long-term effects for the children themselves. having to kneel down and interview the human toll of this policy. ¿Cómo te llamas tú, señor? Jan Carlos. ¿Cómo es tu apellido, Jan Carlos? No lo sé. ¿No sabes tu apellido? Solo sabes que tienes seis años. Él dice que su nombre es Jan Carlos.

Él no sabe su último nombre. Tiene seis años. Y eres de Guatemala. Libre. Vamos. ¿Y tú cómo te llamas? ¿Qué? Joshua. And you, what's your name? Joshua? Joshua? All right, we are gathering together bottles of water and bags and car seats and headed out of 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan.

You know, we have volunteers, we have lawyers, we have social workers. Everyone's, you know, trying to take down names and phone numbers for these families before they take off. for these families before they take off. And at some point, everyone sort of just picks up whatever they can, the kids' duffel bags, the trash that's been left around, and all that's left in this ICE office is just like a pallet of water bottles. And that's really all that ICE gave them when they were reunited, was some free water.

Everything else came from the lawyers and the social workers and the volunteers. They were the ones who had to kind of pick up the slack and help these families figure out the next step in their journey. Wait a minute. and help these families figure out the next step in their journey. Wait a minute.

So we get on the elevator and... That was the sound of the children reacting to the elevator going downstairs. And there's this mix of fear and excitement to this entire episode. They're about to leave, go rejoin relatives, and more than anything, there's that excitement at being free. And now we're outside. So we walk outside, and you can tell that the moms are just enjoying the feeling of the sun on their skin.

feeling of the sun on their skin. The first time they're walking without handcuffs and chains. They're actually literally free to walk across the street with their kids and load up into a taxi. Free. Happy. free, happy. They're trying to keep track of the whole group as we cross Worth Street, downtown Manhattan,

among people on their lunch break who have no idea what we're doing or who we are. But at the same time, they're walking in shoes that don't even have laces because the government's even taken their shoelaces and their belts. They are being released with literally just the clothes on their backs and their ankle monitors. The parents, all they've really got are a stack of papers from ICE to their names.

And these are the lucky ones. These are the families where the parent has been located, the child has been located. The authorities have brought them back together and let them go. There's still hundreds, more than 300 kids still in U.S. custody whose parents have been deported. And the government has yet to work out a way to get them back together. There are more than 20 whose parents haven't been located at all.

I know of one foster mother, she started out with nine children here in New York. And slowly, one by one, those kids have started going back to their families. But she still has a couple, and those are children whose parents have been deemed ineligible for reunification and have been deported.

And if there's a plan for how they're going to get back to those parents, she says she doesn't know about it. And she says they're pretty much part of the family now. And that, for the time being, might actually be the case for a lot of kids whose parents have been deported and whose families haven't figured out how to get them back.

And the U.S. District Judge has basically said that the reality is that for every parent who's not located, there will be a permanently orphaned child, and that is 100% the responsibility of the administration. So we really just don't know what's going to happen to those kids. I'm not going to go with you. I'm going to let you have some peace and quiet. .

. Can you. I'm gonna try and let it go on for a little bit. La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días ¿Cuándo llegamos? Solo llegamos nosotros dos y llegaron otras, pero también eran separados. Pero cuando estábamos en la casa, usted dice si veníamos juntos. Exacto, si venían juntos

y si venían como un grupoo. Si venían juntos. Y si venían con un grupo grande. Jamelín, ¿cuántos años tienes tú? Nueve. Nueve. Bravo. ¿Cuántos años tienes? Nueve. Lester, ¿cuántos años tienes?

11. 11. Bravo. Bravo! How old are you? Nine. Lester, how old are you? Eleven. Eleven! Bravo! I was six years old, but now I'm three. Oh, I want that. I was four. I was four, but now I'm five. Four? You tenía cinco. ¿Ya tienes cinco? Here's what else you need to know today.

76 days away from the midterms. Hard to believe. If the Democrats take back power, do you believe they will try to impeach you? Well, you know, I guess it's something like high crimes and all. I don't know how you can impeach somebody who's done a great job. In an interview with Fox News broadcast on Thursday, President Trump predicted that the country would descend into economic crisis if Democrats tried to impeach him over his conduct.

I'll tell you what, if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor because without this thinking, you would see numbers that you wouldn't believe. During the interview, Trump delivered a new rebuke of his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who the president still blames for triggering the special counsel by recusing himself from the Russia investigation. I put an attorney general that never took control of the Justice Department, Jeff Sessions, never took control of the Justice Department,

and it's sort of an incredible thing. Hours later, Sessions defended himself in a statement, saying, quote, I took control of the Department of Justice the day I was sworn in. In his statement, Sessions said he would not be swayed by the president's criticisms. While I am attorney general, he said, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations. The Daily is produced by Theo Malcolm, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ike Sreeskanarajah, Claire Tennisketter, Paige Cowan, Michael Simon-Johnson, and Jessica

Chung, with editing help from Larissa Anderson. Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher. Our engineer is Chris Wood. And our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolan, Michaela Bouchard, Stella Tan, Samin Amin, Mark Lacey, Cliff Levy, Liz Robbins, Ron Nixon, Miriam Jordan, Manny Fernandez, Mitchell Furman,

and all of the other reporters in the newsroom who covered the story of family separations. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. Tomorrow, in a special episode, as a record number of women run for Congress this year, we look back at the first time an election year was called the Year of the Woman, 1992.

See you tomorrow.