The Daily - The Truth Behind #WhereAreTheChildren

Episode Date: May 31, 2018

The United States government lost track of nearly 1,500 undocumented children in the last three months of 2017, giving rise to claims that they had been separated from their families at the border. What does the confusion reveal about President Trump’s approach to immigration? Guest: Caitlin Dickerson, a national immigration reporter for The New York 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 Watch. Today, the U.S. government lost 1,500 undocumented children, but not for the reason many believed. What the confusion says about President Trump's unique approach to immigration. It's Thursday, May 31st. Thank you, Mr. McCammon. Mr. Wagner. Chairman Portman, Ranking Member Carper and members of the subcommittee,

it is my honor to appear on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Steve Wagner, Acting Assistant Secretary for Children and Families. So on April 26th, Stephen Wagner, who's a top official at the Health and Human Services Department, he goes in front of a Senate subcommittee, and he's talking about, in general, what's happening at the border and what's happening in particular to children who cross the border. These changes help protect children from traffickers, smugglers, and others who wish to do them harm. So he talks about how many are in custody, where in custody they are, what countries are they from, why are they coming here.

Caitlin Dickerson covers immigration for The Times. And in the course of his testimony, he mentions 1,500 kids who he says the U.S. government has lost track of. We don't have a mechanism for tracking down the kids. 1,500 kids are missing, essentially. Right.

This morning, an immigration mystery. What happened to nearly 1,500 missing unaccompanied migrant children? Many are from Central America. It's in response to the disclosure that the federal government lost track of nearly 1,500 immigrant children. And it created a lot of concern that has sort of gotten larger and larger. The government lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children. Sparking a backlash on Capitol Hill. Where are these kids? Why don't we know where they are?

We need to know where these kids are. Until this weekend when questions really exploded on the internet. The Department of Health and Human Services reported last month that 1,475 children are now missing. But it just started trending with a new hashtag, WeAreTheChildren. Growing social media campaign with the hashtag, WhereAreTheChildren. But also on Friday, on the 25th, it was National Missing Children's Day. And so immigrant advocates really seized on that as a moment to draw a lot of attention to the issue and really start to criticize the Trump administration for having lost track of these kids.

They don't know where they are. They don't know if they're still in the United States. They don't know if they're still alive. They just know that they separated them from their parents and now they're gone. And over the course of the weekend, this narrative emerges, it evolves too, to where people actually believe that the 1,500 kids

were separated from their parents at the border. And if you actually believe that the 1,500 kids were separated from their parents at the border. And if you are not angry about 1,500 children being taken away from their families and never to be seen again, I have my children. So if you're not American, you're not allowed to have your own children. Your children get sold off to the highest bidder. So you see, for example, the actor Jim Carrey. He has 18 million followers on Twitter, and he tweets, 1,500 innocent children ripped from their mother's arms

at our border, lost in Trump's system. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and we will torture them for wanting a better life. So they think that there are 1,500 kids who crossed the border with their parents, who were taken away from their parents, and who were then lost. But that's not really what happened. So this narrative you're describing is that the Trump administration took these 1,500 children from their parents, separated them at the border,

and then, on top of that, lost track of these children after they had been separated. That's the narrative, but that's not actually what happened. These 1,500 kids came into the U.S. by themselves. They were unaccompanied minors. And when unaccompanied minors come to the U.S. by themselves,

they're placed in custody of HHS, and then they're united with sponsors. And then when the administration tried to follow up, tried to check in and see where the children were, how they were doing, the administration wasn't able to reach those sponsors. And so that's where the 1500 number comes from. It's 1500 that haven't been in touch. We don't know exactly where they are, but they came in by themselves. How exactly do you lose 1500 children inside the United States? Well, there are a few different explanations for that. And one of them that the administration has put forth is that, you know, in many cases, these sponsors are undocumented themselves and they don't want to be in touch with the U.S. government. They don't want to be found. And so they're just not answering their phones. Of course, it's possible

that people move. They change their phone numbers, and they're not reachable in that way. But there was still a lot of concern about what happened to these 1,500 children because we've seen cases where, for example, eight children were once reunited with sponsors who turned out to be human traffickers, and they illegally put them to work on an egg farm. So even though the kids were reunited with adults, we know that sometimes those adults aren't who they say they are. These children are the most vulnerable children that we have in North America. And, you know, we can argue about whether they should be here, but because they're here, they're ours, and they're our responsibility.

And that's why Republicans and Democrats in the Senate wanted to make sure how they were doing, if they were okay. I've been sitting here for most of the questioning. There's a lot of, I don't know, I can't answer that question. That shouldn't be where we are right now. You are the worst foster parents in the world. You don't even know where they are. And it's also important to point out that it's not typical for the government to stay in touch with sponsors over long periods of time once children are reunited with them. This is sort of a voluntary follow-up.

And the Trump administration has certainly said, look, it's not our jobs. Once we reunite these kids with adults, they're in those adults' custody. And we don't need or we don't want to continue to track their whereabouts long after. So these kids are still lost. But what people on social media and these activists got wrong is that they weren't lost because the administration, the Trump White House, took them away from their parents. Exactly. Not because they were taken away from their parents. But the reason people are talking about children being separated from parents, and I think why this story got so big, is because

there's also been a lot of attention paid recently to a very controversial policy that's been in place for some time, but that the administration just recently announced sort of formally, in which children are being separated from their parents at the border when they cross. All right, there's a dramatic new proposal from the Department of Homeland Security. CNN confirms DHS is considering separating kids from their families when they are trying to cross the border illegally. And so it was really a conflation of two very controversial ideas that blew up into this sort of firestorm of misinformation.

So this is just a little bit confusing. The Trump administration didn't separate these 1,500 children from their parents. They came to the U.S. on their own, unaccompanied by an adult. But the U.S. government is separating other children from their parents at the border. Is that what you're saying? That's exactly right. It's that people really conflated this 1,500 number with a very controversial policy that has also received a lot of attention recently, in which the administration is separating on a pretty large scale adults and children who cross the border together.

An official said that this is a proposal that's meant to protect children, claiming adults essentially kidnap kids and force them to come along with them because the current guidelines allow most adults to stay in the country if they make it across the border with a child. And just to be clear, it's always been the case, even prior to the Trump administration, that if a minor and an adult arrived at the border together and border patrol suspected for whatever reason that that person wasn't actually their parent, that they were a human trafficker, that they were abusive, the two would be separated to make sure that the child was safe. What's different here under the Trump administration is that this is being used as a deterrent measure. To deter undocumented immigration. To deter undocumented immigration and asylum seeking, which is a legal process, right?

If you get some young kids who manage to sneak into the United States with their parents, are Department of Homeland Security personnel going to separate the children from their moms and dads? We have tremendous experience in dealing with unaccompanied minors. So the controversy over this really started last spring when John Kelly, who's now the president's chief of staff, was the secretary of Homeland Security, and he announced that he was considering separating parents and children at the border,

not as a measure to make sure that the children weren't being abused or being trafficked, but as a way to deter people from coming here at all, because who's going to immigrate to the United States when they believe when they arrive, their children are going to be taken away from them? Yes, I am considering, in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network, I am considering exactly that. They will be well cared for as we deal with their parents. But you understand how that looks to the average person,

who is more important to me, Wolf, to try to keep people off of this awful network. And so up until recently, the administration has said, no, no, no, we didn't, in fact, enact that policy. We're not separating parents and children except for in cases when we actually have to. Your agency will be separating children from their parents. No, what we'll be doing is prosecuting parents who've broken the law, just as we do every day in the United States of America.

I can appreciate that. But if that parent has a four-year-old child, what do you plan on doing with that child? The child under law goes to HHS for care and custody. But we continued to ask questions because we were hearing stories really quite constantly from the border of parents and children being separated. And it just seemed like it was happening much more than it ever had been. Finally, we got access to a set of data that showed, in fact, that it was happening on a grand scale. What exactly had you found? What was the data and the evidence? So between October of 2017 and April of 2018, about 700 children had been separated from their parents after crossing the

border, including more than 100 kids who were under the age of four. So this very much sounds like official policy by the Trump administration to separate parents from their children. It at that point seemed like a very clearly larger number than we had ever seen before. The numbers really were unprecedented. And that was backed up by people who work along the border and people who run the shelters where these children were being held. So today, we're here to send a message to the world that we are not going to let the country be overwhelmed. People are not going to caravan

or otherwise stampede our border. We need legality and integrity in our immigration system. And then separation becomes a formal policy when Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, announces a zero-tolerance policy against adults who cross the border with children. I have put in place a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry on our southwest border. policy for illegal entry on our southwest border. If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. It's that simple. He still doesn't call it a family separation policy. So we still see some confusion here. But when you announce a zero tolerance policy to prosecute everybody who crosses the border, any parent, any adult who crosses the border with a minor is going to be criminally prosecuted, which means they're going to be put into criminal custody

where a child can't go. And so you're always going to see those two separated. You're always going to see the kid go into one set of custody and you're going to see the parent or the adult go into another. So zero tolerance basically means families will be separated. Exactly. If you don't want your child to be separated, then don't bring them across the border illegally. It's not our fault that somebody does that. If you make false statements to an immigration officer or commit fraud in our system to obtain an immigration benefit, that's a felony too. in our system to obtain an immigration benefit, that's a felony too. And we'll put you in jail if you qualify. This largely goes back to the comments that we heard from John Kelly last spring, where he said this is a deterrent measure. The idea is to prevent people from trying to come

to the U.S. But another argument that we've seen out of the administration is that parents who bring children to the United States, even if they are legitimate families, they're putting those kids in danger and they're also committing a crime. And so to some people, that justifies taking the child away from the parent because if they're willing to put their kid in that kind of danger to go through this journey

with a sort of uncertain fate, then clearly the kid is going to be in better care with the U.S. government than with their parents. We'll be right back. Kaitlin, we've talked to you a lot on this show about the Trump administration's approach to cracking down on undocumented immigration. What is new and important about this policy and this approach, separating children from their parents? We've seen so many changes when it comes to immigration policy. We've seen far more arrests happening than ever before.

Immigration policy. We've seen far more arrests happening than ever before. Groups of people who in the past would have been left alone, deported. And we've seen visas become more seriously scrutinized and harder to get, in some cases impossible to get. We talk about the wall all the time. And it's not just the policy changes, it's the rhetoric. You know I'm referring to the MS-13 gangs that are coming in. You hear the president talking about immigrants in ways that we've never heard before. We have the worst immigration laws of any country anywhere in the world. But they exploited the loopholes in our laws to enter the country as unaccompanied alien miners. They look so innocent. They're not innocent. At least not in modern history.

These aren't people. These are animals. And we're taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that's never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast. We get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It's crazy. So a lot of changes. But, you know, here we're talking about kids and really what's happening here, what's different. And I think what's striking a chord with so many people is the administration's handling of young children, in some cases, children who are too young to talk in an entirely new way. You know, I think for a lot of people, including immigration hardliners, there's sort of a red line when you talk about taking kids away from their parents.

So I think it's this new way of dealing with kids that has a lot of people questioning how far we should go to try to cut down on illegal immigration and on just the large numbers of people crossing the border in general. It sounds like what you're saying is that this may be too big a leap, even for the people who generally agree with President Trump's immigration crackdown. Yeah, for a lot of people, kids are sacred. So it's too far for a lot of people. And where do the children go when the U.S. government separates them from their parents?

So those kids are sent to shelters that are run by the Health and Human Services Department, which contracts with individual organizations, non-governmental organizations. You know, it's not a jail-like setting. It's not detention. It's really a shelter for kids. And they're all over the country. So very often the kids are pretty quickly sent to a different state because they really are sent to wherever there's room in the shelters. And often that's not along the border where their parents are being held. So while the 1,500 kids that we began this conversation talking about

are lost, these kids who are taken from their parents and sent to these shelters, they aren't really lost, right? We know their whereabouts. We know where they are. We know their physical whereabouts, but they're actually kind of lost in a different way because their parents are being held by the Department of Homeland Security. They're in detention facilities along the border. But the kids are being held by the Department of Homeland Security. They're in detention facilities along the border. But the kids are being held by a separate federal agency, the Health and Human Services Department. And what we've learned is that a lot of them are showing up to these shelters. You know, they're either too young to speak or they can't speak English.

And they don't have documentation as to where their parents are. And some of them have stayed in shelters for months with no indication of where their parents are. And some of them have stayed in shelters for months with no indication of where their parents are. We've also heard of cases where parents have been deported where the kid is still in a shelter stuck in the United States. So they're not lost in the way that Steve Wagner described in front of the Senate subcommittee. But certainly if you asked anybody in their family, where's your kid? They're going to say they're lost. We can't find them. We don't know where they are. kid, they're going to say they're lost. We can't find them. We don't know where they are. So I guess the perspective has kind of shifted. The original 1,500

kids, they were lost to the U.S. government. The kids you're talking about now, they have been lost to their own families. Exactly. Caitlin, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks, Michael.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, in the latest rebuke of his own attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, President Trump said in a tweet that he wished he had chosen a different lawyer than Jeff Sessions for the job. If I were the president and I picked someone to be the country's chief law enforcement officer

and they told me later, oh, by the way, I'm not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated, too. The tweet came in response to a CBS interview with Representative Trey Gowdy, a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, who said he sympathized with the president's frustration with Sessions. There are lots of really good lawyers in the country. He could have picked someone else. In his tweet, Trump quoted Gowdy,

saying he could have chosen a different attorney general, adding, and I wish I did. And the Times is reporting that in March of 2017, shortly after Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, President Trump pressured him to reverse his decision, saying he needed a loyal attorney general to oversee the probe. That request to Sessions is now part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into whether the president obstructed justice. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.