Evidence that Trump Administration Lied About Ability to Reunite Families, leading to Baby Jails
Days after the Trump administration stopped separating migrant families at the border, it told the public those families would one day be reunited. But emails obtained by NBC News show that the administration didn’t have enough information to do that. On the same day that DHS released a statement claiming that the administration had “a central database” of information on separated children and parents, an HHS data analyst Thomas Fitzgerald emailed an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Matthew Albence (briefly Acting Director of ICE) to say that, in fact, they only had enough info to reunite about 60 kids. “We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children… “[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful.” In the absence of an effective database, the emails show, officials then began scrambling to fill out a simple spreadsheet with data in hopes of reuniting as many as families as they could. Click here and here to read the emails.
The gaps in the system for tracking separations would result in a months-long effort to reunite nearly 3,000 families separated under the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. Officials had to review all the relevant records manually, a process that continues. An HHS’s Office of Inspector General Report from earlier in the year show that even more than this group of 3,000 children, over a longer period of time, have been separated from their parents or guardians and referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for care as well.
A full-length book on family separation at the border by Philip G. Schrag, Baby Jails, will be released by UC Press in February 2020.
“For decades, advocates for refugee children and families have fought to end the U.S. government’s practice of jailing families for months or even years until courts could decide on their claims for asylum. Baby Jails is the history of that legal and political struggle narrated engagingly by Philip G. Schrag, a legal activist, who takes readers on the thirty-year battle to end the detention of migrant children. Using the Reno v. Flores case of 1985 as a backdrop, Schrag shares the story of 15-year-old unaccompanied Jenny Lisette Flores, who languished in a makeshift jail of a motel surrounded entirely of barbed wire, chronicling legal twists and turns on the case over the years. Yet no one could have predicted how Flores would become a significant target for the Trump administration. Honing in on developments over the last two years, Schrag provides recommendations to reform a system that has caused anguish and trauma for parents and children alike. Provocative and timely, Baby Jails exposes the continuing struggle between the government and immigrant advocates over the duration and conditions of confinement of children who are simply seeking safety in the United States.”
-MHC