Immigrant families remain separated after crossing the US-Mexico border

A 7-year-old Guatemalan girl died last week while in Border Patrol’s (CBP) custody. But a statement the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) released Thursday night about her death raises more questions than it answers.

The Washington Post reported that CBP told them the girl “died of dehydration and shock after she was taken into Border Patrol custody last week for crossing from Mexico into the United States illegally with her father and a large group of migrants along a remote span of New Mexico desert.”

President Donald Trump’s closing argument in the 2018 midterms was to vote Republican to save America from foreigners — an idea rooted in a fringe theory that whites are under siege, or “white genocide.”

“It’s like an invasion,” Trump said last week, talking about Central American migrants walking north through Mexico. “They have violently overrun the Mexican border. You saw that two days ago. These are tough people, in many cases. A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country.”

Thousands of families fleeing persecution in Honduras are walking to the United States to request asylum. President Donald Trump has made it quite clear that he doesn’t like that.

Aside from deploying the military to the border, Trump said on Thursday that he plans to detain asylum seekers in “massive tents” along the border. I won’t go into the details about the legal problems this would cause the Trump administration, or how inhumane tent cities are. Vox’s Dara Lind does a good job explaining that here.

The Trump administration has separated more families at the US-Mexico border than it’s previously admitted — including untold numbers that were never officially counted as “separations” because Border Patrol agents claimed the people they were separating weren’t actually families.

And those unofficial separations are likely still ongoing.

The Trump administration has just agreed to give parents who were separated from their children at the US-Mexico border earlier this year a second chance to make asylum claims in the US.

The Department of Justice has negotiated an agreement that covers three lawsuits filed against the government over the family-separation policy. Parents in the US who’d been ordered deported would get another chance to pass an interview demonstrating a “credible fear” of persecution — the first step in the asylum process.

A group of parents who failed their initial asylum interviews while they were separated from their children under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy this spring and have been given deportation orders are now suing the Trump administration to give them another chance.

The 29 parents, represented by Muslim Advocates, Eversheds Sutherland LLP, and the Legal Aid Justice Center, filed the case Dora v. Sessions Friday in the DC federal district. All of them have now been reunited with their children but have been given final deportation orders after losing their asylum cases.

Late Thursday night, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting any of the reunited families who were separated under the administration’s “zero tolerance” prosecution policy earlier this year, arguing that children reunited with their parents still need to be given the chance to seek asylum in the US.

The ruling was issued by Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California, in the case M.M.M. v. Sessions — a separate lawsuit from the one that’s compelled the government to reunify families, but one which is now being overseen by the same judge.

As a matter of policy, the US government is separating families who seek asylum in the US by crossing the border illegally.

Dozens of parents are being split from their children each day — the children labeled “unaccompanied minors” and sent to government custody or foster care, the parents labeled criminals and sent to jail.

The family separation crisis has officially passed its peak. More than half of the families once separated have been reunited; the number of remaining separated families has fallen from thousands to hundreds, and is likely, under judicial supervision, to continue falling.

But family separation was always only the tip of the iceberg. It was one tactic in a broader strategic battle the Trump administration has been fighting since the days after Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Fathers being held in an immigration detention facility after reunification with their children engaged in a protest Thursday out of frustration and despair over being “restrained from our freedom as human beings,” as one father put it.

According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, the protest was minor: a brief sit-in. But according to the Texas advocacy and legal services group RAICES, which announced the protest, what’s going on is much more serious: a hunger strike.

The family separation crisis at the US-Mexico border, which started back in April, isn’t going away. The court-ordered deadline of July 26 for the government to reunite more than 2,000 families has passed — and although a majority of families are back together, some remain apart.

The government still says it’s reunited the majority of “eligible” families. But that all hinges on how they define eligible. In a few “ineligible” cases, the parent has a criminal record; in others, the child has already been released to a different sponsor (usually a relative living in the US).

A lawyer claims that several fathers have been separated from their children by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for a second time, after the fathers refused to withdraw their children’s cases to stay in the US and allow the government to deport the family together.

The fathers say that shortly after being reunited with their teenage children, they were presented with forms that gave them three “options” for their families’ cases — with the option for deporting the child along with the parent already selected. One parent says the check mark had been made in pen; two others report that they were told they had to sign the form with that option selected.

As the court-ordered deadline passes for the government to reunite more than 2,000 families separated at the US-Mexico border, two things are clear: The majority of families have been reunited, but some remain separated.

We don’t know exactly how many families have been reunited — the federal government’s numbers aren’t quite precise enough for that. We don’t know what the fate of the families who have been reunited is — and how quickly parents will start getting deported after being reunited with their kids.

The federal government is on pace to meet a court deadline to reunite all “eligible” families it separated at the US-Mexico border earlier this year.

The question is what happens after that.

The Trump administration has justified its “zero tolerance” crackdown on families entering the US in two ways. The first is a moral argument: People who violate US immigration law deserve to have their children taken from them or detained with them indefinitely. The second is a practical one: If we crack down, fewer people will come.

Under this rationale, the administration wasn’t trying to traumatize families by separating them. Its real goal was to deter people from crossing into the US illegally instead of waiting at an official border crossing to seek asylum — and, more fundamentally, to stop families from making what’s often a dangerous trek through Mexico to the US.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, only wanted to know one thing about President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the consumer watchdog agency — and it had nothing to do with financial regulation.

During Kathy Kraninger’s Senate confirmation hearing Thursday, Warren asked about how Kraninger was involved in the administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy that led to the separation of more than 2,000 immigrant children from their parents in recent months. Kraninger’s portfolio as the associate director for government programs at the White House’s Office Management and Budget includes oversight of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, the agencies that carried out the policy.

After several months of experimenting with punitive policies toward families coming to the US without papers — including separating thousands of children from their parents to detain and prosecute parents — the Trump administration is reluctantly returning to a practice it pejoratively calls “catch and release”: releasing families from immigration detention and allowing them to live in the US while they wait for their asylum claims to be adjudicated.

President Donald Trump and other top administration officials have spent months railing against the release of immigrant families as a recipe for widespread lawlessness. They claim that once a family is released from immigration, they’ll simply abscond into the US, skipping their appointed court dates, to live as unauthorized immigrants. The administration makes it seem like this is a deliberate strategy — a known end-run around existing immigration law that takes advantages of extra protections afforded to children, families, and asylum-seekers.

On Monday night, the Trump administration was handed the latest in a series of courtroom defeats over its treatment of families entering the US without papers.

Judge Dolly Gee of the Central District of California formally refused the administration’s request to modify the Flores court settlement, which governs the treatment of children in immigration custody. The Flores agreement was the court ruling that the administration had pointed to for its policy of family separation — because it couldn’t keep children detained longer than 20 days, per Flores, it had to split children from their parents while the parents were in detention.

The federal government is definitely not going to meet Tuesday’s deadline, imposed by federal judge Dana Sabraw, to reunite all of the more than 100 children under the age of 5 separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border under President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” prosecution policy.

But it’s almost certainly not going to matter.

One of the children separated from his parents at the US-Mexico border was returned months later with lice, looking as if he hadn’t been bathed in weeks, and with irrevocable changes to his personality, his mother said, according to documents filed in a lawsuit against the Trump administration.

That detail comes from PBS’s Lisa Desjardins reporting for PBS Newshour. The lawsuit, from 17 states and the District of Columbia, calls for an end to Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy and demands the administration reunite all families that were separated at the border.

With a court-imposed deadline looming for the government to reunite families separated at the US-Mexico border under President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told reporters on Thursday it doesn’t know exactly how many of the children in its care were separated from parents under the policy.

The administration has a list of nearly 3,000 children who might have been separated. But it is still trying to figure out exactly which ones had parents taken away.

Anti-immigration sentiment fueled Donald Trump’s shocking primary victory and seemed to have won him some crucial votes in critical 2016 swing states. But now that he’s in office, public views of immigration are soaring to new heights. A new Pew poll released last week, for example, finds that, for the first time on record, more Americans want to see legal immigration levels increased rather than decreased.

The higher levels of support for immigration are driven by a surge in Democratic enthusiasm, but Republican views are also shifting in the same direction. Overall public opinion on immigration is always somewhat murky and a little hard to parse, but the trends here are unmistakable.

Surprised by vehement public reaction, President Donald Trump has decreed an end to the policy of separating arriving asylum seekers from their children. But what now? Not what will Trump do — his latest pronouncements simply up the ante on mean-spiritedness, with little clarity on a specific policy direction. But what asylum reforms should progressives push for to build a humane, workable, and sustainable program?

The policy problem is real. The flow of asylum seekers from Central America has not noticeably abated even during the administration’s imposition of cruelties. The current adjudication system has been overwhelmed — both the asylum officers in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the immigration judges in the Department of Justice (DOJ). Claims in both venues, from all nationalities, have seen sharp rises over the past five years, and backlogs have mushroomed.

The Trump administration has a new official policy to deal with families seeking asylum at the border. They won’t separate children from their parents, but they will keep those families locked up together until their cases are processed — even though it’s against the law to detain immigrant children indefinitely.

The Department of Justice (DOJ), which announced the new policy Friday night, has come up with a weak legal argument to justify it. (Vox’s Dara Lind explains the policy here.) DOJ lawyers said keeping families in detention centers is the only way to comply with US District Judge Dana Sabraw’s recent injunction that banned immigration authorities from separating families and ordered them to reunite those they had already split up.

Without having reached any meaningful solution, Congress’s debate over the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is likely over for the foreseeable future.

For the past few weeks, Republicans have been furiously negotiating among themselves to develop a “compromise” between conservative and moderate Republicans on immigration. Last week, they failed — by a long shot: The bill, which was fairly conservative in policy, lost the support of every single Democrat and 112 Republicans.