The American Immigration Council does not endorse or oppose candidates for elected office. We aim to provide analysis regarding the implications of the election on the U.S. immigration system.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a special report this week revealing its findings following an investigation into the Trump administration’s contentious family separation policy.
The OIG’s primary finding is that DHS was “not fully prepared to implement the Zero Tolerance Policy.”
Further, the OIG found that DHS was not prepared to “deal with certain effects” of the policy, an ominous euphemism for the countless horrors that unfolded as a result of Zero Tolerance: hundreds of parents deported back to possible harm without their children following the separations, hundreds of migrant children who remain alone to this day in government custody, and the extensive and permanent psychological trauma suffered by children and parents alike.
The report confirmed the countless concerns shared by members of Congress, immigration advocates, medical and mental health professionals, and the legal community and highlighted the sheer incompetence of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in its implementation and subsequent cleanup of the policy.
The report also confirms what we already knew – that the administration was lying when it asserted that a policy of family separation never existed. In a June 2018 press conference, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen stated unequivocally: “We do not have a policy separating families at the border. Period.” However, the OIG’s report detailing the problems with the policy family separation demonstrate that the policy did in fact exist.
The OIG notes that it requested all data from DHS on family separation after April 19, 2018, a date selected because Border Patrol officials “stated that they could not feasibly identify children who were separated before that date.” Again, this is a clear indication that DHS had no system in place to track the families it was separating and leaving one to wonder how many children remain separated from their parents due to the government’s utter incompetence.
Perhaps most chilling was the OIG’s observations regarding Border Patrol’s inability to handle non-verbal children – babies and toddlers, leading one to wonder whether some such children were lost in the confusion after being separated from their parents.
“Border Patrol does not provide pre-verbal children with wrist bracelets or other means of identification, nor does Border Patrol fingerprint or photograph most children during processing to ensure that they can be easily linked with the proper file.”
The OIG also reports that hundreds of separated children were held in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody longer than the permissible 72 hours: about 27 percent of separated children in the Rio Grande Valley sector and about 23 percent of separated children in the El Paso sector were detained in CBP holding cells for over five days. One child was detained in CBP custody for 25 days.
Photo by Customs and Border Protection.
