Key oversight documents from federal agencies
- Report of the DHS Advisory Committee on Family Residential Centers, September 2016.
- Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, HHS OIG: Many Children Separated from Parents, Guardians Before Ms. L. v. Ice Court Order and Some Separations Continue, January 2019.
- Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, September 2019.
- Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, DHS Lacked Technology Needed to Successfully Account for Separated Migrant Families, November 2019.
- Government Accountability Office, Southwest Border: Actions Needed to Improve DHS Processing of Families and Coordination between DHS and HHS.
- Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Review of the Department of Justice’s Planning and Implementation of Its Zero Tolerance Policy and Its Coordination with the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, January 2021.
Key NGO Reports
- Amnesty International, Catastrophic immigration policies resulted in more family separations than previously disclosed, October 2018.
- National Immigrant Justice Center, The Biden Administration Routinely Separates Immigrant Families, January 2022.
- Human Rights Watch, Texas Civil Rights Project, The Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School, “We Need to Take Away Children”: Zero Accountability Six Years after “Zero Tolerance.”
- Key documents in the Ms. L v. ICE litigation are available from the ACLU website.
Reports on Family Separation
- Caitlin Dickerson, “The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy,” The Atlantic, August 7, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/trump-administration-family-separation-policy-immigration/670604/.
- Human Rights Watch, “We Need to Take Away Children, Zero Accountability Six Years After ‘Zero Tolerance,’” December 16, 2024, https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/16/we-need-take-away-children/zero-accountability-six-years-after-zero-tolerance.
- Sarah J. Diaz and Jenny Lee, “Zero Tolerance Atrocity Crimes Against Migrant Children and Families in the United States: An Accountability Framework for Family Separation,” Center for the Human Rights of Children at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, 2022
Other FOIAs Filed and Lawsuits
- June 25, 2018: National Immigration Law Center: https://www.nilc.org/press/nilc-files-foia-asking-16-government-agencies-to-reveal-how-they-plan-to-reunify-families/.
- September 25, 2018: The Project on Government Oversight: https://www.pogo.org/post/new-documents-show-nielsen-signed-off-on-family-separation-policy.
- August 8, 2018: Attorney General Beccera: https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-becerra-submits-foia-request-trump-administration-owes-us.
- June 24, 2020: American Oversight: https://americanoversight.org/american-oversight-sues-ice-for-family-separation-memos/.
