Key Takeaways
- Oversight agencies (agencies decimated by the second Trump administration in 2025) played a key role in exposing the failures of family separation.
- The DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties was inundated with complaints from separated families.
- Congressional offices helped bring to light the harm suffered by separated families and helped parents reconnect with their children.
Scrutiny from other sectors of the federal government played a crucial role in exposing family separations. Government oversight agencies recorded grievances of separated families and launched investigations into the government’s actions implementing the separations, which corroborated the stories of thousands of parents who had been separated from their children.
Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle repeatedly sought to hold the Department of Homeland Security accountable both during and after the zero-tolerance policy. Their bipartisan efforts led to improved inter-agency communication protocols at DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services. Congressional offices often found themselves serving as liaisons between immigration enforcement agencies and parents looking for their children.
The work of oversight agencies and congressional offices was largely investigatory. It alone could not prevent or end family separation. However, the inquiries helped shine a light on what the administration was doing and how it was responding to this crisis. Public outrage and the oversight levers of government combined to put pressure on DHS to repair the damage caused by the agency’s implementation of family separation.
Oversight Agencies
Oversight agencies like the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and DHS’s own watchdog agencies like the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) helped document stories of people affected by the zero-tolerance policy and expose agencies’ wrongdoings.
For example, as part of its investigation into CBP’s role in family separations, the GAO asked the agency in April 2018 how it had prepared for the zero-tolerance policy and whether it knew of prior family separation programs. On October 9, 2018, the GAO published a report finding that government agencies failed to adequately plan for the categorical separation of families. Records show how the GAO got CBP’s input on a draft before the report was published.
Similarly, the DHS Office of the Inspector General also investigated the department’s response to the crisis. On June 29, 2018, the OIG requested 26 pieces of data about children who had been separated from their parents and asked agency officials for an answer by July 6. But DHS emails in response to this request show that the agency struggled to provide OIG with the correct information and could not meet OIG’s timeline.
In October 2018, OIG requested information from Customs and Border Patrol about its findings that a child had been detained for 25 days, far beyond the 72-hour period allowed by TVPRA. While CBP could not find a child who had been in custody for 25 days, it found two children who had been detained for nearly that long, though both had been held with their respective parents.
These oversight agencies also became repositories for complaints and stories, compiling crucial first-hand accounts of separated families. Many complaints were filed by nonprofit organizations, including the Council. One concerned a child who was deaf and mute, was separated from his father around April 25, 2018, and whose detention facility failed to address his special needs.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) maintained records of complaints filed by parents separated from their children. Records show that in the summer of 2018, CRCL became “inundated” with over 1,000 grievances regarding family separation. As staff members struggled to keep up with the high volume, CRCL had to update its website to publicize alternative ways to file complaints.
Agency logs describing the plight of parents seeking information about their children are among the FOIA records obtained. The logs of complaints filed by separated families are available here:
- CRCL Log from 2017 and 2018
- CRCL Log from 2017 and 2018
- CRCL Log from 2018 and 2019
- Logs of complaints referred to CRCL from HHS ORR and other shelters about separated families from 2017 and 2018
As part of CRCL’s investigation, the agency sent DHS and ICE a memo with recommendations to address the “lack of clear, cohesive, comprehensive, and readily accessible policies and procedures covering family separation.” To address this issue, members of Congress played a key role in the development of the Joint Concept of Operations (JCO), finalized on July 31, 2018. The JOC tasked OIG with receiving migrants’ reports of abuse.
Congressional Oversight
Even before DHS admitted to systemically separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border, stories of family separation had reached members of Congress. In an email on November 20, 2017, House Appropriations Committee staff raised concerns to DHS, requesting information about a case highlighted in the media of a man who said immigration agents took his infant son and would not tell him where the boy was. At the time, DHS justified the practice on grounds that it wanted to protect children from men who were not family.
However, a November 29, 2017, memo indicates that the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector had a family unit initiative policy to prosecute “all amenable subjects . . . to deter first time and/or repeat offenders,” which included family units. Far from focusing only on men smuggling unrelated children, CBP’s own records show that this pilot program separated 281 family units.
The Congressional Black Caucus wrote a letter to DHS on March 20, 2018, expressing concerns about family separation. ICE responded on April 23, 2018, denying that the agency had a “broad policy of removal” and explaining that ICE made the determinations on a case-by-case basis to protect children from smugglers. The history of transparency efforts led by the Congressional Black Caucus can be seen here.
And, DHS Secretary Nielsen assured the House Appropriations Committee on April 11, 2018, that DHS standard procedure was to keep a family together in every case as long as operationally possible. But James McCament, then the DHS deputy undersecretary for strategy, policy and plans, confirmed during a Senate hearing that approximately 700 children had been taken from their parents since October 2017.
Through inquiries and hearings on the issue, Congress began to unravel the DHS claim that it did not have a policy of separating families. Once this came to light, congressional leaders from both parties pressed DHS about the policy’s impact. An email chain from April 19, 2018, shows that the House Committee on Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee requested information about separated children.
Ranking member Bennie Thompson asked then CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan for the number of children separated, their ages, and how long they were detained, along with other information about their separation.
Congressional leaders also worked to expose the practice of family separation to the public. Sen. Jeff Merkley visited the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center on June 3, 2018. The summary from an agency official stated that Sen. Merkley toured the facility for one hour and fifteen minutes and asked when the agency began the practice of separating families. The email suggests that Border Patrol in El Paso began separating “all” families in the summer of 2017, and that officers in McAllen had begun separating “all families amenable to prosecution in RGV” in April 2018. The agency told Sen. Merkley that media was not allowed into the processing center, but the senator held a press briefing and posted on “Facebook Live” after his tour.
The email exchange also shows how CBP officials viewed this visit. Upon hearing that Sen. Merkley had commented that the situation was different from what had been reported in the press, Border Patrol official Carla Provost said, “And these are the leaders of our nation,” to which an undisclosed sender replied “Sigh…” Sen. Merkley, however, was raising serious concerns about whether the CBP officer’s description of the separation process was accurate given the accounts of separated families in the press at that time and even what the DHS Secretary had said about when family separations began.
PROVOST, CARLA
And these are the leaders of our nation.
REDACTED
Sigh…
Sen. Merkley led another delegation of congressional leaders and staff on tours of different processing sites on June 17, 2018. During this trip, the delegation met a mother who had been separated from her child two days prior and did not know where or how the child was. The congressional members shared this story with protesters and media gathered outside the detention facility to raise awareness of the issue.
Further examples of congressional leaders bearing witness to the plight of migrant parents separated from their children include:
- Rep. Nadler reached out to CBP to get the American Academy of Pediatrics and UNICEF access to detention centers. The organizations had earlier requested access but had been denied.
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren toured the Port Isabel facility on June 24, 2018, the day after DHS issued a press release stating that the U.S. government “knows the location of all children in its custody and is working to reunite them with their families.”
- During a visit to CBP facilities by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, Pete Ladowicz, from CBP’s Office of Congressional Affairs, told her that the ZTP and the asylum process were “two different paths which did not intersect.” As illustrated by the plaintiff in the Ms. L v. ICE litigation, parents whose children were taken from them often withdrew their asylum applications due to confusion and despair.
Congressional leaders also sought accountability as to reunifications and often served as key contacts for parents trying to reunite with their children.
The calls for information about how reunification was going came from Democrats and Republicans alike. Sen. Ron Johnson’s staff requested daily updates from ICE on the number of children reunified with their parents between June 30 and July 5, 2018, but ICE often replied that they did not have any updates. A July 10, 2018, email chain between then DHS Deputy Chief of Staff Chad Wolf and other agency staffers shows that DHS scrambled but failed to get answers to Sen. Johnson, then the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The DHS secretary had a call with Sen. Johnson, which Wolf described the next day as not going “all that well.” Wolf pressed DHS staff to provide statistics on family reunifications.
Additionally, a briefing memo for a call between DHS officials and Sen. Susan Collins describes the senator as being “very interested” in the status of family reunification. Agency talking points claimed that CBP had reunited 500 children separated under the zero-tolerance policy, but the talking points also showed that some children would remain separated.
HHS wrote to Rep. Elijah Cummings on July 11, 2018, to address his concerns about the agency’s reunification efforts. HHS assured Rep. Cummings that the agency “knows the location of all children in its care,” and said that HHS was facilitating communication between parents and children. A 2019 report by the HHS OIG showed that, in fact, HHS could not precisely report on the number of children separated or where these children were placed, due to the informal tracking systems implemented prior to June 26, 2018. This led Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, then chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, to issue a statement saying the Trump administration had “misled” the American people.
Members of Congress also succeeded in helping parents find their children. Rep. Nanette Barragan visited the Otay Mesa detention facility in California, where she met a woman who had been separated from her son. The son was being held in a shelter in New York, and had talked to his mother only once in two months. Congresswoman Barragan’s staff contacted ICE on June 22, 2018. That same day, ICE tracked down the director of the facility where the boy was being held and arranged a telephone call between mother and son, as well as “a few” weekly calls. Further, staff for Rep. Jared Polis wrote to ICE on June 28, 2018, to help reunify families separated after the Ms. L settlement agreement, which mandated family reunification.
Members of Congress pressured DHS and HHS to finalize a Joint Concept of Operations (JCO) to protect children transferred from DHS to HHS custody. The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs published an investigation on agencies handling of issues related to unaccompanied minors, which detailed the lack of urgency on the part of DHS officials and the resistance faced by congressional leaders in developing a Joint Concept of Operations (JCO) to, in part, improve the safety of unaccompanied children. The report notes that the JCO was published 17 months after the agency’s own deadline. A Briefing Book prepared for the DHS secretary on January 26, 2018, for a call with Sen. Claire McCaskill shows the agency’s recalcitrance at developing the JCO, stating that the JCO would not resolve “loopholes” on existing issues with regards to unaccompanied minors and that the JCO was “not a substitute for legislative action.”
When the first Trump administration implemented family separation—one of its most egregious and harmful policies—Congress stepped up its investigatory role and provided an important check on the executive branch. Congressional leaders did not abdicate their oversight roles. Instead, they pressured the administration to provide information about the policy and how it planned to repair the chaos it had created.
Oversight agencies — undermined and dismantled early on during the second Trump administration—also demanded answers and highlighted deficiencies in the government’s brutal plan.
Together they fueled a transparency apparatus that proved critical to dismantling the zero-tolerance policy, reuniting children with their parents, and keeping a check on governmental abuse of power.
