In the spring and summer of 2018, the first Trump administration sought to deter migrants from coming to the United States through the cruel practice of separating children from their parents. To do this, they implemented the zero-tolerance policy, which aimed to prosecute all adults who crossed the southern border without inspection. If a family was apprehended, the parents were taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security, while their children were taken into custody by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In many cases, these kids were sent to shelters thousands of miles away from their parents, without a way to contact them. Later, the government struggled to reunite families, in part because there was no centralized database of where the children had been sent or who their parents were. Years later, some of the nearly 3,000 children taken by the government during the zero-tolerance period had still not been reunited with their parents.
The American Immigration Council and partners filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for records to better understand how the government implemented these separations. After the Council sued to obtain these records, the government began producing them on a monthly basis. In 2020, the Council published a tranche of documents highlighting the harms and trauma to children caused by the separations. After years of continuing litigation, the Council received tens of thousands of additional pages from government documents about this policy.
This site showcases a new subset of the records obtained. It reveals how journalists, attorneys and members of Congress fought to expose this horrific policy and hold the government accountable for the pain and havoc it created. Visitors to this site can review never-before-published government records, read analysis by the Council, and hear celebrated actors read first-person accounts by the journalists, attorneys and Congressmen who fought family separations on the front lines.
In This Report, You Can:
- Review data and analyses regarding family separations in 2017 and 2018 (some family separations occurred outside the official zero-tolerance policy);
- Track the government’s posture on whether publicity would incite fear and deter migrants from crossing the border;
- See how flawed record-keeping led to hundreds of children not being reunified with their parents;
- Get a sense of the lack of communication that existed among government agencies, impeding reunification efforts; and
- Read how congressional leaders sought accountability and transparency from the administration.
Introduction and Background
In trying to deter migrants from coming to the United States, the first Trump administration implemented one of the cruelest tactics of its tenure: family separation. The plan was to criminally prosecute adults who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without inspection—even if they were accompanied by their minor children, who by law must be given higher levels of protections. This “zero-tolerance policy,” as it became known, resulted in thousands of children being torn away from their relatives. To this day, many still have yet to be reunited with their families.
The Trump administration ended the zero-tolerance policy after just six and a half weeks, thanks in part to the actions of journalists, legal advocates, and representatives from other branches of government. The purpose of this new analysis—produced after years of litigating public records requests—is to look at the interventions that contributed to the end, at least officially, of this shameful policy. The documents featured here serve as a stark reminder of the government’s actions during the time, and in the aftermath, of family separation. They also show how entities opposed one of the most egregious anti-migration policies of the first Trump administration.
Government Records Show that Journalists, Advocates, and other Government Representatives Sought Transparency and Accountability
This chronicle is based on government documents and correspondence provided in response to the Council and our partners’ Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As such, the records contain limited information about the personal experiences of those who were affected, such as separated children and parents; attorneys and social workers; journalist witnesses; and impacted communities. These key stakeholders—immigration and children’s advocacy organizations and others— sought transparency and accountability. Journalists published photos and stories on the plight of separated families. A wave of public outcry forced Congressional leaders to demand answers from government agencies. On June 20, 2018, President Trump signed an executive order mandating the end to categorical family separation, a little over six weeks after it had begun.
Documents previously published by the Council and other organizations, demonstrated how poorly organized, harmful, and cruel the Trump administration’s efforts were in carrying out the family separations. These previously released resources, along with the government documents released here, show how this horrific policy was brought into the public eye.
While it remains imperative to share the personal stories of people affected by the family separation policy, we can nonetheless learn a great deal about the crisis through a careful review of government records. The documents reviewed for this analysis allow the public to see how the administration’s decision-making process was affected by outside levers, and to compare the administration’s public comments against internal agency correspondence.
The Legal Framework for Family Separation
Under other recent administrations, federal prosecutors had exercised discretion, typically choosing not to prosecute parents for uninspected border crossings. This approach preserved prosecutorial resources and recognized that, due to U.S. laws protecting children, prosecuting adult relatives traveling with children would result in family separation.
The practice can be traced to the Flores Settlement Agreement of 1997, which among other things, required that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) release children from custody “without unnecessary delay” and hold them in the least-restrictive setting appropriate to their circumstances. This settlement was implemented because, in the 1980s, immigration authorities had often held unaccompanied children fleeing Central America in dangerous conditions, prompting litigation.
Additionally, Congress in 2000 passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), which requires DHS, including U.S. Border Patrol, to transfer unaccompanied children in its custody to the care of HHS within 72 hours absent exceptional circumstances.
In the early days of the first Trump administration, however, key officials were fixated on deterring families from crossing the southern border. To carry out this plan, they announced their intent to prosecute everyone who crossed the border without permission, “includ[ing] adults who [were] accompanying children,” saying that border crossers were “engage[d] in criminal activity.” Family separation was the intended consequence of this so-called zero-tolerance policy.
- On April 6, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions signed a memorandum encouraging prosecution of all noncitizens who entered the United States without authorization.
- On May 4, 2018, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen signed a memorandum requiring U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials to refer all cases of improper entry to the U.S. Department of Justice for criminal prosecution, including adults traveling with their minor children.
The Trump Administration criminally charged thousands of parents with misdemeanors for entering the United States without proper authorization, requiring prosecution of parents and directly causing family separation by treating parents and their children as unrelated. The goal was to achieve deterrence through en masse family separation.
By designating all adults, including those traveling with minor children, as subject to prosecution, the administration triggered a process by which children were immediately sent to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a subagency of HHS. The government took the position that because parents apprehended by Border Patrol were likely to go into criminal custody (even for a short period of time), they would become unavailable to care for the children. The children were then classified as unaccompanied for purposes of the TVPRA and sent to ORR custody, often thousands of miles away from where their parents were detained. The children were relocated even if their parents had spent only a few hours in criminal custody or were never actually prosecuted.
Hundreds of parents were rapidly removed from the United States, many after being sentenced to time served, without being reunited with their children.
The Council’s 2020 analysis of government records makes clear the trauma separated children faced. One ORR report, for example, tells the story of a crying 5-year old boy who would not speak to anyone; another describes a 12-year old boy who developed suicidal ideations.
This new analysis shows the woeful inadequacy of the Trump administration’s efforts to reunify families after the zero-tolerance policy ended. Records in this tranche show that the agencies did not have technology systems in place to properly track the locations of separated family members.
Parents had to follow cumbersome processes to reunify with their children. Under the Trump administration, agencies were adamant that parents who had already been removed from the United States could not re-enter the country to reunite with their children (though a limited number of parents were eventually paroled into the United States for this purpose). Furthermore, U.S. agencies had to coordinate with embassies and consulates in the families’ home countries to secure travel documents and arrange for parents to reunite with their children at an airport.
The Ms. L case, filed in 2018 by the ACLU on behalf of a separated mother, helped establish significant measures to ensure family reunification, including following a 2023 settlement agreement.
FOIA records obtained by the Council do not include documents from the Biden administration, which implemented efforts to reunite families who had been intentionally separated.
In 2020, two years after the official end of the family separation policy, hundreds of the 4,368 children the U.S. government identified as taken from their parents remained separated.
To delve deeper into the harm caused by the zero-tolerance policy, visit these resources:
- American Immigration Council’s Government Documents on Family Separation.
- Legal filings on C.M. v. U.S., a case filed by several organizations, including the Council, on behalf of a separated family.
- Article published by Caitlin Dickerson in The Atlantic on family separation.
