The Best American Magazine Writing 2023, page 35
The influx of anguished parents into government detention centers across the country turned the facilities into pressure cookers, where detainees and correctional workers alike were on edge. Even during the busiest season at the border, an individual U.S. Marshals facility would typically deal with only a few dozen daily intakes. Now the facilities were suddenly being asked to find housing for hundreds of new detainees every day.
Marshal supervisors ordered that temporary, stackable overflow beds be crammed into dorms so that the separated parents had a place to sleep. “Our manpower has been completely depleted,” a marshal in the Southern District of California wrote in an email to staff in mid-May. “We are in ‘crisis mode,’ ‘critical mass’ ‘DEFCON 1’ or however you want to phrase it.”
On top of this, the marshals were fielding urgent calls from shelter staff working under the Office of Refugee Resettlement who were improvising any method they could to track down the parents of separated children, to satisfy requirements that children in federal custody be given the chance to speak with their family members or sponsors twice a week. According to the DOJ’s inspector general, some of the marshals had never heard of ORR and had to research it on the internet. Many marshals declined to make parents available for the calls because the marshals were too busy or said they were not required to do so.
Rich Hunter, the high-ranking marshals official in Texas who had anticipated such chaos, traveled from his office in Houston to the federal court in McAllen to try to troubleshoot problems. He arrived to find the street outside the courthouse lined with charter buses that had been procured at the last minute to transport the surge of separated parents to court. Because the court didn’t have enough cellblocks, parents had to sit for hours inside the parked buses until it was their turn to be called before the judge. The courtroom itself resembled a packed concert venue; the court reporter “was crammed in the corner,” Hunter told me. “The prosecutors are standing up over by the jury box that had additional defendants in it. It was just not a picture of a federal courtroom that I had ever seen before.”
As a thirty-year veteran of the agency, Hunter said his first concern was safety. But he also found the scene emotionally disturbing. “I remember their faces,” Hunter said. “You deal with this issue long enough, you realize that the overwhelming majority of people are not cartel members.… You would hear them asking their defense attorneys, asking anybody, for information [about their kids]. As a dad, as a person, it would take a toll on you because you can imagine what that was like.”
He recalled parents struggling to use the court’s interpretation headphones. “A lot of them had not seen technology like that before ever in their life, so they’re put on wrong,” he said. “And then the look on their faces of What am I going through?”
Neris González, a Salvadoran consular employee charged with protecting the rights of migrants from her country in U.S. custody, was stationed at a CBP processing center in McAllen when she read about Zero Tolerance. “In my little mind,” she told me, “I thought they were going to separate the families” by putting parents in one cell and children in another. “I never thought they would actually take away the children.”
But when she walked into the processing center for the first time after Zero Tolerance was implemented, she saw a sea of children and parents, screaming, reaching for each other, and fighting the Border Patrol agents who were pulling them apart. Children were clinging to whatever part of their parents they could hold on to—arms, shirts, pant legs. “Finally the agent would pull hard and take away the child,” she said. “It was horrible. These weren’t some little animals that they were wrestling over; they were human children.”
Other than Wesley Farris, the Border Patrol officer who spoke to Frontline, González appears to be the only official to have gone on the record to describe the separations themselves. (I asked members of the Biden administration to provide Border Patrol officials who’d participated in Zero Tolerance for an interview. I was told that no one would agree to speak with me.) González said the facility was effectively locked down during Zero Tolerance; almost no one outside Border Patrol and ICE was allowed in, whereas in the past, journalists, representatives from faith-based organizations, and human-rights lawyers had sometimes been given access. “It wasn’t right,” she said. “They didn’t want anyone to expose what they were doing.”
González asked a Border Patrol agent what was going on. “He said that ICE and BP were under orders from Trump, and he said to separate the kids from their parents—as in, completely separate.” Desperate scenes played out everywhere. Border Patrol agents who were yanking children away asked González to help them prevent fights. In several instances, she placed herself between parents and agents, trying to calm the families down. González said that at the height of Zero Tolerance, about 300 children were separated each day at her facility and crammed into caged enclosures. She spent most of her time inside the enclosures, helping children call their relatives. Sometimes the younger children didn’t seem to fully understand what was going on.
González says the sound in the facility was chilling—the children’s cries formed an ear-piercing, whistling wind. The sound worsened when it came time for her to leave at the end of the day. “They grabbed me, squeezed me, hugged me so that I couldn’t leave.”
For her, the scene triggered flashbacks to the war in El Salvador, where thousands of children were disappeared and the sound of their wailing mothers was hard to escape.
While zero tolerance was in effect, Kirstjen Nielsen defended it before Congress and in the media using the same clinical language that had been deployed to convince her that the policy was reasonable. She and her team argued that some of the separated families were actually part of trafficking schemes in which children were either kidnapped or paired with random adults in order to give both parties free passage into the United States. (Several Trump-administration officials stipulated that they would talk to me for this article only if I agreed to mention “false families” in my story. Instances of such false families do exist, but subsequent investigations into family separation have not yielded many examples. In the federal class-action lawsuit over family separation, the government indicated that it suspected only a small number of false families existed, and Michelle Brané, who is heading up the Biden administration’s Family Reunification Task Force, recently told me the group had not found a single false-family trafficking case.)
Another argument Nielsen made is still popular today among veterans of the Trump administration: that separating migrant children from their parents for the purposes of prosecution was no different from what happens in American criminal proceedings every day. “If an American parent is pulled over for a DUI and their child is in the back seat,” this argument goes, “the child doesn’t go to jail with them.”
But as U.S. attorneys—who are arguably the highest authorities on this subject—came to understand what was happening to families after separated parents left the courtroom, they wholly disagreed with this assessment. American parents who are arrested in the United States typically have access to a system for getting their children back when they are released from custody. According to a source, John Bash, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in El Paso, recently testified in federal court that he was horrified to discover in June 2018 that in the few days it took his office to finish prosecuting parents, their children were already being shipped as far away as New York, with no system in place for reuniting them. “It was like, ‘You’re telling me the kid is nowhere to be found and they’re in some other state?!’ ” Bash reportedly said.
Bash and other U.S. attorneys were flabbergasted by the ineptitude of those who had created the policy. “I remember thinking, Why doesn’t someone just have an Excel file?” Bash reportedly said. “I mean, it’s a large population in human cost and human terms, but it’s not a large population in terms of data management. We’re talking about a few thousand families. You can have all that on one spreadsheet with the names of the people, where the kid’s going. It was just insane. I remember being told that there was going to be a phone number parents could call and know where their kids were. And I told a public defender that and she was like, ‘This phone number doesn’t work, one. And two, most parents don’t have access to phones where they’re being held, or they have to pay for the use of the pay phone. So that doesn’t work.’ ”
Bash asked the Justice Department to launch an investigation into why parents and children were not being reunited expeditiously, still not fully understanding his agency’s role in the scheme. He created a list of questions that he wanted answered, which were shared with Gene Hamilton, Rod Rosenstein, and others at DOJ: “What technology could be used to ensure that parents don’t lose track of children?”; “Is it true that they are often pulled apart physically?”; “Why doesn’t HHS return the child to the parent as soon as the parent is out of the criminal-justice system, on the view that at that point the child is no longer an ‘unaccompanied minor’?” Rosenstein responded that the U.S. attorneys should try to find out what was going on themselves. The attorneys sent the questions to their Border Patrol counterparts, but their inquiries were ignored. “DHS just sort of shut down their communication channels to us,” Ryan Patrick, the U.S. attorney in South Texas, told me. “Emails would go either unanswered, calls would go unreturned, or ‘We’re not answering that question right now.’ ”
Recently disclosed internal emails from that time help explain what Bash, Patrick, and the other U.S. attorneys couldn’t figure out—why the plan for reunifying families was faulty to the point of negligence. Inside DHS, officials were working to prevent reunifications from happening.
Within days of the start of Zero Tolerance, Matt Albence, one of Tom Homan’s deputies at ICE, expressed concern that if the parents’ prosecutions happened too swiftly, their children would still be waiting to be picked up by HHS in Border Patrol stations, making family reunification possible. He saw this as a bad thing. When Albence received reports that reunifications had occurred in several Border Patrol sectors, he immediately sought to block the practice from continuing, contacting at least one sector directly while also asking his superiors—Tom Homan, Ron Vitiello, and Kevin McAleenan—for help. “We can’t have this,” he wrote to colleagues, underscoring in a second note that reunification “obviously undermines the entire effort” behind Zero Tolerance and would make DHS “look completely ridiculous.” Albence and others proposed “solutions” such as placing parents whose prosecutions were especially speedy into ICE custody or in “an alternate temporary holding facility” other than the Border Patrol station where their children were being held. This appears to have happened in some cases.
Albence also suggested that the Border Patrol deliver separated children to HHS “at an accelerated pace,” instead of waiting for federal contractors to pick them up, to minimize the chance that they would be returned to their parents. “Confirm that the expectation is that we are NOT to reunite the families and release” them, Albence wrote. (Albence declined to comment for this article.)
DHS headquarters sent out an email on May 25 saying that—when it was possible—the agency had no choice but to reunify children with parents whose criminal sentences were complete. The responses made clear that this was new information and not part of the original plan. Mere prosecution was “not exactly a consequence we had in mind,” wrote Sandi Goldhamer, a longtime agent and the partner of Carla Provost, the head of the Border Patrol at the time.
Still unaware that DHS officials were working to keep parents and children apart, both Bash and Patrick started to devise strategies wherein parents could be prosecuted on misdemeanor charges, satisfying their orders from Sessions, but still get their children back quickly: Patrick developed a plan to transfer some detainees to less burdened courts in his district, farther away from the border, so that they could be prosecuted faster. Bash hashed out another plan to conduct prosecutions via video teleconference, so families would not have to be separated in the first place. Neither idea ever got off the ground.
Bash recently reviewed the exchanges between Albence and others at DHS, which were made public this past June as part of the court case for which Bash was deposed. He was outraged. In no place in the American criminal-justice system, he reportedly testified, would it be considered either ethically or legally permissible to keep children from their parents for punitive purposes after their legal process is completed. “We wouldn’t do that to a murderer,” much less a parent facing misdemeanor charges as a result of their attempt to claim asylum, Bash reportedly said.
In federal court cases, several parents whose children were taken away allege being taunted by agents who said “Happy Mother’s Day!” And parents say they were told that their children would be put up for adoption or that they would never see them again. Others recount being threatened or ignored when they asked where their children were. Perhaps to avoid physical altercations, some agents began deceiving families in order to lure them apart or pulling children out of holding cells while they and their parents were asleep. Bash reported to DOJ headquarters that two plaintiffs in his district said they had been told their children were being taken to have baths and then never saw them again.
HHS child-care facilities evolved rapidly to meet the new demands of their work. Bethany Christian Services, which had previously cared mostly for children twelve and older, had to open a makeshift preschool to accommodate the influx of separated children who were not yet potty-trained and who needed to take naps. Bethany’s teachers stopped trying to give traditional lessons, resorting instead to playing soothing movies throughout the day, in hopes of preventing a domino effect where one child’s emotional outburst could quickly lead to an entire wailing classroom.
“What it demonstrated was that we do not, in fact, want your tired and poor and huddled masses,” Hannah Orozco, a supervisor at Bethany, told me. “We want to deter you from coming here, and we were the face to the children of that message.”
When the entire HHS shelter system reached capacity, Bethany resisted pleas to expand its program, which consists mostly of foster homes and a few small shelters housing only up to thirty-six kids at a time, to ensure that each child still received individualized care. But other companies eagerly accepted multi-million-dollar government contracts, housing children in huge facilities such as a former Walmart, which was at one point used to detain more than 1,000 children.
Large-scale institutions had long since been eliminated from the domestic child-welfare system because they were found to be traumatizing and unsafe. Indeed, many such facilities for immigrant children have faced significant allegations of physical and sexual abuse, and some have bypassed federal background-check requirements to weed out predators. But they are where most separated children ended up, in part because the lack of advance planning left no other option.
Some of the social workers under contract with HHS wrestled with the ethical dilemma presented by Zero Tolerance, unsure if they were helping separated children by continuing to go to work each day or if they were enabling the system that had taken them away from their parents in the first place. In mid-June, Antar Davidson quit his job at a large shelter in Arizona, calling himself a “conscientious objector” to Zero Tolerance. Children at the shelter had been “running up and down the halls, screaming, crying for their mom, throwing chairs,” he told MSNBC, which led to a “harder, more authoritarian approach by the staff in attempting to deal with it.”
The public did not know what to make of HHS’s role in the situation either. Reporters and protesters showed up outside HHS child-care facilities, whose addresses are typically tightly guarded because of the vulnerability of their clients. Staff put Halloween masks on the children or shielded their faces when they were outside to protect them from being photographed. A Bethany caseworker in Michigan was spit on at a gas station and accused of kidnapping.
Even high-ranking Trump-administration officials were deeply confused. For weeks, the White House communications team asked the Justice Department to put forward lawyers who could explain the policy to the media, but no one at DOJ headquarters wanted to do it. May Davis, then the deputy White House policy coordinator, tried to explain the situation to a group of senior staff, including Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, who was being questioned by reporters about the policy. But Davis inadvertently added confusion by suggesting that parents and children were being swiftly reunited. “I did a few diagrams of what I thought was happening,” Davis told me. “Of course, what I thought was happening was ‘separate for two to three days while they go get time served from a judge and then come back.’ ”
At one point, Claire Grady, Nielsen’s deputy, emailed Rod Rosenstein at the Justice Department to ask for help: HHS had run out of space, so more than one hundred young children had been stuck for several days in Border Patrol holding cells. Rosenstein, who had previously admonished John Bash’s office for declining to prosecute parents of very young children (a charge Rosenstein disputed to the DOJ inspector general, though it was explicitly documented), responded by asking if the seventy-two-hour time limit on when children must be transferred over to HHS for their safety could simply be changed. Grady and Gene Hamilton had to explain to Rosenstein that the limit was nonnegotiable; it had long been enshrined in law. The email chain eventually made it to Jeff Sessions, who replied unhelpfully: “If things are not moving at any DOJ agency don’t hesitate to report it to me, and Rod or I may need to call them. We are in post 9/11 mode. All is asap.”
Meanwhile, the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties was being overrun with pleas for help from separated parents looking for their children. The requests tended to be fielded by entry-level contract employees. Each time an employee started processing a new complaint, a mug shot of the child taken by the Border Patrol appeared on their computer screen. In some photos, a very young child appeared unaware of what was about to happen—smiling as if on school-picture day. Photographs of older children, who seemed to have a better understanding of what was going on, showed some in tears or still screaming. Young staffers in the office started breaking down at their desks.
