Top health official warned feds against family separations

A senior government health official had warned the Trump administration against any policy that would lead to immigrant family separations after crossing the border illegally, and was assured no such plan was in the works — only to see the Justice Department announce the zero-tolerance policy anyway.

Commander Jonathan D. White, the public health service officer in charge of reuniting separated children with their parents, said there had been discussions for months over the possibility of a stiffer border policy within government circles.

He said he’d sent a clear warning that the government wasn’t capable of handling the fallout of a policy that would separate immigrant parents from their children at the border, and was told it wouldn’t happen.

“I did raise it,” Commander White told a Senate panel probing the family separations. “The answer received is that family separation is not a policy. That there was no policy that would result in family separation.”

But the government did move forward with such a policy in early April, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a zero-tolerance approach to border jumpers, saying they would now be prosecuted under longstanding criminal law, in addition to facing deportation under the regular immigration law.

Since there are no family facilities in federal jails, parents who were charged had to be separated from children, who were then deemed “unaccompanied” and sent to the federal Health Department, where they were housed in dorms, fed three meals and snacks each day and given access to soccer fields, school lessons, trips to the movies and amusement parks, and hefty cable television packages so they could watch their favorite sports teams from their home countries.

Government officials say they always planned to reunite the children once the parents were to be deported — but a federal judge stepped in, ruled the separations unconstitutional, and demanded they all be reunified immediately.

That set off a month-long scramble as the government had to quickly try to process more than 2,500 cases, seeking to reconnect children with people who claimed to be their parents.

Most were reconnected but some 559 children remained separated as of Tuesday.

Officials said most of those children’s parents were either released into the U.S. and disappeared, or were deported and signaled they wanted to leave their children in the U.S. on the chance they could gain a legal foothold here, or disappear into the shadows.

Other parents from that group have criminal records, including rape and murder, that make them unfit to take custody of their children. And then some smaller number of adults lied about their relationship and turned out not to be parents of the children they claimed, Commander White said.

Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee demanded faster action to track down the deported and released parents, and also questioned whether the government was being truthful about the criminal records that disqualified some parents.

Sens. Richard Durbin and Kamala Harris, both Democrats, said Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen should be ousted over the way the zero-tolerance policy was carried out.

Ms. Harris pushed Commander White to set a deadline for reunifying the remaining children, but he declined, saying it will be up to the courts to impose a timeline.

For their part Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials testified that they’ve had to reinstitute a catch-and-release policy for immigrant families after several court orders limiting the amount of time they can hold migrant children. The families are now quickly released into the interior of the U.S.

The officials said that’s created an incentive for immigrant adults to come to the border with children — sometimes unrelated to them — to portray themselves as families and take advantage of the situation.

Migrants who are held in detention, though, can be deported with more speed and certainty.

“Give us the authority to hold the family as a family unit during the pendency of their immigration hearing,” said Matthew Albence, ICE’s top deportation official, asked lawmakers.

Republicans seemed amenable, but Democrats resisted, pushing instead for alternatives to detention such as ankle monitors.

Mr. Albence said that while those methods get people to show up for court hearings, they are “woefully unsuccessful” in actually making sure people can be found when it’s time to deport them.

He said the government spends an average of $1,600 for each deportation of someone who was detained, but spends $75,000 per deportee for those released on alternatives such as ankle monitoring.

“We haven’t accomplished anything except expend a lot of taxpayer money,” he said.