Wall Street Journal
By Laura Meckler and Alicia A. Caldwell
May 08, 2018
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Tuesday defended a new Trump administration plan that will separate families arriving at the nation’s southwest border, and Democrats attacked the plan as putting children at risk and contrary to American values.
Ms. Nielsen told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that her department would refer all illegal border crossers for prosecution, including parents, which means separating them from their children, who can’t be jailed.
“We are a country of laws,” she said.
Crossing the border without authorization is a misdemeanor for a first offense and a felony for those previously deported, but in the past, all crossers haven’t been referred for criminal prosecution.
The policy, announced on Monday, came under sharp attack from Democrats, as well as immigrant advocates.
“No matter what you call it, the new policy is going to result in thousands of children, some of them infants, being forcibly separated from their families,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) said at the hearing. “My concern is not just that the administration is turning its back on immigrants. This administration is turning its back on what it means to be American.”
The new policy also faces a number of logistical hurdles, as it will increase demands on prosecutors, courts, detention facilities for adults and shelters for children.
Ms. Nielsen blamed the parents for choosing to cross the border illegally and said she was making a “plea” for families and others to come to the ports of entry if they want to request asylum.
“If you are fleeing and have a need to come to the United States, please come to the ports of entry,” she said. “If you have a legitimate claim and you come to a port of entry, you haven’t broken the law.”
Ms. Nielsen’s message was at odds with administration officials’ suggestion last month that migrants in a caravan from Central America were breaking the law. President Donald Trump repeatedly castigated their mission. Most, if not all, of them arrived at the official San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego and asked for asylum—using the process Ms. Nielsen recommended on Tuesday.
About 180 people from the caravan were eventually processed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. A DHS spokesperson said that all of the publicity around the caravan encouraged the migrants to go to the port of entry.
Prosecuting every adult border crosser is sure to swamp an already busy federal court system along the U.S. border with Mexico. The U.S. Border Patrol routinely refers tens of thousands of criminal cases, including for drug smuggling, to federal prosecutors.
During the 2017 budget year, prosecutors took on nearly 60,000 criminal cases. Charging every adult border crosser that year would have meant adding more than 161,000 cases, according to Border Patrol statistics of arrests at the Mexican border.
The Department of Homeland Security has money in its budget to jail about 40,000 people at any given time. That bed space is needed to house both people caught at the border, as well as immigrants arrested in the interior of the country.
The children removed from their parents will be treated as unaccompanied minors, which will have ripple effects on the already strained system for children. Since the start of this budget year, more than 26,000 unaccompanied children have been caught at the border. Nearly 5,000 other children have made their way to a port of entry on their own.
All of those children are placed in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency houses them in shelters or group homes until a sponsor, typically a relative, inside the U.S. can be located. Its system is already near capacity, with 87% of the 10,460 beds occupied, a spokesman said Tuesday.
Jennifer Podkul, director of policy for the advocacy group Kids in Need of Defense, said unaccompanied children are now spending as long as 45 day in the government’s care, up from an average of about 30 days about a year ago. She said changes in immigration policy and the broader crackdown appear to have made relatives in the U.S. more hesitant to step forward.
Separating the families also means that each person in the family will now have their own immigration case, a move that could grow the immigration court backlog “exponentially,” Ms. Podkul said. There are already nearly 700,000 cases pending in the immigration court system, and cases routinely take years to be resolved.
And separations, Ms. Podkul said, could last days or months, if not longer, if a parent remains in jail while their asylum case is heard.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.) said that research shows removing children from their parents hurts their long-term development and asked Ms. Nielsen if she had considered that. The secretary replied, “We are working with the community to understand the science.”
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