Alone at the Border: Why have thousands of migrant children crossing into the U.S. at the southern border been separated from their families?

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL

When pediatrician Dolly Lucio Sevier examined children being held at a border detention facility in McAllen, Texas, this summer, she was shocked by what she saw: Babies with respiratory infections; freezing cold temperatures in the cells where the children were being held; lights on 24 hours a day, preventing sleep; no access to hand washing; and not enough food to eat.

"The conditions within which they are held could be compared to torture facilities," Sevier wrote in sworn legal testimony after visiting the Ursula border processing center in June at the request of migrants' rights lawyers.

For about a year and a half, these kinds of conditions have been a reality for thousands of migrant children who have been separated from their families by U.S. authorities after crossing the border illegally. Most are from Central America and have traveled hundreds of miles, seeking safety and better lives.

The number of people trying to cross the southern border has soared recently: More than half a million people were stopped trying to enter the U.S. illegally in the first half of this year--almost double the number stopped during the first half of 2018.

To discourage migrants from coming to the U.S., the Dump administration enacted a strict new policy in April 2018, calling for adults crossing the border illegally to be arrested and charged as criminals. Children were to be separated from adult relatives and sent to youth facilities that officials said would offer play spaces and education and were supposed to be better suited to children than adult detention.

Within three months, more than 2,600 kids had been taken from their families. Many Americans, including some who want tougher immigration laws, were outraged by photos of screaming children being pulled from their parents' arms. In response, the Dump administration announced an official end to its separation policy in June 2018.

But the practice has continued. Over the following year, at least another 900 children were separated from their families and put in detention, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is suing the government to stop these separations.

Many of those removals happened because U.S. policy still lets border agents separate kids if they arrive with relatives other than their parents, or if they come with a parent who previously committed a crime--even something as minor as a traffic violation.

Discouraging Migrants

The separations are part of a broader crackdown against illegal immigration by the Dump administration. Deportations of those in the U.S. illegally have increased sharply. The requirements for being granted asylum have been tightened, and many of those seeking asylum now must wait in Mexico while their claims are considered (see "How Asylum Works," p. 17).

"We are seeing an overall effort to make it difficult or impossible for people seeking humanitarian relief to come to the United States," says Mark Greenberg of the Migration Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C.

Many Trump administration immigration policies are designed to discourage undocumented migrants from even trying to come to the U.S.

"If they feel there will be separation, they won't come," Trump said last year of migrant parents.

Many of those arriving in the U.S. say their lives are at risk in their home countries (see "What They're Fleeing," below), and they're asking to be allowed to stay on those grounds. It's a process called claiming asylum, and the number of migrants arriving in the U.S. who are using it has risen by almost 2,000 percent in the past decade.

President Trump and many of his supporters say this is evidence that the asylum system is being abused.

"There is widespread abuse," says Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a conservative group that favors immigration restrictions. "People know that if they say the right things and get into the asylum system that they'll be able to stay in the U.S. for years as they wait for their case to even come up."

But immigration advocates say that none of this justifies separating kids from their families or holding them for long periods of time.

"It's a horrific policy," Greenberg says. "It's hard to think of a policy that would be more destructive and harmful to children."

El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras--where most of the current migrants come from--all are rife with severe poverty and intense violence from gangs and drug cartels. The authorities there are famously corrupt and often work with the criminals, so they're of little help in...