More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If you want proof Donald Trump didn’t have the largest, biggest, best inauguration crowd ever, I’m your man. I got the plum assignment of covering the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump—from the farthest possible position along the National Mall. The way, way back near where the press tent was built, to accommodate a massive crowd. And there wasn’t one.
Translation from government-speak: in order to end the “catch and release” of undocumented adults who arrived with minor children, their kids would be separated, classified as “unaccompanied” (even though they arrived with their family), and transferred to ORR, where they would be sheltered as refugees while their parents went through the United States criminal justice system. The thought was that word of the separations happening would deter other migrants from coming at all.
Commander White kept stoic through the meeting despite mounting concern as the idea of systematically separating parents and children to deter others from coming to the United States was raised. This was the same proposal that career ORR employees had opposed when it was considered during the Obama administration.
A former DHS official in the room that day remembered any potential pushback differently. “Nobody warned of the impact on children.”
The San Ysidro Port of Entry is the largest land border crossing in the world. Tens of thousands of cars and hundreds of thousands of human beings make their way between Tijuana and San Diego on a daily basis. So do an untold volume of narcotics—more than anywhere else along the entire southern border. As President Trump continued to make the case for his big, beautiful border wall, I was curious if it would do what he said: stop drugs from “pouring across” the southwest border. At least here, the answer was no way. Most hard narcotics come through legal ports of entry, like this one, and
...more
That begged a question: If Mexican cartels were smuggling drugs mostly in places you had to show your passport, who was crossing in between the ports—where there were no walls—or trying to get around the ones that did exist? Mostly, it was Central American family members looking to seek asylum. It was a group now in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
“We have tremendous experience in dealing with unaccompanied minors,” Kelly said. “We turn them over to HHS, and they do a very, very good job of either putting them in kind of foster care or linking them up with parents or family members in the United States.” And then, finally, Kelly admitted it. “Yes, I am considering, in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network, I am considering exactly that. They will be well cared for as we deal with their parents.” Wow.
I was headed to South El Monte, where, on this night, the Catholic Church was training undocumented immigrants already in the United States how to avoid deportation.
“How many people are at risk of an encounter with ICE?” She looked down, then up at me through her thin rectangle-shaped glasses. She lifted up her left arm, squeezing her fist into a ball and pulling it back toward her face, purposefully drawing my attention to the brown skin on her wrist. “Anybody that looks like this is at risk. Because they’re stopping everybody.” “That’s a lot of people in Los Angeles,” I said to her, immediately realizing I had asked a stupid question with an obvious answer. “Tell me about it,” she replied.
I brought with me the fifty-page document that informed Lucy Boutte’s presentation and asked him why they were going from church to church preparing families for immigration enforcement. “I have been talking about stopping the deportation for a long time. Because it’s breaking families. And it’s destroying the lives of people.” “Do you see what you’re doing here in Los Angeles as a conflict with the Trump administration?” “We’ve been doing this for a long time, as I said, before with the Obama administration and now with the Trump administration. Because we want the undocumented people to
...more
The United States of America, a nation as thoroughly defined by immigration as any on earth, was deliberately breaking apart families seeking asylum here—to scare other families from coming.
President Trump, however, was no fan of foreign aid, even if it kept farmers afloat and potential migrants at home. He still felt the same way after evidence was presented to his administration later in 2018 by Custom and Border Protection, which showed climate change and variability were fueling the food insecurity driving migration. The administration ultimately ignored the consequences of climate change, which candidate Trump had called a Chinese hoax, when in 2019 it defunded programs to mitigate its effects, instead choosing to continue punishing migrants when they made it to the United
...more
We are preparing to publish a story based on ORR data provided to us by Homeland Security officials on background that shows more than 700 children have been separated from their parents since last October. According to our sources, the data shows that about half of the children are under 10 years old and more than a quarter are under five years old. The story will also say that ORR-contracted shelters have struggled increasingly to track down the parents of children who show up at their facilities after being separated—so the children effectively become lost in the system until ORR contracts
...more
A public affairs specialist at the Administration for Children and Families, the part of HHS that encompases ORR, finally emailed Dickerson back on Thursday, more than a full day past her deadline, to tell her that they “cannot verify the numbers because they do not come from the Office of Refugee Resettlement.” “The numbers do in fact come from HHS/ORR,” Dickerson replied.
The explanation was that the DHS information technology infrastructure didn’t share the key detail of whether a child had been separated between relevant agencies, including ORR, resulting in confusion about the number of family separations, making reunifications difficult if not impossible.
This admission, that the federal government was systematically separating families, was the exact type of action Senator Kamala Harris had asked of Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen about during Nielsen’s confirmation process. In response to a question specifically requesting Nielsen report back on whether DHS was drafting or considering separations, Nielsen replied, “I commit to sharing additional policy guidance and appropriate information with Congress.” But she never did. Harris and others, including myself, would get confirmation the policy was being carried out first in the
...more
Throughout his tenure, when Lloyd had been asked by staff about family separations, he had been using a version of the carefully crafted White House line that “there is no family separation policy,” echoing Waldman and her colleagues at DHS. Now, with the Times article published based on Lloyd’s own data, family separations were undeniable.
Embarrassed, Lloyd knew the leak came from his department, on his watch, under an administration that appointed him to his position. When considering how to handle the fallout from the leak, Lloyd’s first thought was a drastic one. Let’s get rid of the list. If he followed the idea through, it would destroy the critical linkage between the seven hundred separated children in his custody and their parents despite the fact that the list itself was the best hope of reuniting them. Lloyd knew that in order to discard the list, he would have to instruct his staff to do so. Lloyd wanted to hear from
...more
The answer he would receive, of course, was that the list was the only way separated children would be reunited with their parents. The document, Lloyd was reminded, was kept by ORR’s senior federal field specialist Jim De La Cruz for explicitly that reason. The “problem” wasn’t the existence of the list, but the separations themselves.
Sualog, who has a masters degree in clinical psychology and twenty years of child welfare experience, knew she never could or would let that happen because of the consequences, she later told colleagues. So she said as little as possible to her boss, Lloyd, and his boss, Wagner. “OK, I’ll see what I can do,” she replied. The meeting ended, without Lloyd acting on his earlier impulse to specifically and literally order the destruction of the list. But quickly, word spread throughout the office about what had happened and what those in the meeting understood their director’s intention to be.
Sualog conveyed her feelings about what had happened to De La Cruz, who had been keeping the list since the limited separations occurred at the end of the Obama administration. If Lloyd expected Sualog to instruct De La Cruz to stop keeping the list, she never did. Nor did De La Cruz do anything of the sort. On the contrary, he continued adding to it as the number of separated children rapidly grew.
Had the keeping of the list been stopped, any reunification of those seven hundred children would have been made needlessly more complicated, compounding the pain and trauma suffered as time apart from their parents grew longer. Neither Sualog, nor De La Cruz, would allow the destruction of the list to happen. But they were powerless to stop the policy itself.
In other words, Secretary Nielsen’s lawyer was making clear that family separations could be deemed illegal—including on the grounds it would violate the constitutional right of fair treatment in the judicial system for families. And yet, despite Mitnick’s legal guidance that family separations were potentially unconstitutional, McAleenan, Cissna, and Homan pressed ahead, pushing their boss to implement the policy in their memo.
Secretary Nielsen’s lieutenants were endorsing family separations. Now it was up to their boss, who with the stroke of a pen could change the face of immigration enforcement. At stake, according to the projection of Commander White at Health and Human Services, was the fate of around 30,000 children. Nielsen read their memo, but decided not to sign it right away.
Looking down, the horror of the scene became clear. What must it feel like to enter the United States with the goal of turning yourself in on humanitarian grounds, only to have a military chopper circle you, welcoming you as if you were an enemy combatant with its deafening fury?
While the children sat cross-legged beneath the tree, waiting to be picked up by Border Patrol agents they likely hoped would help them start a new life, on Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s desk sat a memo that, should she sign it, would likely result in separation of those kids from their parents. Sometimes, everything looks clearer from above.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration had been watching me closely.
But the consequences were seismic: with the stroke of Nielsen’s pen, family separation was now the official policy of the United States government.
Sessions was in California to announce what Nielsen had not: that family separations was now an official policy. He had chosen perhaps the most in-your-face location possible, Friendship Park, a public safe zone where people from both sides of the border could visit through the fencing, though access was limited under President Trump. After signing the decision memo, Nielsen had lain low, and was not aware Sessions would be speaking to the press.
“The Department of Homeland Security is now referring one hundred percent of illegal southwest border crossings to the Department of Justice for prosecutions,” Sessions said. “And the Department of Justice will take up these cases.”
Sessions continued his remarks, attempting to paint a picture of a United States under siege by migrants, while standing at a border crossing that Chief Scott himself had told me was as safe as it had ever been.
What would happen to the family from Nicaragua I met waiting in the Nogales shelter to cross with the little boy who looked like my son? To the family below the Black Hawk chopper who had wanted to turn themselves in? To the Edwins from Honduras at the Anzalduas Bridge, especially the son who said he was scared of a lot of bad guys on his journey?
Then Trump repeated a familiar, but untruthful refrain, that his big, beautiful border wall was being built. “Not only the wall, which we’re building sections of wall right now. We have $1.6 billion,” the president continued, in a more honest vein, admitting what he was doing was replacing existing wall.
As the press left the room the secretaries sat silent. The president bringing up immigration without recognizing Nielsen or Sessions was a bad omen. Once the doors again closed and the press had been ushered out, the conversation about immigration continued. Attorney General Sessions, the target of Trump’s ire because of his recusal in the Justice Department’s Russia investigation, asserted that Nielsen could stop anyone from crossing the border. Nielsen felt panicked, believing not only that Sessions was throwing her under the bus to look tough in front of the president, but that was not
...more
“There is a huge culture of fear around the White House and the president,” a former senior administration official later told me about Trump’s outburst that day. “There are huge parts of the inter-agency process in fear for their jobs including General Sessions. They had to bluster and look tough to protect themselves.”
“Every day on the phone it was F-bomb ridden conversation,” the former official recalled, reeling off a list of outrageous ideas floated to Nielsen by President Trump to harm migrants in order to deter migration—ideas that were first publicly reported in Border Wars, the book from New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear. “Painting the wall black. Shooting people. Snakes.” Despite the “crazy,” Nielsen decided not to resign.
Many who are apprehended today by Border Patrol are asylum seekers. Some put the number at almost half? Why would you separate them?
In fact, it was different. Crossing the border is a civil crime, adjudicated in immigration court, and only if prosecutors decide to press charges do families get placed into criminal proceedings. Nielsen was hiding the truth, and in so doing, steamrolled through my attempt to understand what was going on. That was, embarrassingly, the beginning and end of our conversation about family separations. A better reporter would have been more prepared to keep pressing.
They also wanted to be sure I wouldn’t use the part of our exchange where Nielsen mistakenly said there was a 200 percent increase in rapists and criminals. We couldn’t guarantee them that, I told them.
De La Cruz had advocated for ending any type of family separation as far back as 2016. Now, as the practice was expanded systematically to the entire border under the Trump administration, at the direction of the attorney general and secretary of homeland security, De La Cruz knew, having informally tracked separations for years, that there was no way to automatically link separated parents and children once they were apart.
De La Cruz understood how important tracking parents and children would be to any potential reunification, and if separations were carried out on a scale projected by his former colleague Commander Jonathan White, ORR would be flooded with thousands more children than under normal circumstances.
“We’re happy to have you here,” Sanchez said, explaining that Casa Padre was currently over capacity. Some 1,497 kids were inside a building meant for thirty-nine less than that—that day accounting for 13 percent of all children in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement nationwide. As he explained it, the increase in referrals was a direct result of children being taken from their parents, children who would otherwise not require the services of his organization.
I was walking side by side with Alexia Rodriguez, the lawyer for the facility. When I expressed amazement at what I was seeing, without skipping a beat she told me and another reporter standing near her to smile at the kids because “they feel like animals in a cage being looked at.” I think she realized how truthful she had just been, because she immediately said she didn’t want that comment to be on the record, which, of course, is not how that works.
The kids were looking at us with a deer-in-the-headlights gaze, a group of ten reporters with notepads chronicling any detail we could vacuum up as we were herded like animals through the facility. As we continued walking, she explained all of the approximately 1,500 kids would eat in a two-hour window, rotating. Disobeying orders, I couldn’t help saying hello, asking the children how they were doing the best I could with my limited Spanish. I soon was asked to stop.
As we continued walking, we again passed by the cafeteria, where we started. For the first time I noticed there was a mural of President Trump that stretched the length of the entire wall. Incredulous, I read the quote that accompanied the mural: “Sometimes losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.”
He concluded, “no one should stay longer than 2 weeks” to mitigate behavioral health issues.
ON THE SAME day I spent hours broadcasting from outside Casa Padre, breaking the news that the federal government was standing up the Tornillo tent camp for migrant children, Attorney General Jeff Sessions used the Bible to justify separating children.
The Fort Wayne Rotarians, for their part, regretted participation in Sessions’s speech, posting online “we have instituted policies to never allow it to happen again.”
“No, I hate it, I hate the children being taken away. The Democrats have to change their law. That’s their law. They will force—” the president stopped short, interrupted by a follow-up question. “Sir, that’s your own policy. That’s your own policy. Why do you keep lying about it, sir?” “Quiet. Quiet. That’s the Democrats’ law,” President Trump said, indeed lying.
I continued with Gura until we ran into technical difficulties, but rejoined him the next hour, this time with Dr. Colleen Kraft, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who in May when the zero tolerance policy was announced wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. Kraft had eviscerated the policy on the grounds that the damage it would inflict on children would never be reversed. Studies overwhelmingly demonstrate the irreparable harm caused by breaking up families. Prolonged exposure to highly stressful situations—known as toxic stress—can disrupt a child’s brain architecture and
...more
