Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

by Jacob Soboroff

An hour and forty-five minutes later, the Post published an op-ed by former First Lady Laura Bush. In a tweet, she shared the piece with her followers, writing, “I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.” Bush, too, pointed to the words of Dr. Kraft to rally the nation against the separation policy. Recently, Colleen Kraft, who heads the American Academy of Pediatrics, visited a shelter run by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. She reported that while there were beds, toys, crayons, a playground and diaper changes, the people working at the shelter had been instructed not to pick up or touch the children to comfort them. Imagine not being able to pick up a child who is not yet out of diapers. Bush concluded there had to be another way and the policy must be ended. In 2018, can we not as a nation find a kinder, more compassionate, and more moral answer to this current crisis? I, for one, believe we can.

Earlier that day, President Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, often the subject of the president’s scorn and abusive behavior, tweeted a doozie she must have figured would please the tweeter in chief. “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.” My eyes widened when I saw it. You’ve got to be kidding, I thought. Come on. Not far from where more family separations were happening than anywhere else along the border, I decided to reply to her tweet with one of my own: three “face-palm” emojis of a guy slapping his visage in disbelief.

The dispatch failed to include the scathing language Judge Sabraw used in his decision. Sabraw characterized the current state of affairs as a “chaotic circumstance of the Government’s own making” that “has reached a crisis level,” resulting in “the casual, if not deliberate, separation of families.” That the Trump administration had “no reunification plan in place” was “a startling reality.”

For these thirty-seven children, the hope that they would soon see, speak with, and touch their parents for the first time in too long must have filled their heads. But as they pulled into the parking lot outside the detention center, that hope withered. The vans began idling in the parking lot at two thirty in the afternoon as staff from the Harlingen shelter brought the children into the ICE facility, designed to detain adults only. The shelter staff was told paperwork to secure release of the parents in order to reunify them wasn’t yet complete, so the kids packed up and headed back into the vans in the parking lot, where they waited. And waited. And waited. Shelter staff called back to colleagues in Harlingen to ask for more vans, to allow the children to stretch out within them, and to have food to eat. As day turned to night the staff again attempted to jump-start reunifications by bringing the children back inside, but many of the kids were too cold to sit inside the air-conditioned facility and so went back to the vans, where they could rest more comfortably. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials inside the facility clocked out and went home for the day, Andrew Carter, the regional director for BCFS, wrote to his boss, Kevin Dinnin, the company’s CEO, explaining what had happened. It is 22:30 and they are still in the vans and not one of our children has been checked in. In addition, there are other vans with kids from other facilities that are waiting a...

What bothered me was your personal decision to use the extremely inflammatory and emotionally charged description of our processing centers as “cages.” That few seconds of video overshadowed and erased any sign of neutral reporting. It became made-for-TV drama and little else. To be fair, I also queried a number of private citizens who viewed the program in order to get their perspective. They also reiterated that their take away point was that the U.S. Border Patrol separates families and places them in cages. If that was your objective, you were successful. Regrettably, Rodney S. Scott Chief Patrol Agent, San Diego Sector, U.S. Border Patrol This is the same Rodney Scott who toured President Trump around his border wall prototypes for a bank of cameras. If any of the drama around separations was “made for TV,” it was created by the Trump administration itself. Katie Waldman, the Homeland Security spokeswoman, told me on multiple occasions that the policy was designed to play so shockingly in the media that it would force Congress to end it by passing harsh immigration laws, such as permitting indefinite detention of migrant families and the immediate deportation of unaccompanied Central American minors in its place. As for my use of “cages,” the Border Patrol’s own officially released photos and video of the detention facilities testify to the accuracy of the description. I am happy the “private citizens” Scott “queried” took ...

Sure enough, in a court filing later that day, the Trump administration admitted that while it had reunited more than 1,400 children with their parents, 711 kids had not been reunited, and of those, 431 had parents who had already been deported.

On the docket was the issue of 120 parents who had signed forms, just like Juan at Adelanto, giving up the right to be reunified with their children. Gelernt was adamant those cases be revisited in some way so that those parents were not immediately deported without their children, as more than four hundred others had already been. “The trauma that is going on is amazing,” Gelernt said of the reports he was getting from the ground. “It would be torturous to have a parent thinking the rest of their lives, I gave away my child because I was confused, and it was my mistake. “I mean, they are going to go back to their home countries now and people are going to ask, where is your daughter? Where is your son? “And they are going to be having to say, well, I was confused and didn’t understand.” For much of the rest of the hearing, Gelernt continued to press this issue, and Judge Sabraw attempted to digest it as the Trump administration pushed back. “I think we never anticipated that people could make the decision requested of them on the form without being with their child, because it is a family decision,” Gelernt admitted. “So this would be a parent in a facility who has a removal order,” Judge Sabraw said, describing almost exactly the case of Juan in Adelanto. Gelernt, too, without knowing Juan or his case specifically, described his situation perfectly. “It was virtually impossible to counsel parents when they were separated because they were constantly being transferred,” h...

The group walked through the lead-up, implementation, and aftermath of the policy. But one question in particular caused the room to explode: Was separation harmful to children? Commander Jonathan White, who had long warned of the impacts of separation on children, as had the American Academy of Pediatrics, among others, made it clear he believed it was. If asked, he would stick to the scientific facts. Waldman suggested a line that was straight out of the Koch brothers’ climate denial playbook: “there’s no reason to think, or way to know, that separations were harmful to children.” White couldn’t believe it. “I cannot give that answer under oath because it would be perjury.” Stimson, the Health and Human Services lawyer, jumped in. Commander White, he told the DHS flacks, was his “star witness” in the Ms. L. case “and you’re pressuring him to give this answer under oath?”

After the blowup, Waldman approached Commander White and, as she had done to me on several occasions, used one of her favorite pejoratives. “I’m sure you’re a bleeding heart liberal.” That set Commander White off. “Ms. Waldman, you should save that attitude for journalists. You literally traumatized these kids. Why don’t you go peddle your story to people who don’t work in immigration.”

“Where are your loyalties?” he asked White, using a line that could have come from President Trump. “I swore to protect the Constitution as a commissioned officer of the U.S. Public Health Service. Under oath I’ll answer truthfully,” he shot back.

“There’s no question. There’s no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child.”

“You’re representing ten people in this facility alone who are fathers that were separated from their kids and signed papers that said basically I don’t want to be reunited with my kid.” “Yeah.” “So, Juan, did he want to give up his right to be reunified with his son?” “Absolutely not. He actually refers to this—him signing this document that he didn’t understand—as a sin.” “A sin?” “Yeah. Because he didn’t know what he was signing, and only now that he is working with attorneys does he understand the repercussions of what he signed. And people will sign, because it’s an officer in a uniform, you know, telling them that they should sign this.”

“The separation of father and child hurts in my heart. When I asked them to fight my asylum case they didn’t allow me. They are deporting me without even knowing. I feel like the government here is treating me really bad. I feel ignored,” Juan wrote. “I’m human. The government is treating me really bad, but I forgive them.” That line, after writing it, was crossed out by Juan. But he continued. “The separation has affected me a lot. I don’t think I will ever be able to forget this. I don’t think that will ever be OK and I am going crazy. I am in an inhumane situation. This does not have a name. I just think how somebody of my age, an adult who understands how life works a little more than a child, is suffering so much. I cannot imagine the pain that my son is going through. I just pray and hope that all of this pain is worth it at the end because I fear that even after all this pain, I will still be deported and this trauma will not be worth it and my life will again be in danger. I fear they will deport me. This does not have a name for me.”

Juan, like nine other men inside the facility we stood outside of, was losing hope. In the constantly changing numbers coming out of the Secretary’s Operations Center in Washington, the government was now saying more than 150 parents were in the same boat. “This was either the cruelest policy—even more cruel than I think people realize—or it was the most negligent policy of all time,” Toczylowski told me about the situation in which the separated parents now found themselves.

“You thought the only options were be reunited and deported or you be deported and he stays here. So you thought that’s the better option.” It was clear to me that Juan understood some English, because again, he nodded along, and responded with “yes.” “But it turns out,” I said turning to Toczylowski, “you’re his lawyer. Those are not the only two options.” “Those are not his only two options and in fact once he was able to speak with a lawyer we evaluated his case and realized he has a viable claim for asylum, as does his son. And so we were able to make an official request that he get a credible fear interview, which is the first step that allows him to begin the asylum process. He had already been ordered removed by the government,” she said, using the legal term for deported.

“I’m happy that there are these people. They’re like angels. Working hard, trying to rescue all these people.”

Finally, DHS provided inconsistent information to aliens who arrived with children during Zero Tolerance, which resulted in some parents not understanding that they would be separated from their children, and being unable to communicate with their children after separation.

The same day, the Trump administration upped the number of children whose parents “indicated desire against reunification” to 199, part of the 416 who were still separated. One of those children was José, who had spent the last three-plus months at the BCFS shelter in Harlingen, Texas. His father had been trying relentlessly to get released from Adelanto. The “separated parents removal form” Juan had signed, waiving the right to reunification with José, had finally been voided, after Juan won a credible fear determination from an asylum officer, putting him back on track to go through proceedings that would allow him and his son, if and when they were reunited, to stay in the United States together. But first he’d have to get out of Adelanto on bond and find his son. The process would start with an appearance before an immigration judge.

By the end of the day, the immigration judge at Adelanto had answered Juan’s prayers, ordering that “the request be granted” and he be “released from custody under bond of $2,500.” While I worried family separations were slipping away from the American consciousness, I was proven wrong, at least in Juan’s case. A group of volunteers came up with the money to pay Juan’s bond. He would soon be free.

Distracted, the president brought up family separations. “Kirstjen, we’re going to have to reinstitute that,” Trump declared while tornado victims awaited him “with open arms and raised cell phones” on the ground, as NBC affiliate KPLC reported. “Sir,” Nielsen began, “I’m not sure I can reinstitute this on my own,” she said, attempting to end the conversation. It wasn’t the first occasion the president had brought up restarting family separations since he was forced to end them—and it wouldn’t be the last. But this time, the conversation was put to bed not by the president, nor either cabinet secretary on board his chopper. “We can’t do that. We can’t do that,” Melania Trump cut in, curtailing any debate. It wasn’t the first time the first lady voiced her opposition to family separations. In June 2018, at the height of the outrage over the policy, her spokeswoman said “Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families” and that “she believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.” Trump, frustrated, rolled his eyes at the interjection by the sneaker-and-peacoat-clad First Lady, but did not argue back. Instead, the president sighed. “We’ll see. We’ll see,” he said. The following morning, the border numbers were still on President Trump’s mind. From Mar-a-Lago, he turned to Twitter. “Border Patrol and Law Enforcement has apprehended (captured) large numbers of illegal immigrants at the Border,” Trump wrote. “Th...

Today, Waldman and her then-boyfriend, Stephen Miller, the architect of the family separation policy and the senior advisor to President Trump, are married. After leaving DHS, Waldman worked briefly for Arizona senator Martha McSally, and she is now the press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence. Katy and I ran into Waldman a year later, at a Trump election rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, as we were shooting another episode of American Swamp. Vice President Pence was there to introduce the president on the same day articles of impeachment were introduced against Trump in the House of Representatives. We congratulated her on her engagement and new job, and asked how things were going. She was elated and told us she was going to meet up backstage with Miller for thirty minutes, the most time they would see each other all week. Before the rally started, I asked her about a report from the DHS inspector general that had come out just more than two weeks earlier, which confirmed that “DHS did not have the information technology system functionality needed to track separated migrant families during the execution of the Zero Tolerance Policy,” a surprise to no one. There was a shocking revelation in the report, however. CBP, which officially separated 2,814 during zero tolerance, then later admitted it separated 1,556 more before the policy officially started, told the Office of Management and Budget: “it [had planned to] separate more than 26,000 children between May and Septe...

“HARMING CHILDREN MEANS a century of suffering,” a government official who was involved in the runification effort told me the following morning at a Starbucks outside of Washington, D.C. “It’s the greatest human rights catastrophe of my lifetime,” the official explained, referring to domestic U.S. history, while rocking back and forth.

Scott Lloyd is “the most prolific child abuser in modern American history.” The official believed Lloyd—head of the agency supposedly responsible for the welfare of migrant children placed in its custody—had abdicated his legal parental authority and custodianship of more than five thousand children. Lloyd was “starry-eyed around Stephen Miller,” yet was blind to warnings coming from his own staff. Lloyd, in a written response, told me he was taken aback by the accusation of child abuse. “There is nothing anyone can point to that would make that statement true. My job was to take care of the kids and unite them with a sponsor. It’s something we did well, and I am proud of the work we did. This person, whoever it is, had the opportunity to air their concerns in person while these events were happening, but instead is choosing to speak anonymously, through the media, two years after the fact. It is a comment that clearly belies everything I have ever done in my professional and personal life. Given all of this, it’s impossible for me to take it seriously.”

“We should have done better to explain what was happening,” he said about DHS’s response to the public outrage over the crisis. Meanwhile, the White House was putting “impossible pressure” on the agency. Despite that, this person, directly involved not just in the reunifications but the separations themselves, wanted me to know that he regretted being a part of the policy.

THE FOLLOWING MONTH, in early January 2020, both Katie Waldman and her former boss, Jonathan Hoffman, now a spokesperson at the Department of Defense, were in the news. They were issuing statements that Iran fired ballistic missiles at a military base in Iraq in response to President Trump’s ordered assassination General Qassim Sulemani. The people who were in charge of the most spectacular policy fail of the Trump administration were now in charge of communicating whether or not the nation was about to go to war. As 2020 continued, Waldman added to her portfolio the government’s public relations response to the global pandemic known as COVID-19. She again would find herself working with some of the same public health professionals at the Department of Health and Human Services she repeatedly clashed with during family separations and the court-ordered effort to reunify them. Waldman’s and Hoffman’s departures from DHS hadn’t moderated the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Since zero tolerance, nothing had captured the attention of the nation like that June 2018 did. But the deterrence-based immigration policy championed by the Trump administration since that first meeting on Valentine’s Day 2017, and to differing degrees by previous presidential administrations before it, has continued to be deployed at a rapid clip. Some activists argue that what is happening today is as bad if not worse than family separations. Migrants who make it here and prove a credible f...

After family separation, at least seven migrant children died in the custody of Customs and Border Protection. No child had perished in the previous ten years.

A MONTH AFTER Scott’s appointment as Border Patrol chief, Physicians for Human Rights, a nonprofit group that shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to ban land mines, issued a scathing report about the Trump administration’s family separation policy. In it, the group declares the “government’s forcible separation of asylum-seeking families constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment and, in all cases PHR evaluated, meets criteria for torture.” Torture. Despite the warnings, the evidence, the journalism, and the public outcry, “torture” was not a word I had used to describe what I had seen with my own eyes. But that’s exactly what it was. “U.S. officials,” the group wrote, “intentionally carried out discriminatory actions that caused severe pain and suffering, in order to punish, coerce, and intimidate Central American asylum seekers to give up their asylum claims.” By their measure, the Trump administration succeeded in one respect—the act of separations and the damage it caused to thousands of parents and children. But where they failed, and will continue to fail, was to quash the determination, perseverance, and love that those they tortured share. Look no further than Juan and José, who, on the contrary, didn’t give up their asylum claims once they were separated and reunited. They only fought harder. Their claims are now being adjudicated separately by the United States government. Once they’re able to clear the massive backlog of cases and if Presid...