Families split at border common; rise seen before ‘zero tolerance’

The "zero-tolerance" policy of criminally charging people who cross the U.S. border illegally led to thousands of children being separated from their parents.

But the practice of separating families appears to have begun accelerating last year, long before President Donald Trump's administration announced the policy in the spring. Among those cases, according to records and interviews, are many that happened at ports of entry.

In the first two months of the Trump presidency, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly -- then the Homeland Security secretary -- said separating families could be used as a deterrent to people wanting to cross the border. The notion was quickly dropped.

But behind the scenes, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and others hadn't given up on the concept. It reappeared this spring, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the policy requiring criminal prosecutions of anyone coming to the U.S. illegally. Sessions and others argued that families would have to be separated because children can't go to jail with their parents.

How or whether families would be reunited wasn't much of a concern to the policymakers, according to administration officials and others with knowledge of the discussions who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. That lack of planning for families was evident in an interview that Kelly did with NPR in May.

"The children will be taken care of -- put into foster care or whatever," he said. "But the big point is [the parents] elected to come illegally to the United States."

In a federal court declaration, Marc Sanders, acting director of Homeland Security's Human Smuggling Cell, argued that releasing all families together can bolster human smuggling and increase illegal immigration.

"Once such a requirement is publicized it is likely to be a pull factor that contributes to further illicit migration to the United States," he wrote.

Administration officials have said repeatedly that asylum seekers who don't want to be separated from their children should present themselves at a port of entry. Doing so is the legal way to ask for asylum, they said.

But court filings describe numerous cases in recent months in which families were separated after going to a port of entry to ask for asylum. It happened even when asylum seekers carried records, such as birth certificates or hospital documents, listing them as the parents of their children, according to interviews and court records.

While border officials have long had a policy of separating children when their safety might be in question, lawyers and advocates say they began seeing a significant increase last year in officials separating children from their parents who asked for asylum.

In a ruling last week ordering the reunification of families in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego wrote that there had been a "casual, if not deliberate, separation of families that lawfully present at the port of entry, not just those who cross into the country illegally."

Nicole Ramos, an attorney who provides legal help to asylum seekers in Tijuana, Mexico, said she started to see an increase in family separations at ports of entry in May 2017.

Ramos has filed eight complaints related to the issue in recent months with the Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

[U.S. immigration: Data visualization of selected immigration statistics, U.S. border map]

Separations at ports of entry have happened "even when families have presented sufficient evidence of parentage, even where they do not have signs of neglect or abuse ... even when the child is able to speak for themselves and say" this is my parent, Ramos said.

She said the problem has been compounded by long waits at ports of entry. In some cases, families have been waiting for weeks to claim asylum at a border crossing.

Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the ACLU's case challenging family separations, said the government has justified taking children in some cases by saying there was concern a child was with a smuggler.

In one case, he said, "the little girl was screaming 'Mommy, Mommy, don't let them take me away.' Anyone would have known it was not a smuggler."

Ramos said she worries that despite Trump's June 20 order to end family separations, border officials will continue separating families without due process by saying that a parent is a danger to the child or is not actually the parent.

"They were doing it before the zero-tolerance policy, and they're going to keep doing it," she said. "They will say the parent presented a security risk without well-articulated reasons as to what that security risk was."

SEPARATION FACT SHEET

In an email, U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Daniel Hetlage referred to a Department of Homeland Security fact sheet, which says it is a "myth" that families asking for asylum legally at ports of entry are separated.

The fact sheet says Homeland Security will separate in three circumstances: "1) when DHS is unable to determine the familial relationship; 2) when DHS determines that a child may be at risk with the parent or legal guardian; or 3) when the parent or legal guardian is referred for criminal prosecution."

Customs and Border Protection spokesman Carlos Diaz said the agency did not have data on separated families. But if a family asks for asylum at a port of entry, "it is highly likely that the family will stay together through the process," Diaz added.

Diaz referred questions to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. Officials there referred a reporter back to Customs and Border Protection.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen also said last month during a White House press briefing that there wasn't a policy to separate children. She was later heckled at a Mexican restaurant where she was eating dinner.

Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency in charge of children who are separated from their parents, said only that the number of children in its care is 11,800. This includes children who crossed the border without parents as well as those separated from their parents.

One of those children was reunited with her mother on Sunday. Buena Ventura Martin Godinez embraced her 7-year-old daughter when she arrived at the Miami airport, almost two months after Martin was separated from her family trying to cross the border from Mexico.

"I feel very happy, now and to complete my joy I would like to have my husband released," Martin said in Spanish as her daughter Janne clutched a stuffed dog and blue balloons and played with her infant brother at baggage claim.

Martin carried her infant son from Mexico into the U.S in May, fleeing what she said were threats from gangsters demanding money in their hometown in northwestern Guatemala. Her husband followed two weeks later with the young girl.

But the family was caught at the border and scattered. Her husband, Pedro Godinez Aguilar, was convicted of the misdemeanor offense of illegal entry into the U.S. and was sent to Atlanta, where he awaits almost certain deportation. Martin was held for a week with her infant in Arizona and Texas, and now wears a heavy black monitoring device strapped to her ankle. She and her baby boy are with relatives south of Miami.

Her 7-year-old girl was in the custody of a child welfare agency in Michigan.

Martin has been getting some help from a local activist since she can't afford a lawyer. She has been working at a nearby plant nursery, earning $9 an hour. She puts her baby in day care as she presses her case for asylum.

As the grateful mother clutched her daughter Sunday, she had a warning for other families.

"I would advise people to find another country to seek refuge ... because here the law is very tough. People don't have a heart," she said with tears streaming down her cheeks. "Your child is a treasure, and to have them separated is very painful."

Information for this article was contributed by Paloma Esquivel and Brittny Meija of the Los Angeles Times; and by Josh Replogle, Kelli Kennedy, Colleen Long, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Jill Colvin, Lisa Mascaro and Zeke Miller of The Associated Press.

A Section on 07/02/2018

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