Reunifying Families Separated Under Trump’s Zero Tolerance

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, Host: But we turn now to the U.S., where illegal border crossings have reached record highs. And New York grapples with an influx of migrants over 126,000 since last spring.

If elected president again in 2024, Donald Trump promises a crackdown on immigration, which comes as the Biden administration is settling a lawsuit over Trump’s controversial child separation policy. Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Caitlin Dickerson joins Michel Martin to discuss the impact of that policy.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Bianna. Caitlin Dickerson, thank you so much for joining us.

CAITLIN DICKERSON, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: You won a Pulitzer Prize, which is one of our field’s highest honors for your reporting on the Trump administration’s family separation policy, what they called the Zero-tolerance Policy. I just wanted to start by asking, you know, how did this start? Like, what’s the genesis of this?

DICKERSON: Sure. So, let me take you back to 2017, Michel. I’m on the immigration beat. President Trump has just taken office. We know he’s going to be making a lot of changes because he’s campaigned on wanting to crack down on immigration as much as possible. And so, I’m covering things like the travel ban, like the border wall.

But I get a tip pretty early that year that the Homeland Security secretary has been presented with an idea to take migrant children away from their parents as a way to discourage illegal border crossing. So, it’s a deterrent strategy, probably the most aggressive one that this country has ever seen.

And the idea was simply to send a very, very strong message that this kind of brutal reality would meet any family that tried to cross the border. The idea begins to be debated within the Department of Homeland Security, and then I start to get tips that separations have actually begun, one by one. I start reaching out to the administration and asking them, has the separation policy begun, you know, explaining to them the details of the cases that I was being tipped off to.

And I was hearing for about a year that separations hadn’t begun. There was a big disconnect. What we know now is that hundreds and hundreds, in fact, over a thousand separations took place in secret before this policy known as zero-tolerance was ever announced publicly, that happened in the summer of 2018, and separations increased even more after that.

MARTIN: So, the Biden administration estimates that a total of 3,924 kids were separated from their families from 2017 to 2021. As of last month, about a thousand children still hadn’t been reunited with their families. Where are they? How is that possible?

DICKERSON: It’s really striking. And I should say the total count of separations that I have is over 5,000. There are a few different numbers that have been batted around as the ACLU has had to fight in court to basically get every single separated family to fall under the purview of the lawsuit that they filed against family separations.

And part of the problem that we’re discussing here is that there was really, really poor record keeping. That’s why these counts change all the time. And it’s also why we haven’t been able to identify and reunify so many families that you’re asking about.

MARTIN: But in 2021, the Biden administration set up a task force to reunify these families. So, I guess that’s why it’s puzzling. Is it that it still hasn’t happened?

DICKERSON: The reason why it’s not puzzling to me, Michel, is because my reporting found that there was very, very little documentation of separation. Sometimes no documentation of a separation at all for about a year until the policy became acknowledged publicly, and then the administration started to take some account of the separations.

By then, so many had taken place. Hundreds of parents had already been deported without their children. And you had this issue where children were being sent to one federal agency, the Health and Human Services Department. Parents were being sent to any number of federal agencies that were different. Some were in ICE custody, some were in U.S. Marshals custody, some were in the Bureau of Prisons custody, some were released into the United States, and some were deported.

The computer systems across these federal agencies did not speak to one another. And depending on where parents ended up, how their cases were handled, how quickly they were deported, some left the country without the U.S. government having any way of locating them again. No address, no phone number. Add to that, that in many cases, we were talking about at this time, asylum seeking families who were fleeing deep, deep poverty in Central America. So, folks who didn’t have steady access to the internet, may not have had a phone, may not have had a firm street address.

A lot of them, of course, were fleeing violence, fleeing unsafe situations. And so, it’s not as if even if they did have an address, they return to the exact same place they left when they saw asylum in the first place. And so, this Biden administration task force has had to try to forensically reconstruct from any information that exists across these government databases, enough information to reunify families, and it’s proven an almost impossible task.

MARTIN: Do we know anything about the children who still haven’t been reunited with family members? Is there any through line to them? For example, do they tend to be younger? I mean, like, older kids, you know, have some ability to, you know, remember their parents’ names or some identifying details or the names of aunts or uncles or other sort of family members? Obviously, younger children, you know, less so. Or perhaps they speak indigenous languages. And perhaps Spanish, for example, is not their first language, let alone English.

DICKERSON: The government, the Biden administration really has not given us good information about who these children are, including what their ages are. I think your guess is probably a really good one, Michel. I spent a lot of time reporting on the babies that were separated from their parents at this time.

I tracked down the youngest separated child who was four months old when he was taken away from his parents. He spent five months in government custody. And another great example of what you just talked about, the language barrier. His family was actually from Romania. So, his dad spent months in ICE custody without an interpreter to explain what his case was. And of course, the baby was nonverbal for the entire time that he was in U.S. custody.

So, there were many, many cases of children who were babies and toddlers who were separated. And I think it’s a fair guess that it’s perhaps those younger children who’ve had a harder time reconnecting with their parents just simply because they weren’t old enough to speak, to memorize phone numbers, to know family members who could be contacted to try to track parents down.

MARTIN: So, we’ve talked about the administration set up this task force to try to reunite families that had been separated, but they also settled a lawsuit brought on behalf of families who were separated at the U.S. Mexico border. And I understand that this settlement still needs to be approved by the judge overseeing the case. If approved, what would it do?

DICKERSON: So, this settlement is very significant in the eyes of the ACLU that represented these thousands of separated families. They got almost everything that they were asking for. Any family who is separated is entitled to re-enter the United States if one or both members was deported, to apply for asylum and invoke their separation in their asylum claim to be reunited, of course, and also to seek mental health and medical care that could be paid for in part by the federal government if it’s deemed related to the separation itself. Some families will also receive funding and support for legal resources to pursue these asylum claims and some may even be eligible for access to housing. The other huge, huge part of the settlement is that it says family separations are outlawed for eight years. So, of course, a lot of advocates, the ACLU included, would have liked to see a forever ban on family separations. The Biden administration, I’m told, really put their foot down when it came to that issue, did not want to legislate in a federal court settlement. And so, they landed at a compromise of eight years.

And so, this is viewed as a great success, you know, with the huge caveat of what we’re actually talking about here. We’re talking about making amends for thousands of children having been taken away from their parents. We’re talking about what medical experts have said unequivocally can cause lifelong damage. And we’re also talking about those hundreds of families that have yet to be reunited. Will they be able to get access to these benefits from the settlement is still an open question?

MARTIN: OK. Let me go back again to when the former president first introduced this zero-tolerance policy, the family separation policy back in 2018. I think people may remember there was bipartisan outrage about it.

Somebody like, you know, the former first lady, Laura Bush, even wrote an op-ed about it. A person who was, you know, reluctant to take public stances on — you know, on most issues, even when she had the platform of first lady. So, it was quite an extraordinary thing. Republicans even drafted legislation to outlaw family separation, but nothing happened. I — just what does your reporting tell us about that?

DICKERSON: You’re exactly right, Michel, that the full spectrum of representation in Congress was crying out and demanding, once this policy became public, that the Trump administration put it to a stop, and they wanted to outlaw everybody from the House Freedom Caucus to Nancy Pelosi, and it never happened. And what happened is that the family separation policy, controversial as it was, it really got dragged into the general bipartisan sort of stuckness and cynicism that has prevented overall immigration reform from happening for so many decades. So, I think once family separation came to a stop, the reunification efforts started and you had a sort of scapegoat to blame. And Kirstjen Nielsen, the DHS secretary, who lost her job not long after family separations came to an end, Congress was ready to move on. And we went back to the status quo where you have Democrats and Republicans widely, widely separate from one another and really no political will to make progress, even on something that at one point everybody agreed on.

MARTIN: Totally, I think, you know, President Biden is very different from President Trump. I mean, you don’t see him going out of his way to demean people from whole parts of the world as being, you know, criminals by definition. But from a policy standpoint, are there substantial differences between the Biden administration and the Trump administration, apart from the rhetoric?

DICKERSON: It’s important, as you’ve emphasized, Michel, to say that the Biden administration is taking a very different tone when it speaks about immigrants, when it speaks about our country’s relationship to immigrants and the goals that we have.

But as an immigration reporter, I do have to say that I’ve seen this administration reach again and again for the same deterrent policies to try to crack down on border crossing that not just the Trump administration relied on, remember, but also the Obama administration, also the Bush administration. These are old tools. We have no evidence that they work, but they are part of the political playbook that has not fundamentally changed.

MARTIN: Give an example. I mean, I know what got a lot of attention was this sort of a barrier on the Rio Grande. Like give an example of what you say is, you know, more of the same, going into the Biden administration.

DICKERSON: So, it’s restrictions on access to asylum. I mean, it was the continuation of the Title 42 border policy for a very long stretch of time that led to, as your viewers will recall, vast numbers of expulsions from people at the southern border who were hoping to come to the United States to seek asylum but were instead kicked out under the pretenses of the pandemic, even though I traced the history of that policy and it had nothing to do with COVID-19 when it was put into place. This was just another attempt that the Trump administration tried to cut off access to the border and to asylum.

And then, as you pointed out, there’s the continuation of the building of the wall. The Biden administration has said multiple things at once. You know, President Biden campaigned and said, not another foot of wall would be built under his presidency. And yet, we do see more wall being built. Then you had the president saying, well, Congress tied my hands. I didn’t want to do it, but I have to. Well, the DHS secretary that he appointed is saying, I support the idea for this wall.

So, there’s a lot of mixed messaging, but the policies themselves point to greater restrictions and more use of deterrent policies to try to minimize border crossings.

MARTIN: You actually traveled to the Ukraine Poland border. Did you see differences in the experiences of refugees and would be migrants there versus the — what you’ve been reporting on for some time now at the U.S. Mexico border? What was the difference that you saw?

DICKERSON: Absolutely. It was quite stark. I mean, my interest in global migration is to see, you know, this is an international issue. You have forced migration on the rise really across the globe. And so, I wanted to try to take a look and compare the experiences that I’ve been able to report on.

What I saw in Poland was quite striking. You know, the Polish parliament had passed emergency legislation to give 18 months of legal status to any Ukrainian who’d crossed the border, as well as cash support, access to the health care system. Children were enrolled in schools. And it wasn’t just a legal difference.

There was also a social and a cultural difference. You know, walking around in Warsaw, Ukrainians were universally referred to as refugees. It was — they were sort of treated as synonymous. And that’s very different, of course, from the way that the Trump administration looked at Central Americans who were seeking fundamentally the same type of status, you know, refugee status in the United States, instead of being referred to as refugees, they were referred to as criminals, as rapists, as we know, as people who were trying to exploit the American immigration system.

MARTIN: Isn’t there a difference though between people who were invaded, literally invaded by another country versus people who have been, I mean, trying to move across the border for — you know, frankly, for, well, I mean, all kinds of reasons?

DICKERSON: I agree with you. There’s a big difference. And for a lot of people, that will explain exactly why Poland was so welcoming to refugees from Ukraine. Although I will point out, Poland was not welcoming to anybody who had been living in Ukraine who was from another country who tried to enter Poland, in particular if they were African or Middle Eastern. But for a lot of people, this difference alone justifies the way that Poland welcomed Ukrainians and the comparison between that and the way that the United States was treating Central Americans. This is a really good point. Our asylum system is not clear on who is entitled to refuge in the United States and who isn’t. But many, many Central Americans have successfully won asylum cases. And so, while there may be a difference in terms of, you know, just the psyche and the emotional reaction to the news of the day, the reason for people crossing the border, legally, there isn’t always a distinction. And then it becomes a question of, I think, social dynamics, of cultural dynamics, which are always at play when it comes to immigration.

MARTIN: What I think I hear you saying is that you think race or ethnicity is a part of it.

DICKERSON: You cannot take race and ethnicity out of immigration. So, there were refugees trying to come into Poland who were from predominantly Muslim countries through Belarus, leading up to and during the war in Ukraine. The leader, the elected leader of Poland talked about viewing Islam as fundamentally at odds with Polish culture and Polish identity. And so, while Ukrainians were being allowed to cross the border really without limitation, the Polish border guards were blocking the border from Belarus, and in fact, using things like water cannons, there were people who froze to death in the forest between Belarus and Poland, trying to get into Poland, and you can’t ignore the demographic difference between how these groups are treated.

MARTIN: So, before we let you go, Caitlin, this is the very hard question, is it possible that some of these children will never be reunited with their families? Is that possible?

DICKERSON: I think it’s absolutely possible. I would even go as far as to say that it’s likely. I mean, certainly many parents and children will find each other and won’t report back to the U.S. government about it for obvious reasons. I think lots of these families want to stay as far away from the U.S. government as they possibly can. But I think given what we know about how careless the administration went about this effort, how little record keeping took place, and all these challenges when it comes to language access, internet access, you know, funding to seek out lawyers, I think it’s fair to say that it’s likely that some children may never make their way back to the parent they crossed the border with, which is a very troubling reality.

MARTIN: Caitlin Dickerson, thanks so much for talking with us today.

DICKERSON: Thank you so much for having me.

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