The Secret History of Family Separation

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : "Or I'd say to him, 'Have you talked to anyone at CBP?
52% : Because the mother and daughter, who became known in court as Ms. L and S.S., respectively, had been living in South America before requesting asylum in the United States, S.S. had picked up Spanish.
52% : She asked the White House to allow her to defer her decision on the program for six months so she could travel to Central America herself and announce that the policy was imminent, in hopes that doing so would encourage families that needed to seek asylum to use legal ports of entry.
51% : Nielsen told me he claimed to be in contact with Border Patrol officials who were eager to get started.
50% : This would have allowed the agency to separate not only families that crossed the border illegally but also those who presented themselves at legal ports of entry, requesting asylum.
49% : The Border Patrol could have continued processing families the same way it always had without violating any law or order.
48% : He had leapfrogged over those in CBP leadership who'd worked their way up from the front lines of the Border Patrol and who tended to view leadership recruits with posh résumés as "street hires."
48% : McAleenan and Homan, who was now the head of ICE, testily assured her that the agencies involved "had a process" -- without specifying what it was.
47% : It was clearly directed toward ICE, which operates in the interior of the country, unlike the Border Patrol.
45% : According to colleagues, Tom Homan and Kevin McAleenan continued to minimize the significance of Zero Tolerance, saying that they merely wanted to increase enforcement of laws already on the books.
45% : In one, Jeff Sessions officially announced a new "zero-tolerance policy," under which U.S. attorneys would, "to the extent practicable," accept 100 percent of the illegal-entry cases referred to them by the Border Patrol.
45% : Those who reportedly gave these assurances about the policy, including Homan, McAleenan, and Ron Vitiello, the acting deputy commissioner of CBP, all denied doing so; some suggested that the DHS secretary and her advisers must simply be confused.
43% : De La Cruz and a handful of others at ORR were using the list to seek help from ICE in tracking down the parents of those children and trying to reunify them, or at least connect them by phone -- many of the separated parents were still detained or had been deported.
43% : After debating the idea for months, McAleenan took his most direct step to push for prosecuting parents, knowing that they would be separated from their children by the Border Patrol.
42% : Throughout his career, his approach to both criminal justice and immigration enforcement could be defined by the phrase zero tolerance, a law-enforcement term of art that is almost always used euphemistically, because snuffing out all crime is impossible.
42% : On May 1, McAleenan emailed Hamilton, saying, "Looking at next week, likely," for the Border Patrol to begin referring parents for prosecution.
41% : The response both papers got from the DHS press office not only failed to acknowledge that separations were already taking place; it also characterized families seeking asylum in the United States as abusive to their own children: "It's cruel for parents to place the lives of their children in the hands of transnational criminal organizations and smugglers who have zero respect for human life and often abuse or abandon children.
39% : When they read it, Nielsen's staff asked for the removal of one line, hoping that they could ask Border Patrol to hold off on applying the policy to families until they could prepare: "If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law."
36% : Furthermore, Homeland Security and Border Patrol would not be able to process these cases fast enough.
35% : Judd maintained close access to Trump after winning his affection with an early endorsement in 2016, and occasionally attended private Oval Office meetings where he lobbied for McAleenan to be fired for being too weak on enforcement.
34% : Materially, the documents did not mean much for the Border Patrol, which Nielsen, a lawyer, theoretically should have known: Sessions had no authority over that agency, including over which cases its agents referred for prosecution.

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