How Many Families Were Seperated at the Border Under Obama

March 02, 2022 Post a Comment

The all-time way to depict Donald Trump'southward current policy toward families crossing the Us-United mexican states border is this: He just went from beingness much harsher than Barack Obama to trying to become the courts to let him exist as harsh as Obama was.

The executive lodge Trump signed yesterday opens the door to him using a tactic Obama used in 2014: the wide-scale detention of immigrant families for as long as it took to complete their immigration cases and deport them.

Comparisons between Trump and Obama on immigration normally focus on deportations of unauthorized immigrants living in the Usa. Trump has been speedily expanding enforcement, but the numbers are still comparable to Obama'south first term. (Obama holds the tape for deporting more immigrants than any president, with more than than 2 one thousand thousand deportations over eight years — though he scaled back enforcement in the last two years of his administration.)

Simply the furnishings of the Trump administration'southward "zero tolerance" policy for prosecuting illegal entry this spring — the separation of families as a matter of standard government practice for about six weeks, and now (cheers to Trump's executive club) a coming courtroom fight over the indefinite detention of families seeking asylum — are reminiscent, for those of the states who've been following immigration for a while, of what the Obama administration did in 2014.

The comparison to Obama's policies is especially relevant at present that the Trump assistants is seeking to go along families in immigration detention for weeks or months. The reason that Trump can't do that under a current judicial order is that the courts stepped in to cease Obama from doing it.

Now Trump is trying to remove the shackles placed on his predecessor.

Obama was faced with a genuine increment in children and families coming to the US; Trump just decided that typical numbers were unacceptable

The about important affair to recall, when nosotros're comparing Obama's response to the 2014 border "crunch" to what Trump is doing now, is this chart:

This nautical chart combines 2 things: the number of people caught crossing into the Usa between ports of entry (apprehensions) and the number of people who came to ports of entry without immigration papers — for example, to seek aviary ("inadmissibles"). The two lines most likely to jump out at yous, each of which represents one fiscal year (October-September instead of Jan-December), are the blue line that arcs high over the summer months and the orange line that plummets during the winter.

The blue line is 2014 — that'south what Obama was dealing with. The orange line is 2017, when Trump came into function.

Fiscal year 2018 is the carmine line on the chart. Compared to 2017, information technology's a big increase, because 2017 was so anomalously low. Simply in context, it's more like a reversion to the norm of the by few years.

It'south worth noting, by the fashion, that if this chart went back to 2000 or so, the past few years would all wait pretty small in terms of border crossings. Unauthorized immigration into the US is still way downwards from historical levels. That drop has been particularly pronounced amidst single adults coming for work — of the people still coming in, a lot of them are children, families, or other asylum seekers.

Reversion to the Obama-era norm isn't what the Trump assistants wanted, though. The president took a ton of pride in the low number of edge crossings in the early months of his term — he kept bragging about it even as apprehensions crept support in autumn of 2017. When he started realizing that people were still coming in to seek asylum, he got upset that the US couldn't just shut downward the border — and pushed into action a policy calendar that would scissure downwardly on anyone trying to come to the The states without papers, especially if they crossed into the country illegally.

Obama in 2014 took a generally castigating approach to border crossers. Trump in 2018 took an entirely punitive one. Only Obama was reacting partly to circumstances; Trump was reacting solely to his own desires.

Both presidents prosecuted many edge crossers. But Trump's "zero tolerance" policy created family separation.

Prosecuting people for illegal entry into the US is not new. Illegal entry and illegal reentry take been the two most unremarkably prosecuted crimes in federal court for years — frequently via mass trials that basically prosecuted dozens of people at once. Obama didn't start this trend, but he certainly continued it.

While people charged with illegal entry or reentry made upwardly as much as one-half of all people prosecuted in federal court in April 2018, they even so fabricated up only 10 percent of all people Edge Patrol apprehended for crossing into the US between ports of entry.

In other words, officials were nevertheless deciding not to prosecute a lot of people — or, at least, didn't have the resources to prosecute a lot of people and and then had to be deliberate in deciding who deserved to be prosecuted. Every bit a general rule — though not always — people who said they feared persecution in their home countries and wanted asylum were not prosecuted. Neither were people who came to the US with their children.

In Apr 2018, still, Trump's Justice Department (led by Jeff Sessions) announced that they would start prosecuting every illegal entry case referred to them by the Department of Homeland Security. And in May 2018, Sessions and the Department of Homeland Security announced that they would start referring everyone who entered illegally for prosecution: "zero tolerance."

The Trump administration isn't actually prosecuting everyone who crosses the edge between ports of entry nonetheless — or fifty-fifty the bulk of them. Merely the implied corollary to the "zero tolerance" policy was that the Trump administration would no longer brand decisions about whom to prosecute based on whether someone was seeking aviary — or whether they were a parent.

That meant that parents were at present being referred into the custody of the Department of Justice — while their children were separated from them and reclassified as "unaccompanied minors."

Trump made separating families a affair of standard practice. Obama did non.

It'due south not that no family was ever separated at the border nether the Obama administration. But one-time Obama administration officials specify that families were separated but in detail circumstances — for instance, if a begetter was carrying drugs — that went in a higher place and beyond a typical case of illegal entry.

Nosotros don't know how often that happened, but we know information technology was non a widespread or standard practice.

Under the Trump administration, though, it became increasingly common. A test of "zippo tolerance" along one sector of the border in summer 2017 led to an unknown number of family separations. Seven hundred families were separated between October 2017 and April 2018.

From May 7 to June 20, separating a family unit who had entered between ports of entry was the standard practice of the Trump assistants. Information technology was the default.

Trump administration officials denied family separation was a "policy" for legalistic reasons, but they affirmed that "nothing tolerance" prosecutions were a policy. Until Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday allowing families to be kept together in clearing detention while parents were prosecuted, the administration maintained that separating families was an inevitable outcome of prosecuting parents.

Non every family was separated. Merely dozens of families a 24-hour interval were. At to the lowest degree 2,300 families were separated over those six or and then weeks.

We don't know how many families were separated under the Obama assistants, only there's no reason to believe that it numbered in the thousands fifty-fifty over the eight years that Obama was president. Because it simply wasn't standard practice. Nether Trump, it was.

Both presidents housed "unaccompanied" minors in temporary facilities — but under Obama, they'd pretty much all arrived in the US unaccompanied

The 2014 border "surge" was driven partly past an increment in families attempting to cross into the U.s. from Guatemala, Honduras, and Republic of el salvador. Just information technology was primarily driven by an increment in "unaccompanied alien children" — people under eighteen, coming to the Us without parents or guardians — from those same countries.

The federal government had a system to deal with unaccompanied kids, but information technology was underfunded and overloaded fifty-fifty earlier the 2014 "surge" — and quickly got backed up. As a event, Border Patrol ended up property kids for days beyond the 72 hours they were legally supposed to, and the government had to spin upwards temporary property shelters for children that looked a lot like jails.

Some of the pictures of these sites went viral once more in 2018, with people either misidentifying them as pictures of children separated from their parents under Trump or equally proof that Trump's policy was identical to Obama's. Neither is truthful.

The arrangement for dealing with unaccompanied migrant kids is overwhelmed again now. Most of the children in its custody — about 10,000 — are minors, by and large teenagers, who crossed into the US alone. Only with the Trump administration's "zippo tolerance" policy in effect, the system has also had to absorb more than 2,000 children separated from their parents — who are often immature children or fifty-fifty infants.

The temporary shelters that the government started amalgam last week — which government officials call "soft-sided shelters" and the media has called "tent cities" — are ane consequence of that overflow. The rise in "tender age" facilities, designed to agree children under five (as young equally infancy), is another.

Many of the problems with the system for unaccompanied immigrant kids run deep — at that place are long-running concerns with Border Patrol abuse of immigrant youth, for example, and with proper screening of the sponsors with whom children are placed. Trump'due south family separation policy brought attending to some of those problems. But the reason for the attending was that Trump was calculation children to the organization who weren't unaccompanied until the government took their parents away.

Obama detained families together — until the courts stepped in

Obama'due south response to the 2014 "border crisis" was to crack down on the people he could crack downwardly on: adults, including asylum seekers, and families.

At the time, there were special protections (under the 1997 Flores settlement) that stopped DHS from keeping unaccompanied immigrant children in detention, just not children who had come to the U.s.a. with their parents. So the Obama administration attempted to tamp down the number of Central American families seeking aviary in the The states by keeping families in detention and processing and deporting them as quickly as possible.

Immigration advocates challenged the policy of family detention under the Flores settlement. Judges agreed with them — in large part because information technology said the Obama administration was out of bounds in detaining migrant families for the purpose of "deterrence." (As NBC's Benjy Sarlin has pointed out, that's why certain Trump assistants officials have been careful not to say that family separation is a deterrent, or even a policy, at present.)

Ultimately, the 9th Excursion ruled that the Flores settlement covered not just unaccompanied alien children but "accompanied" ones equally well. It set a general standard that the government couldn't hold them in custody for more than xx days.

The Ninth Excursion stopped curt of maxim that parents could exist released under Flores. But the federal authorities has since made a practice, for the most part, of releasing the whole family after 20 days. Since the electric current family detention facilities — ii in Texas created under Obama, and an older one in Pennsylvania — are mostly full, they don't have a ton of space to detain families anyhow.

Until now.

Trump is at present trying to regain the legal authorization to do what Obama tried to exercise only was stopped from doing

The executive order Trump only signed, however, directs that families who enter without papers should exist detained until their cases are completed — which, for families seeking aviary, can take months or years. The order opens up options to set up temporary facilities for families on military bases and elsewhere. And information technology directs the attorney general to inquire the guess who applied Flores to "accompanied" children to undo that ruling.

At the same time, the Trump assistants is pressuring Congress to override the Flores settlement entirely to allow families to exist kept together in immigration detention facilities for as long as information technology takes to approve their claims — or, more likely, bear them.

We don't know much about the atmospheric condition in which families will be housed, or what access they'll have to legal counsel. But it'due south likely that family detention under Trump volition await similar to the fashion family detention did in 2014 — with some families getting basically no due procedure before getting deported, and others remaining in detention for weeks or months — before the courts stepped in and told the federal government it couldn't do that.

In other words, it's not really well-nigh what Obama or Trump did. Right at present, the question is what they are allowed to exercise.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2018/6/21/17488458/obama-immigration-policy-family-separation-border

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