Here's the real story on migrant children separated from parents

As is usually the case, the latest Trump outrage as presented to you by the self-righteous media is not an accurate reflection of what’s really going on.

If you’ve been listening to the scandalized reports from the press and the outraged howls of Democrats and celebrities, you have the impression the Trump Administration is seizing migrant children, separating them from their families and banishing them to dark dungeons – never to see their parents again. And they’re doing all of this because they’re racist xenophobes ...

Is this even close to what’s really going on?

.... National Review’s Rich Lowry explains the truth about how this works, and under what circumstances, and why:

Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings.

It’s the last that is operative here. The past practice had been to give a free pass to an adult who is part of a family unit. The new Trump policy is to prosecute all adults. The idea is to send a signal that we are serious about our laws and to create a deterrent against re-entry. (Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, illegal re-entry a felony.)

When a migrant is prosecuted for illegal entry, he or she is taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. In no circumstance anywhere in the U.S. do the marshals care for the children of people they take into custody. The child is taken into the custody of HHS, who cares for them at temporary shelters.

The criminal proceedings are exceptionally short, assuming there is no aggravating factor such as a prior illegal entity or another crime. The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE.

If the adult then wants to go home, in keeping with the expedited order of removal that is issued as a matter of course, it’s relatively simple. The adult should be reunited quickly with his or her child, and the family returned home as a unit. In this scenario, there’s only a very brief separation.

Where it becomes much more of an issue is if the adult files an asylum claim. In that scenario, the adults are almost certainly going to be detained longer than the government is allowed to hold their children.That’s because of something called the Flores Consent Decree from 1997. It says that unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so.

The clock ticking on the time the government can hold a child will almost always run out before an asylum claim is settled. The migrant is allowed ten days to seek an attorney, and there may be continuances or other complications.

This creates the choice of either releasing the adults and children together into the country pending the adjudication of the asylum claim, or holding the adults and releasing the children. If the adult is held, HHS places the child with a responsible party in the U.S., ideally a relative (migrants are likely to have family and friends here).

The media coverage tells you none of this, of course....

The truth is that when there is separation, it’s very brief, and every family that wants to come to the United States can easily avoid it happening by a) going to a legitimate port of entry instead of sneaking across the border illegally, and by telling the truth about who they are....

But much of America, including almost all of the media and just about every member of the Democratic Party, has stopped taking illegal immigration seriously as a crime. But the law says it is, and the border patrol is charged with treating it like it is....

Related

'We will not apologize for doing our job', by Mark Krikorian, Center for Immigration Studies, June 19, 2018:

... The manic wave of "concentration camp" accusations and Hitler comparisons is reminiscent of the atrocity propaganda that helped propel us into World War I (stories of Germans "bayoneting Belgian babies", raping nuns, and the like). Democratic politicians are weeping on television, staged photos are widely retweeted, and even former President George Bush's wife has penned an op-ed calling for a "kinder, more compassionate" means of enforcing our immigration laws.

The reality is more mundane. Border apprehensions of adults bringing children with them skyrocketed during the Obama administration, from about 15,000 in Fiscal Year 2013 (the first time separate statistics were reported) to more than 75,000 in FY 2017. Before the Obama years, it was rare for a parent to bring children with her when trying to infiltrate the U.S. border. No parent, after all, would subject her children to such risks unless there was an incentive to do so.

And that incentive was not flight from gang violence; research has shown almost everyone leaving Central America is motivated by economic reasons. Instead, the prospect of being released into the United States if you brought a child with you was what has caused the spike in arrests of what he Border Patrol calls "family units" at the border.

As the New York Times reported earlier this year:

Some migrants have admitted they brought their children not only to remove them from danger in such places as Central America and Africa, but because they believed it would cause the authorities to release them from custody sooner.

Others have admitted to posing falsely with children who are not their own, and Border Patrol officials say that such instances of fraud are increasing.

Children have served as get-out-of-jail-free cards for border infiltrators, ensuring the whole family's release with a notice to appear in immigration court some months or years in the future, and when they failed to appear, the Obama administration's prioritization rules meant no one would track you down.

When you reward something, you can expect to get more of it.

How to change the expectations of prospective illegal aliens? Stop rewarding them when they bring children along. This is what the administration has done. In resuming the Bush-era zero-tolerance policy at the border, the Justice Department is aimed at prosecuting every border infiltrator for the crime of "entry without inspection", a policy that even Sens. Flake and McCain vociferously supported when Obama rolled it back. But since children don't accompany their parents to jail, the critics of this policy are implicitly demanding that border-jumpers bringing children with them should be exempt from prosecution — a sure recipe for even more children to be smuggled through Mexico and to the Rio Grande.

In addition to criminal prosecution (which results in only a few days in prison for first offenders) the other reason illegal-alien children are separated from their illegal-alien parents at the border is when the parent claims asylum. Only a small percentage of Central American illegals actually get asylum, but they've been coached by smugglers and anti-borders activists to make the claim anyway as a means of gaining entry to the United States. The government's choice at that point is to detain the parents and put the children in a shelter (because of legal prohibition on keeping children in detention for more than 20 days, even with their parents) or to release the whole family with a notice to appear, which they will ignore, disappearing into the illegal population. Again, the critics of current policy are saying that bringing a child with you when you ask for asylum should exempt you from detention, i.e., give you access to the United States, after which you disappear.

These problems could be fixed with legal changes present in both immigration bills expected to be voted on this week, as my colleague Andrew Arthur explained earlier today. The alternative is to surrender to the use of children as human shields against immigration enforcement, which will only invite even more widespread use of children as tickets to America, not only for Central Americans but also for illegal immigrants from around the world using Mexico as a springboard to sneak into the United States.

Article final link:

The above article contains excerpts - we encourage you to read the complete original article

Search form

Here's the real story on migrant children separated from parents