A Former ICE Director Explains How Separated Children Can Easily Become Orphans

A Former ICE Director Explains How Separated Children Can Easily Become Orphans
In some cases, the parent "has no legal authority to mandate return of their child."
By Tim Dickinson
22 hours ago


President Trump's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy has ripped thousands of children – some as young as 3 months old – from their migrant parents. Trump claims his new executive order will suspend child/parent separations, in favor of family detention at federal internment camps. But the administration has given contradictory accounts of what will happen to the children who have already undergone separation.

On Wednesday, administration officials told reporters no special effort would be made to return these children to their parents. On Thursday, Trump said he was directing government agencies to "work" to "reunite these previously separated groups." Yet the president, who lies constantly, undercut that assurance later in the same meeting, insisting his executive order was "limited," and adding: "No matter how you cut it, it leads to separation ultimately."

John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE Director under President Obama, tells Rolling Stone, "There's a very high risk of permanent separation" for the families that were ripped apart. Migrant parents could easily lose legal custody, he says, in a Kafka-esque tangle of American bureaucracies. (Trump on Friday mocked the migrants' "phony stories of sadness and grief.&quot

To understand the plight of the families affected by Trump's initiative – which Amnesty International has condemned as "nothing short of torture" – it's critical to understand that once family units are broken apart, parents and children are in the hands of two separate bureaucracies. Here's how the process typically goes: Parents are detained by ICE within the Department of Homeland Security; the children are handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services, and are now considered unaccompanied minors. Some of the children have extended family in America who can provide a home for them. For the rest, HHS seeks foster care placements – anywhere in the U.S. that can accommodate them. "They're flying these kids all over the country," says Sandweg.

The government is not equipped to keep track of the broken family units as they proceed separately through the adjudication and/or deportation process. "It's really hard, logistically, to do this – to track movements of everybody, to match IDs," Sandweg says. "And if you've got two separate agencies doing it, it's really, really hard – even if you've planned it. I'm seeing no signs that any of this was well planned." For parents who've already been deported, Sandweg adds, "There is no agency that's now tracking the parent in Honduras." In other words, even if the Trump administration wanted to fly the child back home, Sandweg says, there's no guarantee the government knows where to send them.

more...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/family-separation-explained-w521891