The United States family separation policy under the Trump administration was presented to the public as a "zero tolerance" approach intended to deter illegal immigration and to encourage tougher legislation. In some cases, families following the legal procedure to apply for asylum at official border crossings were also separated. It was officially adopted across the entire US–Mexico border from April 2018 until June 2018. Under the policy, federal authorities separated children and infants from parents or guardians with whom they had entered the US. The adults were prosecuted and held in federal jails or deported, and the children were placed under the supervision of the US Department of Health and Human Services. More than 5,500 children, including infants, were removed and hundreds have still not been reunited as of August 2022.
By early June 2018, it emerged that the policy did not include measures to reunite the families that it had separated. Following national and international criticism, on June 20, 2018, Trump signed an executive order ending family separations at the border. On June 26, 2018, US District Judge Dana Sabraw issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against the family separation policy and ordered that all children be reunited with their parents within thirty days. In 2019, a release of emails obtained by NBC News revealed that although the administration had said that they would use the government's "central database" to reconnect the thousands of families that had been separated, the government had only enough information to reconnect sixty children with their parents. By November 2020, the parents of 666 children still had not been found. The administration refused to provide funds to cover the expenses of reuniting families, and volunteer organizations provided both volunteers and funding.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform reported in July 2019 that over 700 children had been separated from their parents after the policy's official end. In July, it was reported that as many as five children per day were being separated, and by the end of the year, the total had reached over 1,100.
In January 2019, an investigation showed that the child separation policy had actually begun in the summer of 2017, prior to the zero tolerance policy announced in April 2018. Federal officials said there were no plans to attempt to reunite these children because "it would destabilize the permanency of their existing home environment, and could be traumatic to the children."
In June 2019, a group of attorneys with the Flores settlement visited a Border Patrol center in Clint, Texas. The children told the lawyers that meals consisted of instant oatmeal, a cookie and sweetened drink for breakfast, instant noodles for lunch, and a heated frozen burrito and a cookie for dinner. They said they had not had a clean change of clothing or a bath for weeks. There were no adult caretakers; girls as young as ten were taking care of the younger ones.
History
Previous U.S. policy
Prior to the Trump administration, the United States did not routinely separate migrant parents from their children. Rather, previous administrations used either family detention facilities (allowing families to remain intact pending deportation hearings in civil immigration court) or alternatives to detention (e.g., release pending further hearings). Prior to the Trump administration, families traveling together were generally only separated under narrow circumstances, such as suspicion of human trafficking, an outstanding warrant, or fraud.
For decades, the government did not pursue criminal charges cases for illegal entry, a misdemeanor offense. But, in 2005, President George W. Bush launched Operation Streamline, a program targeting a stretch of the U.S.–Mexico border that referred unlawful entrants for criminal prosecution and expedited their deportation. But parents traveling with minor children were typically exempt from the policy. In 2006, Congress designated a single facility—the T. Don Hutto Residential Center—to house families together, and that facility opened in 2006.
The Obama administration initially rejected family detention and shuttered the Hutto Center. But, after the 2014 American immigration crisis, Obama assembled a multiagency team tasked with crafting new immigration policies. This occasioned the first discussion of a family-separation policy, which was proposed by ICE official Thomas Homan, though the proposal was quickly rejected. Instead, the administration opted to expand the detention policy and built new family-detention facilities, meant to hold families indefinitely pending deportation.