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In the weeks leading up to summer, it appears as though the entire country has turned its attention to America’s border cities. There, a crisis emerged when the Trump administration ordered a “zero tolerance policy” calling for the prosecution of migrants attempting to enter the country via asylum or otherwise.
The policy change mandated that border agents detain anyone attempting to cross—which is typically treated as a civil misdemeanor offense—and try it as a criminal case. In turn, parents traveling with children were separated at the border and sent to different detention facilities.
Since the practice began, stories have emerged of infants being ripped out of their mother’s arms, fathers who died from suicide after being separated from their families, and the guttural, heartbreaking cries of children begging for their parents.
The pure, unadulterated outrage that followed from the American public, churches and advocacy groups reached a fever pitch before the president signed an executive order that ended the separation of families on Wednesday. However, while signing the order, President Donald Trump made it abundantly clear that his administration’s “zero tolerance policy” toward migrants will remain, which has left followers of this humanitarian and political catastrophe with more questions than answers.
Will families actually stay together?
According to the executive order, which was posted to the White House website, families will remain together “where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.” However, it additionally noted that children and parents may be separated if the government determines keeping them together “would pose a risk to the child’s welfare,” which gives the government room for interpretation of the law.
Is it actually legal to detain families, even if they are together?
This is where things get very murky. According to a 1997 court ruling known as the “Flores Settlement,” children who are detained at the border with parents must be placed with a family friend or immediate relative “without unnecessary delay,” Vox explained. But, as the ruling states, immigrant children who must remain in custody must be placed in the “least restrictive conditions” possible. Those conditions include food, running water, medical care and separate living quarters from unrelated adults.
The last part—separate living spaces—is what likely will cause major issues in the near future.
In 2014, the Obama administration attempted to keep families together in detention centers following a massive uptick in asylum-seekers from Central America. However, immigration advocates found the practice inhumane. So, a 2015 court set a general standard stating the government could only hold children in custody for up to 20 days, NPR reports. And though the court never specified how long parents could be held, the Obama administration made it practice to release the entire family together, with certain restrictions, such as placing ankle monitoring bracelets on parents to ensure they’d return to court.
There is no word yet if Trump’s administration will do the same, however, he has time and time again ridiculed the practice of releasing the families, often referring to it as “catch and release.” Trump has also instructed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to ask the federal court to modify that agreement so there will be no limit on how long children (and thus their families) can remain in detention, NPR explained.
Where will the families be housed?
Again, this is another question in the air (are you sensing a pattern in this crisis?).
As part of Trump’s instruction to Sessions, the president also called on different branches of his administration to find facilities that could be available for detaining families with children, NPR reports. Trump also asked the Defense Department, to build new facilities "if necessary."
What will happen to the families already separated?
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who provided a statement to NPR, it is indeed working side-by-side with the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to reunite families. "ICE and ORR will work together to locate separated children, verify the parent/child relationship, and set up regular communication and removal coordination, if necessary.”
"ICE will make every effort to reunite the child with the parent once the parent's immigration case has been adjudicated," the spokesperson added. However, according to multiple reports, this just isn’t happening.
According to PRI, the process of unification is difficult because the adults and children fall into different legal paths at the border, and are thus the responsibility of different government agencies. The parents and children are often given different case numbers, so it’s hard to track one another down.
“If they don’t reunite these kids and their parents right away, what can happen is the kids will be stuck in the US for years, guardians will be appointed, and their parents will be down in Honduras or Guatemala with no idea where their child is and no meaningful way to reunite,”John Sandweg, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Obama administration, told MSNBC.
Furthermore, several lawyers and advocates explained to the New Yorker, that the process of finding a child within the system after a parent has been released or deported is nearly impossible. The experts who spoke with the New Yorker explained, in great detail, how the parent is forced to track his or her own child down using a system of non-profits, a 1-800 number set up by ORR, and simply having a bit of luck with finding their loved one.
“I have a master’s degree, and I’m fluent in English,” Emily Kephart, a program coordinator at an immigrant-rights group known as Kids in Need of Defense, told the New Yorker. “And it takes me days to figure one of these cases out.”
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