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....
