Family Separation Policy at the Southern Border

The Policy

In April 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance” policy directing federal prosecutors to criminally charge every adult who crossed the border illegally. Because children cannot be held in federal criminal detention, this policy had an inevitable and deliberate consequence: children were separated from their parents and placed in separate government facilities. The administration argued it was simply enforcing the law, but prior administrations had exercised discretion to avoid separating families.

The separations began quietly but escalated rapidly. Between April and June 2018, more than 2,300 children were taken from their parents. Some were infants. Many parents were deported without their children and given no information about where their children had been sent or how to get them back. Internal government records later revealed that the administration had no system in place to track which children belonged to which parents.

The Horror

ProPublica obtained and released audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility in which children could be heard wailing and crying for their mothers and fathers. A border agent was recorded joking, “Well, we have an orchestra here.” The audio was devastating. It was played on the floor of the U.S. Senate and broadcast on news outlets worldwide.

Reports emerged of children held in cage-like enclosures made of chain-link fencing, sleeping on concrete floors under thin foil blankets. Facilities were overcrowded. Some children were given psychotropic medications without parental consent. Multiple children died in government custody or shortly after being released. The American Academy of Pediatrics warned that the separations could cause “irreparable harm” and “toxic stress” that could permanently damage children’s developing brains.

The Reversal

Facing a firestorm of bipartisan criticism — including from evangelical leaders, former first ladies of both parties, and his own wife Melania Trump — Trump signed an executive order on June 20, 2018, ostensibly ending the practice of family separation. But the order did not reunite the families already separated. Trump falsely blamed Democrats for the policy, claiming, “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” despite his administration having created and implemented the policy.

A federal judge in San Diego subsequently ordered the government to reunite all separated families. The process was chaotic and slow. The government acknowledged it could not locate the parents of hundreds of children. As of years later, some families had still never been reunited.

The Reckoning

A January 2021 report from the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General revealed that the total number of children separated was likely far higher than initially reported — potentially more than 5,500 over the life of the policy. The family separation crisis became one of the most condemned actions of the Trump presidency, drawing comparisons to some of the darkest chapters in American history. It demonstrated both the cruelty the administration was willing to employ as a deterrent and the bureaucratic incompetence that made the cruelty’s consequences even worse.