The Daily - “Divided,” Part 1: How Family Separations Started

Episode Date: August 21, 2018

The policy began in secret. The Trump administration denied such a policy existed. And when it finally acknowledged that migrant children were being separated from their parents at the border, chaos ensued. Only now is the full picture of what happened and why becoming clear. Guest hosts: Annie Correal, who covers New York City for The New York Times, and Caitlin Dickerson, an immigration reporter at The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. The policy began in secret. The government denied there even was a policy. And when it finally acknowledged what was happening, chaos ensued. Only now, the full picture of what happened and why

has started to become clear in the U.S. government's separation of migrant parents and their children. It's Tuesday, August 21st. I don't think I ever saw this coming. I mean, it's more like I never thought they would actually do it. So as a result, I never even imagined what the reaction to it might look like, you know, what the country might think of it, because it just seemed so unlikely. Today is the deadline date by which the government is supposed to have reunited children with their families.

Instead, what we know is true is that hundreds of family members have not yet been reunited. There's no way that the government can reunify every single child by the deadline today. And that's because they never had a plan to put these families back together in the first place. Nobody chooses to be separated. unlike what this administration is saying. And I can guarantee you the facts are just the opposite. The likelihood of most of these 463 deportees ever seeing their kids again is virtually non-existent. When? That's a question I get from parents.

When are the parents going to see their children again? When? When? When? And that's what we all need to be asking. When? All of this starts with a woman called Ms. L. My name is Caitlin Dickerson. I'm an immigration reporter here at The Times. So I'm going to call, I have to call one woman to ask her about a couple of cases of specific children. And back in February, I get a phone call from a lawyer at the ACLU.

He wants to talk on background, and he says he's about to file a lawsuit on behalf of this woman. Ms. L came from the Congo with her 7-year-old daughter, who's called SS, in the lawsuit. He said they spoke Lingala, and they didn't know any English, but they knew enough Spanish

to be able to get into Mexico and then explain to border agents there that they were seeking asylum. So he said they spent about four days in what they thought was kind of a motel. Then at one point, she's in a room next door to her daughter, and she hears her daughter screaming, and her daughter saying, no, I don't want to leave my mom. I want to stay with my mom. Ms. L starts to panic. She doesn't know what's going on. And the next thing she knows, her daughter is taken away.

So this attorney says he's about to file a lawsuit to try to force the government to reunify Ms. L and her daughter. But he also tells me this isn't the only case. This is happening all over the country. Let me get to some other sensitive homeland security issues while I have you. Now, when he tells me this, it's not the first time that I'm hearing about separating families at the border. I'd actually been following that issue for months, way before the ACLU ever called. Are you, the Department of Homeland Security, considering a new initiative... Since March of 2017.

...that would separate children from their parents if they tried to enter the United States illegally? When John Kelly, who was then Homeland Security Secretary, went on CNN and said that he was considering family separation as a way to discourage people from coming here. Yes, I am considering, in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network, I am considering exactly that. They will be well cared for as we deal with their parents. And just a couple weeks later, he walks that back and says, no, no, no, I'm not going to do it. Then just a couple weeks later, he walks that back and says, no, no, no, I'm not going to do it. There has been reports that you are considering separating children from their mothers at the border.

Only if the situation at that point in time requires it. If the mother is sick or addicted to drugs or whatever. So if you thought the child was endangered, that's the only circumstance to which you would separate? Can't imagine doing it otherwise. But that was never true. I knew from my own sources in the government who were talking to me on background that even after John Kelly backpedals from this policy,

the administration is still very much quietly moving in the direction toward family separation. But it was extremely difficult to get anyone to confirm this on the record. It was never publicly revealed. So when the ACLU attorney calls me, my next question is, what kind of proof do you have? And he says he knows because he's been talking to people who operate the shelters where these separated children are being sent. I can try them each again in like two minutes. Okay. Now, these shelters were set up to take care of unaccompanied minors. And if you remember, there was a flood of them in 2014 coming into the

country under President Obama. Good morning. So many of them are coming in on buses. Others are being flown here. And this facility... About 1,000 unaccompanied children who turned themselves in to the Border Patrol are being held in this warehouse in Nogales, Arizona. They were transferred from Texas, where government shelters have been overwhelmed. But those kids were mostly teenage boys, 16, 17-year-olds. They anticipate another 35 to 4,000 young people in the next three to four days just here at this facility. But starting in 2017, these shelter operators said they were seeing something very different, things they had never seen before. One, they were much younger than the unaccompanied minors they were used to getting. So

kids were arriving who were three, four, five, six years old. Clearly, they weren't old enough or strong enough to cross the border without the help of an adult. Two is that unaccompanied minors, when they show up to the shelters, they know what to expect. They're prepared before they get to the United States. You know, the smuggler who brings them tells them, you know, you're going to go to the shelter, you're going to be there for a couple of months until somebody, usually a family member or a friend, is approved to sponsor you and they can pick you up. So just kind of sit tight. This is how it works. You'll be fine. But these kids showing up were completely out of sorts. They were basically in a constant state of tantrum. I mean, there were kids who were clearly old enough to

talk and who in the past had been able to talk, but who became completely nonverbal. There were kids who were clearly, you know, walking around and old enough to use the toilet, but they needed diapers because they were wetting their clothes, wetting the bed. You know, just extreme emotional distress, total disorientation. Clearly kids who were not expecting to end up in this situation and who were really deeply affected by it.

As he's telling me this, I'm realizing that these kids might be the first glimpse of this policy that the administration is claiming it doesn't have. And so I started to ask around, and I'm talking to sources in the government too and asking them the same thing, and they're saying, you know, yes, we're seeing memos and we're hearing discussion of this, but there's no number that we know of yet. And then April comes around. And April is when the Department of Health and Human Services, which is the agency that is responsible for housing the children, contacts the Department of Homeland Security, which houses the parents. And they say, we have a lot of kids in our custody whose parents we can't find. Nobody is applying to sponsor them.

We don't know what to do. They're saying they were taken away from their parent. We can't get a hold of the parent. We don't know who the parent is. Can you help us? So DHS says, okay, we'll help you find the parents. Can you give us a list? HHS says yes. And they put together a document that has around 700 names, and that becomes the very first official accounting of all the separated children. And then I get access to it. So I type up an email to DHS on April 17th.

We're preparing to publish a story based on information that we've received from several DHS sources on background, which shows that more than 700 children have been separated from their parents by immigration authorities since last October. We wanted to run this by you to ensure that DHS doesn't dispute context or further comment. Why have these separations occurred? Are these separations occurring more often than in the past? Has a decision about whether to adopt a policy

of family separation for the purposes of deterrence been made? Why or why not? And my deadline is noon tomorrow. Please be in touch as soon as possible. And then I hit send. So 40 minutes later, I get a response. DHS does not currently have a policy of separating families at the border for deterrence purposes. As required by law, DHS must protect the best interests of minor children crossing

our borders, and occasionally this results in separating children from an adult or if we think the child is otherwise in danger. Unfortunately, we have seen many instances where children are operational control of our border, and it's addressed from Tyler Q. Holton, DHS press secretary. So he's clearly denying that family separation is happening. So he's clearly denying that family separation is happening. So we go back and forth over several days with spokespeople at the agency where they tell me that my numbers are wrong, that if we publish the story, we'll be misleading the public. At one point, a spokesperson even tells me over the phone that my sources must be lying to me or creating fake documents to try to trick me. So we hear them out. We say, okay, turn over whatever evidence you have that, you know, the story we think is true is inaccurate, and then we'll decide how to proceed. And all the

while, I'm calling more and more officials within these two agencies, anybody who I know has access to this data, and I'm asking them, can you confirm these numbers for me? And if you can, how do you know they're true? Is there any way that they could be untrue because that's what these spokespeople are telling me? And one after the other, they confirm that, yes, these are the right numbers. And finally, on April 20th, the agency acknowledges that the numbers are accurate.

They tell me they've tracked down the discrepancy, and they send me a new statement for the story. So we publish it. And then it kind of blew up. We'll be right back. Thousands of people protested across Texas yesterday. They accused the administration of punishing undocumented children by removing them from their parents.

The Department of Homeland Security confirms 1,995 children were separated from their parents between April 19th and May 31st. It's hard to believe, but new government figures out tonight show nearly 2,000 children have been separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border from mid-April. We're talking about the story of this mother who was breastfeeding her child, right? And the border customs guys had taken that child away from her. The Statue of Liberty is really weeping today. A lot of other news outlets started to write stories about family separation. These children are not animals. They are not bargaining chips.

They are not leveraged to help President Trump build his wall. Congress called for hearings. They are children who have been President Trump build his wall. Congress called for hearings. They are children who have been forcibly removed from their parents in our name. But the administration doubles down. Immigration is the fault in all of the problems that we're having, because we cannot get them to sign legislation. We cannot get them even to the negotiating table. And I say it's very strongly the Democrats' fault.

They're repeating over and over again, we do not have a policy of family separation. We do not have a policy of family separation. We're a country of law and order, and we're enforcing the law and protecting our borders. We would like to fix these loopholes. And if Democrats want to get serious about it instead of playing political games, they're welcome to come here and sit down with the president and actually do something about it. Jill. You're a parent. Don't you have any empathy?

Jill, go ahead. Come on, Sarah. You're a parent. Don't you have any empathy for what these people are going through? They have less than you. Brian. Guys. Sarah, come on.

Settle down. I mean, in these hearings and in these press conferences, you keep hearing it. DHS is not separating families legitimately seeking asylum at ports of entry. And it's just not true. How is this not specifically child abuse for these innocent children who are indeed being separated from their parents? So I want to be clear on a couple other things. The vast majority, vast, vast majority of children who are in the care of HHS right now, 10,000 of the 12,000, were sent here alone by their parents.

That's when they were separated. So somehow we've conflated everything. But there's two separate issues. 10,000 of those currently in custody were sent by their parents with strangers to undertake a completely dangerous and deadly travel alone. That would be my answer to that question. If I could follow up, though, for the hundreds that are not included in there, you said 10,000, but for the hundreds that we have seen, perhaps up to 2,000, are there any examples of child abuse you believe?

And how could this not be child abuse for the people who are taken from their parents, not the ones who are sent here with their parents' blessing with a smuggler, but the people who are taken from their parents? Unfortunately, I'm not in any position to deal with hearsay stories. If someone has a specific allegation, as I always do when I testify, I ask that they provide that information. Finally, the story gets so big

that the administration needs to acknowledge in some way that this is happening. And so on May 8th, Jeff Sessions comes forward and he announces a zero-tolerance policy. If you're smuggling a child, then we're going to prosecute you. And that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don't want your child to be separated,

then don't bring them across the border illegally. It's not our fault that somebody does that. What that means is that he says he's decided to prosecute every single parent who crosses the border with a child and that in order to do that, he has to separate parents from children. So in other words, he says the administration does not have a family separation policy, but they have a policy that results in family separation. So we're sending a message to the world, really. The border is not open. The border is not open.

Don't come unlawfully. And whereas before the separations were happening kind of quietly, only sometimes in certain places, then they start to happen everywhere. And almost overnight, you see these shelters, which are all over the country, start to fill up really quickly with separated kids. And a lot of those kids ended up here in New York. Here are the stories we're watching this morning. Is there any way to get New York City traffic under control?

My name is Annie Correal. I'm a reporter on the Metro Desk. I cover New York City. And on June 20th, the city wakes up to some startling news. It's this footage on New York One, our local news station. It has been an incredibly fast-moving day. And it shows kids being led into this center up in Harlem that supposedly have been separated from their parents at the border. Now, New York One's exclusive footage of young children

entering an East Harlem foster care center in the middle of the night drew international attention. It was very odd what was happening at about 1 o'clock this morning. That's right. It was me and camera woman Zoe Slemons. We got a tip to go to this agency. It's called the Cayuga Centers. They have a facility in East Harlem. We were told, and we want to tell you exactly what we were told and what the situation is.

We were told that kids separated from their parents along the southern U.S. border would be brought there. This story had landed like a bombshell in New York City. No one knows that any of these children have been brought, usually by night, to centers around the city. All of us are shocked by the images we're seeing. I'm shocked to have learned here today there are now 239 children right here. And there's this sense of how could we not have known? But as it turns out, not even the mayor knew. Who are these children? How many are they? Where are they?

What is happening here? How is it possible that none of us knew there were 239 kids right here in our own city? How is the federal government holding back that information from the people of this city? And holding back the help that these kids could need? It's like the city went to sleep, woke up the next day, and hundreds of kids are on our doorstep. Children being kept in cages. up the next day and hundreds of kids are on our doorstep. Children being kept in cages, parents having no idea where their children are or what will happen to them. We're all shocked at what we think is something happening far away. This is definitely not just something that's happening in New York. New York is sort of representative of all these cities that found themselves sort of pulled into the family

separation story. So this is also happening in Chicago. It's happening in Michigan, Florida. This is not something that's just happening in New York. Well, I have to tell you, I am further shocked to find out today how much this policy has now come home right here to New York City, and right here to this location. Thank you very much. We're signing an executive order. That same day, while public outrage over this issue is exploding all over the country, President Trump is forced to do something about it.

It's about keeping families together. So he makes an announcement that changes the entire trajectory of the story. While at the same time, being sure that we have a very powerful, very strong border. He signs this executive order, which still places blame for the separations outside the White House. And we're working very hard on immigration. It's been just left out in the cold. People haven't dealt with it, and we are dealing with it. So step by step.

But it does end them. Nobody's had the political courage to take care of it, but we're going to take care of it. It's been going on for a long time. The executive order is actually called affording Congress an opportunity to address family separation. And in the text, it says, it is unfortunate that Congress's failure to act and court orders have put the administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law. We look forward and expect the House to act this week.

We ask them to do their job. The laws need to be changed. This is a problem that president after president has dealt with for decades. This one is willing to stand up and fix it. We ask Congress to do their part. Though, the order actually doesn't say anything about how the government is going to deal with the thousands of kids who have already been separated. And so their situation didn't change at all. Anybody with a heart would feel very strongly about it. We don't like to see families separated. At the same time, we don't want people coming into our country illegally.

This takes care of the problem. Thank you very much, everybody. Thanks, Gary. Thanks, Gary. So it really doesn't shut down the criticism over this policy in the way that the White House might have expected that it would. There's a few fights. There's a few fights.

They're still coming to the wardia. Still coming to the wardia. So we will stay. And we will stay. And we will stay. Until that last flight. Until that last flight. Gets here. Gets here.

Gets here. By the next day, June 21st, while this sort of public uproar is happening around the separated children in New York City, we're just trying to figure out who they are and where their parents are. And there's very little information. I have to follow up on basically any little lead I get. So maybe the Honduran consul tells me, we know of five mothers in Seattle who have kids in New York City. And that's how I start realizing just how far-flung these families are.

There may be 300-some children in New York, but their parents are spread all across the country. So I make a spreadsheet just to try to keep track of all of them. Who's the kid? How old is he? Where's his mom? Does she have a lawyer? Does he have a lawyer? How long have they been here? Can we talk to them? So my job is to figure out what's happening inside the federal government and what the next phase of this story is going to look like. So I, along with some of my colleagues, start to interview federal workers. We talk to more than a dozen people in the agencies that are involved.

And I write a story about this sort of extreme anguish and frustration and whiplash that people are feeling inside the government. There's one office in the Homeland Security Department, for example, that processes complaints from people who are inside immigration detention. And I learned that in that office, for weeks, people had been breaking down in tears at their desks because they were getting these desperate emails from parents who were begging for information about where their children were. And the way their computers work is that when you pull up one of those complaints, it automatically shows you a photo of the person involved who was taken at the border. So these workers are sitting at their desks and they're looking at photos of these little kids and they're just breaking down in tears because the photos,

I'm told they actually kind of look like school photos. You know, they're four and five-year-olds who don't know what else to do in front of a camera except for smile. And of course, the kids have no idea when those photos are taken, you know, what's about to happen, that they're about to be taken away from their parents. Another ICE official tells us they were asked to process deportation for a six-year-old boy. The government wanted to deport the boy alone. And this official says, you know, they're thinking really seriously about just quitting their job on the spot. But instead, they decide that they need to stay stay and the words they used were to bear witness to what's happening. Asylum officers whose job it is to conduct these credible fear interviews,

you know, the parents, to find out if they're actually eligible for asylum, they're telling me they can't sleep at night when they get home and they can also barely get through the day because they literally can't do these interviews. The parents are crying too hard in the conversations to explain where they're fleeing from, what the circumstances they're fleeing are, you know, to actually make a case for themselves. They're too distraught to even do that. And then as I'm having these conversations on background, there's no official information coming out about how the government is going to move forward. And that's because there are no real plans at this point. There are no answers to these questions. Entonces, ¿ustedes cuándo salieron de Honduras para la frontera? ¿Cuándo fue eso?

El 4 de mayo. El 4 de mayo salieron los dos solitos. We know nothing. The shelters and foster care agencies here, they can't give us any information under federal contract. So if I want to know about a kid in New York, I actually have to go find their mom in Colorado or Arizona or Seattle, which is what I start doing. I reached out to an organization that advocates for immigrants there. And they told me that, yes, there were 50 separated parents at detention centers in Seattle. And one of them calls me that night.

Yolani Padilla. And this is the first time I've spoken to a separated parent. And she's speaking to me from a federal detention center. And periodically, a voice comes on the phone reminding me that this is a call from a detention center and we're being recorded. a detention center and were being recorded. She tells me this kind of chilling anecdote about how they were separated. They took her photograph and they took his photograph.

Then they photographed them together. And then she was told to walk one way, and her son was told to walk the other. And they never saw each other again. I asked her what it was like when she finally spoke to her son after about a month of not knowing where he was, what it was like to find out your son was in New York, that your son was in New York, 3,000 miles from you? What did you think? Oof, it was like a weight was lifted from me,

because at least I knew where he was. She spoke to him and that he couldn't really talk because he was crying. And that the director of the center said, you know, just talk to him, tell him everything you're feeling. He's here, he's listening, he just can't talk. She says that she has no proof that he's her son beyond the little case that his eyeglasses were kept in because everything was taken from them when they were separated at the border. And there is no timeline for how she can see her son again

or really even if they'll see each other again. I know. I mean, I would just say there's nothing like talking to a parent who doesn't know where their child is. Mm. Whoa. There's nothing like that, and it's really hard to, you know, hang up the phone and forget a conversation like that Tomorrow, part two of our series on family separation.

Here's what else you need to know today. Thank you very much. That's really for ice, I have to tell you. That's not for me. That's for ICE. On Monday, President Trump honored federal immigration agents during an event at the White House. We're here today to salute the incredibly brave patriots who keep America safe, the heroes of ICE and CBC. To everyone here today from Immigration and Customs, Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, I want to let you know that we love you, we support you, we will always have your back and I think you know that. The event, called Salute to the Heroes, celebrated two of the agencies, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, that were most closely involved with the separation of migrant children and

their parents. And on Monday, 89 South Korean families crossed the border into North Korea to be temporarily reunited with relatives they haven't seen since war broke out between the two countries nearly seven decades ago. Such reunifications used to occur regularly until North Korea stopped them after 2015 amid rising tensions with the South. This year, it resumed the program in a sign of warming relations between the two Koreas as they negotiate a possible peace deal. The reunited family members are allowed to spend 11 hours together over three days before being separated again.

After three days and just a few hours to spend together, it was time to say goodbye, knowing it was almost definitely forever. About 60,000 South Koreans, many of them in their 80s or older, are still waiting for a chance to meet their wives, siblings, and

parents across the border in the North. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow. and parents across the border in the North. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.