Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is the Same Old Cruel Policy of Family Separation

To mark the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a press release on April 30 titled “100 Days of Fighting Fake News.” At the top of the list, the Trump administration rails against the media for “FALSELY” — in all caps — reporting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been deporting U.S. citizen children. “In both cases,” the release claims, “the mother made the determination to take her children with her back to Honduras.”

Over the past few weeks, as news broke that three U.S. citizen children — aged 2, 4 and 7 — were deported alongside their undocumented mothers, the Trump administration has held fast to this rebuttal. Yet attorneys for the two mothers, who were detained during routine immigration check-ins in New Orleans, Louisiana, say that the families were never given an opportunity to determine their own children’s fate. The lawyers also report that the mothers were denied any contact with their legal representatives and family members before their deportation. One of the children, a 4-year-old boy undergoing treatment for a rare form of Stage 4 cancer, was sent to Honduras without his medications and now lacks access to the doctors managing his care.

“If it was truly a choice situation, then why forbid them from talking to their family members and attorneys?” Sirine Shebaya, the executive director of the National Immigration Project told PBS on April 28. “If this was a transparent situation … then there would have been no reason for immigration authorities to specifically prevent them, despite many outreaches, from being able to talk to their family members and their lawyer to actually make that choice. And it is a form of family separation.”

Most of us will remember when Trump’s first administration came under fire for its so-called “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which mandated the separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2017, the government began detaining and criminally charging adults who arrived in the U.S. without authorization, removing more than 5,000 children from their parents without an adequate system to track them. The administration claimed at the time that family separation was an unfortunate consequence of its policy of prosecuting people who cross the border without documentation — but later reporting revealed that the terror it wrought was in fact the goal.

Now, the Trump administration is insisting that its deportation of U.S. citizens is a way to avoid separating families — a rhetorical sleight of hand that casts the continued erosion of immigrants’ rights as an act of compassion. In reality, the latest deportations are part of the same corrosive system that tore families apart eight years ago; the Trump administration has simply honed its marketing strategy.

Of course, basic facts of the case contradict the Trump administration’s claim that ICE was just following the mothers’ wishes. The father of the 2-year-old girl filed an emergency petition to keep her in the U.S., but she was nevertheless placed on a deportation flight before the courts opened. The administration’s audacious disregard for due process sparked the federal judge overseeing the case to express a “strong suspicion” that the government had just done something “illegal and unconstitutional.”

The latest deportations are part of the same corrosive system that tore families apart eight years ago; the Trump administration has simply honed its marketing strategy.

“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a conservative Trump appointee. “But the court doesn’t know that.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has deported at least one mother to Cuba who requested to take her U.S. citizen child with her. Lawyers told NBC News that Heidy Sánchez’s 17-month-old daughter suffers from seizures and is still being breastfed. “They never gave me the option to take my daughter,” Sánchez said.

According to the American Immigration Council, more than 4 million U.S. citizens under the age of 18 have at least one undocumented parent. Numerous studies have found that the deportation and detention of family members can harm children’s emotional wellbeing and put their physical health at risk. In the event that a parent is deported, the American Immigration Council notes that “ICE is supposed to ‘accommodate, to the extent practicable,’ a detained parent’s efforts to make guardianship or travel arrangements for the child prior to deportation” — accommodations that have now been ignored in at least three recent cases.

What’s clear is that Trump’s attempt to rapidly scale up a mass deportation machine shows little regard for human rights or due process. If the administration were truly interested in keeping families together, for instance, it would not have canceled the Family Case Management Program in 2017, which provided families seeking asylum with community-based support services as an alternative to detention. Rather than tear families apart, the short-lived pilot program allowed immigrants to stay within their communities while navigating immigration proceedings and supported them with crucial transportation, legal education and case management throughout the lengthy process.

And there’s one more glaring omission in the Trump administration’s “fact-checking” headlines: The deported mothers are not accused of any crime, beyond being undocumented.

What we’re seeing is not a good-faith effort to keep families together. It’s the continuation of a cruel regime that, just like the family separation policies of Trump’s first term, seeks to sow fear among immigrant communities and uphold a white nationalist vision for the United States.