Over the past three months, families made up the majority of Border Patrol arrests. The number of families coming across the border has grown even as overall illegal border crossings have decreased dramatically compared with historic trends. In some cases, however, Homeland Security officials said a parent had a criminal history but did not offer details on the crimes, the watchdog reported. “For more than a decade it was and continues to be standard for apprehended minors to be separated when the adult is not the parent or legal guardian, the child’s safety is at risk” or there’s a record of a “serious criminal activity by the adult,” she said. Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security, said the report reinforced what officials have long said. Immigration officials are allowed to take a child from a parent in certain cases - serious criminal charges against a parent, concerns over the health and welfare of a child or medical concerns. The inspector general did not say why the children had been separated before the zero-tolerance policy. The separated children had already been released to sponsors, who are generally parents or other close relatives. The watchdog did not give exact numbers, but the total number of migrant children who passed through the agency’s care during the 2017 budget year was 40,810. By the summer of 2017, that percentage had grown to 3.6 percent, officials said. But the report found that in late 2016, 0.3 percent of children turned over to Health and Human Services had crossed with a parent and were separated. Most of the tens of thousands of children who come into government custody cross the border alone.
This report reaffirms that the government never had a clear picture of how many children it ripped from their parents.” Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who sued on behalf of a mother separated from her son, said the separation policy “was a cruel disaster from the start. Maxwell said investigators didn’t have specific numbers, but that Health and Human Services staff had estimated the tally to be in the thousands. “But precisely how much more is unknown.” Those documents chronicled separations that took place as parents were criminally prosecuted for illegally entering the country under President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. 'A Moral Disaster': AP on Scope of Migrant Kids ProgramĪnn Maxwell, assistant inspector general for evaluations, said the number of children removed from their parents was certainly larger than the 2,737 listed by the government in court documents.
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