Migrant sites like ‘summer camp’
WASHINGTON• Trump administration officials mounted a fierce defence Tuesday of the controversial family separation policy at the border, defending sites as “more like a summer camp” than holding facilities, and arguing that the detention system simply was not set up to facilitate court-ordered reunions easily.
“I’m very comfortable with the level of service and protection that is being provided,” top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Matthew Albence told the Senate Judiciary Committee about the conditions at the “family residential centres,” which he likened to summer camps.
He and other administration officials told senators that the government had mechanisms in place to return children to their parents after they were separated, but they had to improvise a new reunification system under orders from a federal judge.
“This is a novel situation,” said Cmdr. Jonathan White, a public health co-ordinating official for the reunification effort. “The systems were not set up to have referrals include parent information.”
White stressed that the border agencies could not have sidelined the victim trafficking law that was prompting precautionary separation of children from their parents without the judge’s order to focus on family reunification instead. “We could not have done that without him ordering that,” White said.
The defensive comments from Trump officials dumbfounded Democratic members of the committee, such as Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who charged that the Trump administration had created a situation at the border that was like a Kafka novel, suggesting that children’s entertainment venue Chuck E. Cheese had a better system for preventing children from being separated from their parents than the U.S. government.
“The initiative was a prosecution initiative, and our focus was on the prosecution element only,” Carla Provost, the acting chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, told Leahy, citing the “zero tolerance” policy that the administration adopted for border crossers.
“At no time did we not know where any adults that were in ICE custody were,” Albence added, stressing that once those adults were deported, the government no longer tracked them — making it difficult to reunite them with their children.
More than 700 children remain separated, including more than 400 whose families have already left the U.S. without them.
Albence added that it was “virtually impossible” to process the cases of immigrant children within the 20 days required, meaning that children were also leaving ICE custody, and sometimes falling through cracks in the tracking system.
Albence complained that the government was focusing on reunification because a judge was forcing the issue.