Zero Tolerance: 5,500+ Children Separated, HHS Lost Track of Hundreds

Overview

Zero tolerance was not a border security policy that had family separation as a side effect. It was a deterrence policy that used family separation as its mechanism. The deterrence theory was explicit: the experience of having your child taken would discourage others from attempting the crossing.

More than 5,500 children were separated. The government did not build a system to track who belonged to whom. When a federal court ordered reunification, the government could not comply with the timeline because it had not maintained the data needed to do so.

The Architecture of Separation

The technical problem was not complicated to anticipate. Separating adults from children and placing them in different agency custody streams — DOJ for the adults, HHS for the children — without a unified identifier linking families would predictably make reunification difficult. The government implemented the policy without solving this problem first.

The result was not a bureaucratic failure superimposed on a policy. It was a predictable consequence of implementing mass separation without the infrastructure to undo it.

What Could Not Be Undone

For 628 families, the separation became permanent. Parents had been deported to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — without their children, without being told where their children had been sent, sometimes without knowing the children were still in the United States.

The ACLU lawyers working on reunification described calling numbers that had been disconnected, reaching relatives who had not heard from the deported parents, and filing missing-persons reports in Central American countries to locate people who had been expelled from the United States.

These families had come to the border seeking protection. What they encountered was the deliberate removal of their children as a deterrent to other families contemplating the same journey.

The Denials

Kirstjen Nielsen, the DHS Secretary, held a press conference in which she denied that there was a "zero tolerance family separation policy." Sessions had announced the zero tolerance policy six weeks earlier. The denial was factually false on its face.

Trump blamed Democrats. The policy had been implemented through executive action by his own administration.