Under Barack Obama in 2014 Family Seperations and Holding Centers Were Exactly the Same

The all-time mode to depict Donald Trump'southward electric current policy toward families crossing the US-Mexico border is this: He just went from being much harsher than Barack Obama to trying to become the courts to let him be as harsh every bit Obama was.

The executive order Trump signed yesterday opens the door to him using a tactic Obama used in 2014: the wide-scale detention of immigrant families for as long as information technology took to consummate their immigration cases and deport them.

Comparisons between Trump and Obama on immigration usually focus on deportations of unauthorized immigrants living in the United states. Trump has been speedily expanding enforcement, but the numbers are yet comparable to Obama'due south first term. (Obama holds the tape for deporting more immigrants than any president, with more than 2 million deportations over eight years — though he scaled back enforcement in the last two years of his administration.)

Merely the furnishings of the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy for prosecuting illegal entry this leap — the separation of families as a affair of standard government do for about vi weeks, and now (thanks to Trump'due south executive order) a coming court fight over the indefinite detention of families seeking asylum — are reminiscent, for those of us who've been following immigration for a while, of what the Obama assistants did in 2014.

The comparison to Obama'southward policies is peculiarly relevant now that the Trump administration is seeking to keep families in immigration detention for weeks or months. The reason that Trump can't do that under a electric current judicial guild is that the courts stepped in to stop Obama from doing it.

At present Trump is trying to remove the shackles placed on his predecessor.

Obama was faced with a genuine increase in children and families coming to the U.s.; Trump but decided that typical numbers were unacceptable

The near important thing to remember, when nosotros're comparing Obama's response to the 2014 border "crisis" to what Trump is doing now, is this nautical chart:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection

This nautical chart combines two things: the number of people caught crossing into the US between ports of entry (apprehensions) and the number of people who came to ports of entry without immigration papers — for instance, to seek asylum ("inadmissibles"). The 2 lines most probable to jump out at you lot, each of which represents one fiscal twelvemonth (October-September instead of January-December), are the blue line that arcs loftier over the summer months and the orange line that plummets during the winter.

The blue line is 2014 — that's what Obama was dealing with. The orange line is 2017, when Trump came into office.

Fiscal twelvemonth 2018 is the cherry line on the chart. Compared to 2017, it's a big increase, because 2017 was so anomalously low. Just in context, it's more like a reversion to the norm of the past few years.

It's worth noting, by the way, that if this chart went back to 2000 or so, the past few years would all look pretty small in terms of border crossings. Unauthorized immigration into the United states of america is still way downwards from historical levels. That drop has been especially pronounced amongst single adults coming for work — of the people yet coming in, a lot of them are children, families, or other asylum seekers.

Reversion to the Obama-era norm isn't what the Trump administration wanted, though. The president took a ton of pride in the low number of border crossings in the early months of his term — he kept bragging about it even as apprehensions crept back up in fall of 2017. When he started realizing that people were yet coming in to seek aviary, he got upset that the US couldn't just shut downwardly the border — and pushed into action a policy agenda that would crack down on anyone trying to come to the U.s.a. without papers, especially if they crossed into the country illegally.

Obama in 2014 took a mostly punitive arroyo to border crossers. Trump in 2018 took an entirely punitive one. But Obama was reacting partly to circumstances; Trump was reacting solely to his own desires.

Both presidents prosecuted many edge crossers. But Trump's "zero tolerance" policy created family unit separation.

Prosecuting people for illegal entry into the US is not new. Illegal entry and illegal reentry have been the 2 most commonly prosecuted crimes in federal court for years — often via mass trials that basically prosecuted dozens of people at once. Obama didn't starting time this tendency, but he certainly continued it.

While people charged with illegal entry or reentry made upwards equally much as half of all people prosecuted in federal courtroom in April 2018, they still fabricated up only ten percent of all people Edge Patrol apprehended for crossing into the Usa between ports of entry.

In other words, officials were however deciding not to prosecute a lot of people — or, at least, didn't take the resources to prosecute a lot of people so had to be deliberate in deciding who deserved to exist prosecuted. As a general dominion — though non always — people who said they feared persecution in their dwelling countries and wanted asylum were not prosecuted. Neither were people who came to the US with their children.

In April 2018, even so, Trump's Justice Department (led by Jeff Sessions) announced that they would get-go prosecuting every illegal entry instance referred to them by the Department of Homeland Security. And in May 2018, Sessions and the Department of Homeland Security announced that they would commencement referring everyone who entered illegally for prosecution: "zero tolerance."

The Trump administration isn't really prosecuting everyone who crosses the edge betwixt ports of entry yet — or even the majority of them. But the implied corollary to the "cypher tolerance" policy was that the Trump assistants would no longer brand decisions about whom to prosecute based on whether someone was seeking asylum — or whether they were a parent.

That meant that parents were now being referred into the custody of the Department of Justice — while their children were separated from them and reclassified every bit "unaccompanied minors."

Trump fabricated separating families a affair of standard do. Obama did not.

It's not that no family was ever separated at the edge under the Obama administration. Just erstwhile Obama administration officials specify that families were separated only in detail circumstances — for instance, if a father was carrying drugs — that went above and across a typical case of illegal entry.

We don't know how often that happened, but nosotros know it was not a widespread or standard practice.

Nether the Trump administration, though, it became increasingly mutual. A test of "zip tolerance" along one sector of the border in summer 2017 led to an unknown number of family separations. Seven hundred families were separated betwixt Oct 2017 and April 2018.

From May seven to June 20, separating a family who had entered between ports of entry was the standard practice of the Trump administration. It was the default.

Trump assistants officials denied family separation was a "policy" for legalistic reasons, merely they affirmed that "zero tolerance" prosecutions were a policy. Until Trump signed an executive order on Wed allowing families to be kept together in immigration detention while parents were prosecuted, the assistants maintained that separating families was an inevitable outcome of prosecuting parents.

Not every family was separated. But dozens of families a mean solar day were. At least 2,300 families were separated over those half dozen or so weeks.

We don't know how many families were separated under the Obama administration, but in that location's no reason to believe that it numbered in the thousands even over the eight years that Obama was president. Considering it simply wasn't standard do. Under Trump, it was.

Both presidents housed "unaccompanied" minors in temporary facilities — just nether Obama, they'd pretty much all arrived in the United states unaccompanied

The 2014 border "surge" was driven partly by an increase in families attempting to cantankerous into the US from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Simply it was primarily driven by an increase in "unaccompanied alien children" — people nether xviii, coming to the US without parents or guardians — from those same countries.

The federal authorities had a organization to deal with unaccompanied kids, simply information technology was underfunded and overloaded even before the 2014 "surge" — and apace got backed up. As a result, Border Patrol ended up holding kids for days beyond the 72 hours they were legally supposed to, and the government had to spin up temporary holding shelters for children that looked a lot like jails.

Some of the pictures of these sites went viral over again in 2018, with people either misidentifying them every bit pictures of children separated from their parents under Trump or as proof that Trump'southward policy was identical to Obama's. Neither is true.

The system for dealing with unaccompanied migrant kids is overwhelmed again now. Well-nigh of the children in its custody — most 10,000 — are minors, generally teenagers, who crossed into the The states lone. But with the Trump administration'south "naught tolerance" policy in effect, the system has also had to absorb more than 2,000 children separated from their parents — who are oft young children or even infants.

The temporary shelters that the authorities started constructing last week — which government officials call "soft-sided shelters" and the media has chosen "tent cities" — are one result of that overflow. The ascent in "tender age" facilities, designed to hold children under 5 (as young as infancy), is some other.

Many of the problems with the system for unaccompanied immigrant kids run deep — there are long-running concerns with Edge Patrol corruption of immigrant youth, for example, and with proper screening of the sponsors with whom children are placed. Trump'southward family separation policy brought attention to some of those problems. Merely the reason for the attention was that Trump was adding children to the system who weren't unaccompanied until the government took their parents away.

Obama detained families together — until the courts stepped in

Obama's response to the 2014 "border crisis" was to cleft downward on the people he could crack downwardly on: adults, including asylum seekers, and families.

At the time, there were special protections (under the 1997 Flores settlement) that stopped DHS from keeping unaccompanied immigrant children in detention, but not children who had come to the United states with their parents. And so the Obama administration attempted to tamp downwards the number of Cardinal American families seeking asylum in the US past keeping families in detention and processing and deporting them every bit speedily as possible.

Immigration advocates challenged the policy of family detention under the Flores settlement. Judges agreed with them — in large office considering information technology said the Obama administration was out of bounds in detaining migrant families for the purpose of "deterrence." (As NBC'due south Benjy Sarlin has pointed out, that'south why certain Trump assistants officials accept been conscientious not to say that family separation is a deterrent, or even a policy, at present.)

Ultimately, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Flores settlement covered not just unaccompanied conflicting children merely "accompanied" ones also. It set a general standard that the government couldn't concord them in custody for more than than twenty days.

The 9th Circuit stopped curt of proverb that parents could be released nether Flores. But the federal government has since made a exercise, for the most function, of releasing the whole family unit later 20 days. Since the current family detention facilities — two in Texas created nether Obama, and an older one in Pennsylvania — are mostly total, they don't accept a ton of space to detain families anyhow.

Until now.

Trump is now trying to regain the legal authority to do what Obama tried to do but was stopped from doing

The executive social club Trump just signed, withal, directs that families who enter without papers should be detained until their cases are completed — which, for families seeking asylum, can take months or years. The social club opens up options to prepare upward temporary facilities for families on military bases and elsewhere. And information technology directs the chaser general to enquire the estimate who applied Flores to "accompanied" children to disengage that ruling.

At the same time, the Trump administration is pressuring Congress to override the Flores settlement entirely to let families to be kept together in immigration detention facilities for every bit long as it takes to approve their claims — or, more than likely, conduct them.

We don't know much virtually the conditions in which families will be housed, or what access they'll have to legal counsel. But information technology's likely that family unit detention under Trump volition look similar to the way family detention did in 2014 — with some families getting basically no due process before getting deported, and others remaining in detention for weeks or months — before the courts stepped in and told the federal government information technology couldn't do that.

In other words, it'south not really virtually what Obama or Trump did. Correct now, the question is what they are immune to do.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2018/6/21/17488458/obama-immigration-policy-family-separation-border

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