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The Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy toward migrant crossing the border isn't actually "zero," according to a new analysis. Border control has specifically targeted parents with children for prosecution, making family separation an even more deplorable policy.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University analyzed prosecutions during the weeks following Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s announcement that all people crossing the border illegally (and as it turns out legal asylum seekers) would be prosecuted. The administration said that family separations and baby jails was just the consequence of that. They lied. The analysis found that in May, 4,458 adults with children were arrested along with 24,465 adults without children, but only 9,216 were actually referred for prosecution. Only 32 percent of the adult immigrants crossing were charged—less than one in three were chosen for prosecution and those chosen were parents. Families were targeted.
"The Administration has not explained its rationale for prosecuting parents with children when that left so many other adults without children who were not being referred for prosecution," the report said. The rationale is not hard to fathom. They've said they want to create a "deterrent" to immigration attempts. Word getting out that authorities were ripping children away from their parents would do the trick.
Susan B. Long, codirector of TRAC and a professor at Syracuse said the researched don't yet have data on how many of those prosecutions have happened, but that the pattern was blatantly clear. "It wasn't like [the prosecutions] were automatic; this was a conscious choice," Long said. "We have yet to know the number of separations due to them being criminally prosecuted."
Another report looked at deportations, finding that 1,1061 out of the 4,537 adults arrested in April were deported but out of the 5,144 children detained as part of families, only 851 were deported. Clearly, hundreds of parents were deported without their children, just in the month of April. Then hundreds of those children were just lost in the system, and even after a court ordered the administration to reunite every one of those families, more than a quarter of the 3,000 children separated since May have not been returned to their parents.
David Leopold, chair of immigration at Ulmer & Berne and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, summed it up in a Buzzfeed interview. "They recognized what they were doing, they had it planned out and the most foul thing about it is they did it intentionally to scare people from applying for asylum in the US." That, he said, has all the hallmarks of a despotic, authoritarian regime. "The wanton disregard for child welfare was done intentionally and knowingly by the US government, the Trump administration. […] There's going to be hell to pay for whoever put this policy together, for whoever targeted these children."