A new investigation reveals how little the administration did to “stop the worst from happening.”
Remember the 2018 images of distraught children, sleeping on concrete floors inside cages in the U.S. government’s centralized processing centers in Texas or Michigan? What about the audio recordings of those children struggling to breathe as they cried out to be united with their families? As a result of President Trump’s “Zero Tolerance” family-separation policy, as of January 2021, at least 5569 immigrant children had been forcibly separated from their parents.
Caitlin Dickerson was on the immigration beat at The New York Times when she was lured away to The Atlantic. And for September’s cover story, the award-winning journalist has written an exhaustively researched and reported piece on the Trump Administration’s family-separation policy and the intended (and unintended) consequences of Zero Tolerance. This is really journalism at its finest: Take a listen to our conversation and read Caitlin’s piece — I think it’s destined to win a Pulitzer!
Katie Couric: Tell me about why the Zero Tolerance policy came to be and why it was established in the first place.
Caitlin Dickerson: “Zero Tolerance” was a policy to prosecute people who crossed the border illegally, including those who did so to seek asylum, and including parents traveling with children. And it resulted in thousands of kids being taken away from their parents. But the idea behind it was to separate families as a deterrent — as a way to discourage migration in general. It first came up under President Obama in 2014, and the broader notions that gave rise to this idea trace all the way back to 9/11, when the George W. Bush administration created the department of Homeland Security with the goal of preventing future terrorist attacks.
When this story surfaced, there was a lot of discussion that this wasn’t a new policy — that this actually was something that was in practice during the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. That’s not exactly true, is it?
It’s not true. What they’re referring to is the federal statute making illegal border-crossing a crime — a misdemeanor the first time and a felony the second. That’s been in place for a very long time. But for the most part, federal prosecutors and federal judges tacitly agreed for decades prior to President Trump taking office that this wasn’t a crime worth using a lot of resources against, especially in these very strapped border courts along the Southern border. Also, most people crossing illegally were doing so to work, which was considered a very low-level offense. So the statute, though it did exist, was very rarely invoked until it started being used under President Trump for the purpose of being able to separate kids from their parents.
Was it a deterrent for illegal immigration?
No. In fact, following Zero Tolerance, border crossings under President Trump reached record-high levels. After this unprecedented attempt to try to minimize them, you had the opposite impact. There’s a lot of evidence going back to 9/11 that deterrents don’t really impact immigration in a meaningful way, when you compare them to other long-range trends that are much more important — the economic factors in the United States and in the home countries people are leaving behind, public safety, and just general opportunities. Those tend to impact immigration more than anything else.
But deterrents have been shown, in some studies, to impact people on an individual level. If you’re apprehended crossing the border illegally and you’re prosecuted, your personal likelihood of crossing again may go down, but it’s nowhere near the level of impact as factors like economics. And of course it comes with very serious consequences and downsides for people’s lives.
Can you explain what would happen to these children after they were taken from their parents?
I interviewed a Salvadoran consular employee, Neris González, who was based in Customs and Border Protection along the Southern border. She said the children and their parents would arrive on buses at this facility. They were ushered out of the buses and then Border Patrol agents would move in and begin to take the kids away from their parents, often not really explaining what was going on. Maybe they’d say that they were under orders from President Trump to take kids away, nothing more than that. As you can imagine, very quickly, these scenes escalated.
Gonzalez said kids were literally being pulled on one arm by Border Patrol agents, and on the other by their parents, screaming and crying. Parents were taken away to facilities run by the Department of Justice, so they could be prosecuted. And the kids were transferred into the custody of an entirely separate federal agency, the Health and Human Services department. Because of the way that their shelters for children work, the children were often sent to states very far away. So you’d have a parent who was prosecuted in Southern California, Arizona, or Texas, and their child being sent to New York or Michigan. That’s part of why parents and children became really lost to each other, into the federal agencies, and why it took so long to get those families reunited.
One of the striking things about your reporting is there seemed to be a practice of not-so-benign neglect on the part of many government officials who really thought that someone else was “minding the store,” if you will.
That’s right. I spoke to dozens of federal officials again in these apolitical roles, as well as some who were political appointees of President Trump, who said they very much opposed the idea to separate families, whether it was via prosecution or other means. And yet, when I would ask about meetings where this was discussed, I was told repeatedly that these weren’t meetings where it would’ve been strategic for them to speak up: “I couldn’t do so in front of people like Steven Miller. It could put my career on the line.” Or they would often say that these ideas were so outlandish and ridiculous that they didn’t think anyone would ever do them.
The problem is that people who were telling me these stories were in very high-ranking roles. It really was left to them to stop this from happening. And they didn’t. I think that their role is as critical, if not more, as those of these more hawkish political appointees. In many ways, it’s not at all surprising that someone like Steven Miller would be pushing for these policies. What it takes is someone who’s a subject matter expert and is not motivated purely by the goal of getting the president reelected. And it was on them to push back. In this case, they didn’t.
After this exhaustive investigation, have you come up with any solutions to the immigration issue in the United States?
I think you need comprehensive immigration reform. Our immigration laws haven’t been meaningfully updated in many decades and they don’t respond to the current geopolitical circumstances that are leading people to try to migrate to the United States. At a baseline level, we need an orderly system that works. Right now, we have hundreds of thousands of immigration cases that are backlogged. I’ve done countless stories about people applying for our asylum system and waiting for years for a resolution on their case. That’s very clearly a system that doesn’t work.
And when Congress doesn’t do anything, the executive branch is left to move in. But they’re so limited in what they can do when it comes to immigration policy, because they’re not constitutionally empowered to legislate. To really address the situation meaningfully, Congress would need to come together and determine who should be given access to the United States, and what is a process that actually works. Short of that, you’re gonna continue to have to effectively leave this policy-making to the Border Patrol, and Zero Tolerance is the type of conclusion they’ve come up with.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length
