THE PRESIDENT’S DECISION TO issue an executive order that would end routine family separation might have staunched the immediate political damage. But the effort to reunite the separated children was a looming disaster, and Alex Azar knew it.
Azar had been confirmed five months earlier as the secretary of health and human services. He was responsible for the facilities where the children were living while their parents sat in DHS holding facilities. Now the president said he wanted the families reunited, and it would be up to Azar to do it. On June 21, the day after Trump signed the executive order, Azar accompanied First Lady Melania Trump to visit separated children at the Upbring New Hope Children’s Shelter near the Mexican border in McAllen, Texas. Melania’s decision to make the trip set off a typical round of speculation and debate about whether Trump’s wife, a sphinxlike figure who said little in public and almost never challenged her husband openly, was trying to send a subtle message that, like many Americans, she, too, was outraged by the president’s policy. As she strode across the tarmac to her government-issued plane at Andrews Air Force Base, she sported an army-green anorak with a cryptic message scrawled in large white letters on the back: “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?” Did she? Melania’s East Wing staff later claimed that she wore the jacket to mock reporters, who were constantly trying to impart meaning onto her every move and garment. But behind the scenes, it was clear Trump’s administration was scrambling to control the damage that the family separation policy had wrought.
Azar knew he needed help managing what had become a full-blown debacle for the administration, which had landed, almost without warning, in his lap. It was like a natural disaster in its scope and urgency, only it had been man-made. So he turned to a group of officials who were trained to manage disasters, in the Health and Human Services office charged with responding to epidemics, natural emergencies, and biohazards. Just before noon, Azar summoned Bob Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, known inside the department as ASPR. Azar gave Kadlec three tasks: Figure out which kids are separated; make sure they can talk to their parents for the next month; and then put them back together as quickly and safely as possible. Later, in a series of back-to-back meetings, Azar was blunt with the team, including Chris Meekins, Kadlec’s chief of staff, and Jonathan White. It shouldn’t be that hard, Azar told Meekins. We have databases to keep on top of such things.
The officials soon found out otherwise. The HHS computer system used to track the children in the department’s care, called the ORR Portal, contained almost no information about a child’s parents. Each child was given a unique identifier. But the Family Unit Number, which DHS assigns to families that cross the border illegally, was not consistently provided when children were separated from their parents and reclassified as Unaccompanied Alien Children. Occasionally, a case worker or a Border Patrol agent might have made a notation that the child came with a parent. But beyond that, there was no way of knowing for sure how many they were looking for. It was infuriating. Customs and Border Protection gave the HHS team one number; Immigration and Customs Enforcement gave them another; DHS headquarters offered a third. 1,000. No, 1,500. No. 2,100. Over several weeks, Azar and his team were given sixty different sets of data, each contradicting the others. The stakes got even higher near midnight on June 26, when Judge Dana M. Sabraw of the Federal District Court in San Diego angrily ordered that all children under five be reunited with their parents within fourteen days, and gave the federal government thirty days to reunite all other children in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. If that didn’t happen, Sabraw warned that he would hold Azar in contempt.
By Fourth of July weekend, Azar was furious. Kadlec, Meekins, and White—along with officials from throughout HHS, ICE, and the Border Patrol—had taken over the secretary’s operations center, a large conference room filled with computers and giant television monitors, on the sixth floor of the Hubert H. Humphrey Building. But they still couldn’t give him a solid number of how many kids had been separated. More than four hundred case files were inconclusive. “Give me a computer and I’ll do it myself,” Azar fumed. “I am not going to be held in contempt.” That night, more than thirty officials—including the HHS chief of staff, the deputy chief of staff, and the department’s counsel—worked past midnight in teams of two. Each team took thirty case files. At 11:15 p.m., Azar, who had attended a dinner, returned to the operations center and sat down in front of a computer with thirty case files of his own, still in his suit and tie. Despite all this, by the time Azar briefed reporters on a conference call July 5, the best he could do was say that “less than 3,000 children” had been separated. HHS is continuing to “work overtime” to determine which children belonged to which parents, Azar told the reporters on the call.
Azar eventually gave full control of the effort to Kadlec and the department’s disaster team. Peter Urbanowicz, Azar’s chief of staff, wrote an email to Scott Lloyd, the director of ORR: To be abundantly clear, ASPR has full operational control. You are now reporting to ASPR. But the disaster team struggled to reunite families once they identified them. In some cases, it was difficult to prove parentage. In other cases, parents had committed serious crimes, making it impossible to reunite them with their children. By July 10, the judge’s deadline for reuniting children under five, officials had managed to bring together only about half of the families. That week, they began placing the older children on buses to be reunited with their parents at DHS holding facilities.
The first effort was bumpy at best. About thirty children in southwest Texas were placed onto a bus and driven to the Port Isabel Detention Center, an ICE facility in Los Fresnos, Texas, only to be told by DHS officials that the parents weren’t ready to be released. For weeks, there had been twice-a-day conference calls between HHS and DHS officials to coordinate the handoff. But somehow, the officials at Port Isabel had not completed the paperwork that needed to be done to release the parents. Worse still, the station didn’t have anywhere the children could wait, so the Port Isabel officials turned away the bus. Thousands of miles away in Washington, Kadlec, Meekins, and White were awoken at 1 a.m. by telephone calls and urgent emails. “We have a problem,” they were told. DHS won’t release the parents, and we can’t leave these kids. Unsure what else to do, the adults who were accompanying the children on the bus drove to a nearby Walmart and bought blankets, pillows, snacks, and other supplies for the children. As the final phase of their harrowing ordeal, these kids would have an impromptu sleepover inside a DHS bus in a barren parking lot on the border, waiting to be reunited with their detained parents. White, Meekins, and Kadlec spent the next several hours raising hell with DHS officials in a flurry of predawn phone calls. By morning, the official in charge of the facility had been removed. The moms, dads, and children had their joyful reunions. But the incident left everyone clear-eyed about what they were facing. Even in the best of circumstances, when they could match children with their parents and arrange for a reunion, the process was going to be anything but smooth.
Privately, Azar was as frustrated as his staff, many of whom were distressed as they sought to reunite traumatized children with their parents. Eventually, mental health counselors who normally tended to the needs of disaster victims were deployed inside the department to help the shaken staff. Publicly, though, Azar tried to put on the best face he could, arguing that his department was doing everything in its power to reunite children, while at the same time protecting the kids from adults with criminal records. Out of 102 children under five years old, they had discovered sixteen parents who had been convicted of serious crimes and five adults who had lied about being the child’s real parent. “It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids who are smuggled into our country or come across illegally,” Azar told Wolf Blitzer in an appearance on CNN. “I’m proud of the work we do. I believe we are saving kids’ lives.”
The happy talk from the Americans was infuriating to the foreign ministers in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala when Nielsen arrived in Guatemala City on July 10 for what she had hoped would be serious discussions about how the three Central American countries could do more to secure their borders and keep their citizens from heading toward the United States. Trump was continuing to hammer her on what more could be done to stop them from coming. Nielsen and a team of diplomats from the State Department had pushed for an agenda that included joint efforts to combat human trafficking, drug smuggling, and illegal immigration.
But that was wishful thinking. From the minute the American delegation arrived in the Guatemalan capital, Sandra Jovel, the country’s foreign minister, insisted on making the issue of the separated families the primary topic of conversation at the ministerial conference, which also included Kevin McAleenan, the head of Customs and Border Protection, and Ronald Vitiello, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For weeks, officials in the three Central American countries had watched in horror as news reports from the United States showed children being taken from parents. And now the Americans apparently didn’t know where all the children were, and which parents they belonged to. Why wasn’t the United States sharing more information about the fate of the missing children? the diplomats demanded.
A cable sent several days later from the U.S. embassy to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson described the heated exchanges. “Jovel pressed for respecting migrants’ human rights while ending family separation,” the cable said. Facing off against Nielsen and the others, Jovel demanded that Guatemalan consular officers be notified about the whereabouts of the children so visits to the shelters could be arranged. Carlos Castaneda, the Salvadoran foreign minister, jumped in. He told the Americans that separating children from their parents causes permanent emotional and psychological damage. He demanded that the practice end, and raised objections to reports that the United States was using DNA tests to help reunite the children with their parents. That will only delay the process, he said. María Dolores Agüero, the Honduran foreign minister, said the Central American governments needed clarity about the fate of their children, and urged Nielsen to make sure the families were reunited quickly.
Nielsen tried to talk about other topics, to little avail. She assured the foreign ministers that officials were working to respond to a court order requiring the families to be reunited. She tried to reassure them that the United States government was working diligently to make it happen. But she denied that her department had made a conscious choice to separate families. “She also clarified that Congress had made crossing the border illegal decades ago, and that DHS does not have a policy of family separation,” the cable said. “Rather, children are separated from their parents when they choose to cross the border illegally because children are not allowed to enter jails with their parents.” It was hair-splitting at best, and it did little to mollify the Central American politicians.
The official DHS press release about Nielsen’s trip read as if the topic of the children never came up. “The ministers and Secretary Nielsen reiterated their commitment to carry out concrete actions to enhance information-sharing best practices as well as collectively address security challenges and illegal migration flows,” it said. In fact, the meeting—and the lack of solid information about the whereabouts of the children—only deepened the anger inside the foreign governments. When a team of DHS and State Department officials flew down to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, for a follow-up meeting two weeks later, they, too, were ambushed by their counterparts in the three countries. The United States was a party to the Convention on Consular Relations, which required that officials inform each other when they take another country’s citizens into custody. But that didn’t happen when the children were separated and taken away, the Central American officials complained. What do we tell our people? they demanded. What would you think if 2,600 American children were taken from their parents in our countries?
To the Americans who attended, the message from the Central American governments couldn’t have been clearer: “You’ve kidnapped our kids.”
“You’re lying!” the congressman fumed at the homeland security secretary.
It was July 25, the same day that the American diplomats and DHS officials 3,400 miles away were being berated in Honduras. But this tirade was coming from Luis Gutiérrez, the Democratic congressman from Chicago, inside a small room on the second floor of the Cannon House Office Building, with pale yellow walls lined with wooden bookshelves, royal blue carpeting and drapes, and brass chandeliers. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus had invited Nielsen for a closed-door session to get concrete answers about how the family separation crisis had been allowed to happen, and expected an apologetic secretary ready with precise answers and a hefty dose of contrition. Instead, Gutiérrez stewed as Nielsen became defensive, unwilling to accept blame for the debacle and seeming to offer excuses instead of information. She primly told the lawmakers that they had nothing to worry about; the federal government had the situation under control, she said, and all of the children would be reunited with their parents by the court’s deadline.
“You’re never going to get these kids to go back together,” Gutiérrez yelled. “You people have a thing against brown children.”
After twenty-five years in the House, Gutiérrez had little patience for people like Nielsen, whom he viewed as an enabler of Trump’s worst impulses. Known as a hothead, even among his friends and fellow Democrats, Gutiérrez had never cared much for the niceties of political decorum. He was an activist at heart. Early in 2017, Gutiérrez joined immigration advocates at an ICE office in Chicago and dared the agents to arrest them when they refused to leave. (Contacted in Washington, Kelly told the agents in no uncertain terms not to oblige the congressman.) In August, Gutiérrez was arrested along with about thirty other protesters as they sat on the sidewalk in front of the White House in the hopes of convincing Trump not to end the DACA program. A month later, after Sessions announced that the program would be terminated, Gutiérrez got himself arrested again, this time at a protest outside Trump Tower in New York City.
His blunt attack on Nielsen drew a rebuke from some of his colleagues in the room on that July day. “Luis, that’s enough. You’ve gone too far,” chided Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democratic representative from New Mexico and the chair of the Hispanic Caucus. Nielsen took offense and defended herself, too. Nobody is working harder than I am to reunite these kids, she told the lawmakers. She recounted her repeated trips to Central America to try to resolve the migration crisis, and cited her personal friendship with Ana Rosalinda García Carías, the first lady of Honduras, as evidence of her effectiveness. When she was finished, Gutiérrez stormed out of the room. Recalling the incident later, Gutiérrez shrugged off Lujan Grisham’s criticism and insisted that he has no regrets for what he said to Nielsen. “She’s in charge. She can quit tomorrow and resign, right? And be a person of honor. No, she’s not. She’s allowing this to happen,” Gutiérrez said.
But Nielsen had no intention of quitting. Nearly three months after the terrible cabinet meeting, she had survived what seemed to be the worst of the brutal family separation mess. Within days, government lawyers would tell the judge that most of the children had been reunited with their parents. An angry Democratic congressman like Gutiérrez was the least of her worries. As far as job security went, an infuriated president who was demanding more aggressive ways to crack down at the border was a far more immediate problem.