On February 16, 2017, I gave my maiden speech on the floor of the United States Senate. It was a humbling experience. In recent years, the Senate has been known largely as a body of gridlock and partisanship. Once revered as the country’s most deliberative body, it has often proved to be anything but. And yet as I stood there, it was the giants of the Senate who came to mind, and the extraordinary work that had been done on that very floor. It was here that the New Deal came to life and the economy was saved. It was here that Social Security earned passage and, later, Medicaid and Medicare. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the War on Poverty—all fought for and won right here in this body. At my Senate desk once sat Eugene McCarthy, who sponsored the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended quotas and established rules aimed at reunifying immigrant families.
I opened my speech exactly as those who know me would have expected. “Above all, I rise today with a sense of gratitude for all those upon whose shoulders we stand. For me, it starts with my mother, Shyamala Harris.”
I told her immigration story, the story of her self-determination, the story that made Maya and me, and made us Americans. “And I know she’s looking down on us today. And, knowing my mother, she’s probably saying, ‘Kamala, what on earth is going on down there? We have got to stand up for our values!’”
I didn’t mince words. I talked about the unprecedented series of executive actions taken in the early weeks of the administration, actions that hit our immigrant and religious communities like a cold front, “striking a chilling fear in the hearts of millions of good, hardworking people.”
I talked about the outsize impact on the state of California, because I believe California is a microcosm of who we are as Americans. I explained that we have farmers and environmentalists, welders and technologists, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and more veterans, and more immigrants—documented and undocumented—than any state in the nation. When it came to DACA, I reiterated what I had said in Kelly’s confirmation hearing: that we had promised recipients that we would not use their personal information against them, and that we could not go back on our promise to these kids and their families.
I spoke as a lifelong prosecutor and former attorney general of the largest state in this country when I said that the administration’s Muslim ban and immigration actions presented a real and present threat to our public safety. Instead of making us more safe, the increased raids and executive orders instill fear. “For this reason,” I said, “studies have shown Latinos are more than 40 percent less likely to call 911 when they have been a victim of a crime. This climate of fear drives people underground and into the shadows, making them less likely to report crimes against themselves or others. Fewer victims reporting crime and fewer witnesses coming forward.”
I also talked about the economic consequences, noting that immigrants make up 10 percent of California’s workforce and contribute $130 billion to our state’s gross domestic product. “Immigrants own small businesses, they till the land, they care for children and the elderly, they work in our labs, attend our universities, and serve in our military. So these actions are not only cruel. They cause ripple effects that harm our public safety and our economy.”
I closed my remarks with a call to action: that we have a responsibility to draw a line and say no—that as a coequal branch of government, it is our duty to uphold the ideals of this country.
The next month, I invited a young woman from Fresno who is a University of California at Merced alumna, a biomedical researcher, and a DACA recipient to be my guest at a joint session of Congress. Yuriana Aguilar’s parents moved their family from Mexico to Fresno when Yuriana was just five years old. None of them had papers. Her parents were agricultural workers who supported the family by selling vegetables. Still, as Yuriana recalls, “somehow they knew in order to succeed, you have to have an education.” Yuriana took her parents’ message to heart—literally. Today she works at Rush Medical College, in Chicago, studying how the heart’s electrical system functions. DACA made it possible for her to pursue her education and earn a PhD.
Yuriana has described how, when she first heard about the creation of DACA, she cried with relief. Then she went back to her research, doing her part to help others live healthier lives. As she says, “Science doesn’t have borders—there are no limitations on its advancement.” My mother would have loved her.
When we talk about DACA recipients, Yuriana’s commitment to giving back to our country is the rule, not the exception. The vast majority of DACA recipients are employed—more than 75 percent of them. They wear our nation’s uniform, they study at our colleges and universities, and they work in U.S. companies large and small. In fact, if DACA recipients were deported, it is estimated that the U.S. economy as a whole could lose as much as $460 billion over a decade. These young people are contributing to our country in meaningful ways.
I kept Yuriana top of mind over the course of the drama that would unfold through the year. She was the first person I thought of when, on September 5, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions cruelly and arbitrarily announced that the administration was ending the DACA program, throwing the fates of hundreds of thousands of people into limbo.
Without DACA, eligible young people who had been brought to the United States as children are faced with a terrible choice: they can live here without papers and in fear of deportation or leave the only country they’ve ever known. They have no path to citizenship. They can’t leave the country and get in line to immigrate here. There is no line. And for this administration, that’s the point.
Congress can fix this. There is bipartisan legislation in the House and the Senate that I’ve co-sponsored—the DREAM Act—which gives these young people a permanent path to citizenship. Every day that the DREAM Act goes unpassed is another day they have to live in fear—despite having done everything we asked them to.
I’ve met many Dreamers over the years, and on a nearly daily basis throughout my first year in the U.S. Senate. They bravely came to Washington to meet with members of Congress and tell their stories. There was one day when I was supposed to meet with five Dreamers from California who were in town as part of a group from all over the country. The others wanted to join, too, so I invited them into my conference room. It was packed, standing room only, with people lined up against the walls.
I was struck by one of the California kids, Sergio, who was a student at the University of California at Irvine. He talked about his mother working in Mexico, unable to make ends meet, and the decision she had made to come to the United States to give him a chance at a better life. He talked about how hard he had worked through school and how he had focused a lot of his energy on doing outreach to help people get health care. Like so many Dreamers, he was taking on a life of service. That’s the thing about the Dreamers: they really do believe in the promise of this country. It is their country, too.
There was so much passion in Sergio’s eyes. But I knew he was also frightened. The administration’s decision to end DACA had been so dispiriting and demoralizing, so counter to the better history of our country, so counter to the promise of opportunity on which he had relied. And as he and most of them searched my eyes, looking for confidence that they would be okay, I fought the pain of knowing how wrong and unfair the situation was, and that I could not, on my own, control the outcome. It pains me still today.
Three days after Sessions announced his actions, the University of California filed suit against the administration “for wrongly and unconstitutionally violating the rights of the University and its students” by rescinding the DACA program on “nothing more than unreasoned executive whim.” The president of the University of California system, Janet Napolitano, had served as President Obama’s homeland security secretary and had been responsible for drafting and overseeing the DACA program as originally conceived. For her, and for all of us, this was personal.
On January 10, 2018, the federal court sided with the university, issuing a temporary nationwide injunction blocking the government’s decision. This was a huge relief, as it restarted the DACA program and halted the administration action. But the operative word is “temporary.” Congress must still act to provide these young people with permanent protection from deportation, which can come only through legislation. Until then, Dreamers will remain in constant fear that a new court decision could rip them away from their families and the only country they’ve called home. And with a solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court, there’s every reason to believe that such a reversal could be forthcoming.
February 2018 was a pivotal month in the immigration fight. The administration continued its cruel and outrageous conduct, going so far as to remove a reference to the United States as “a nation of immigrants” from the mission statement of the agency responsible for citizenship and immigration services. Meanwhile, the administration and many congressional Republicans effectively held the Dreamers hostage.
As part of the budget bill debates to fund the government, the Senate had agreed to take a vote on the DREAM Act, which would create a path to citizenship for the Dreamers. But there was a catch. In exchange, the legislation included $25 billion in taxpayer money to build a wall on the border with Mexico.
There were a number of reasons why I opposed this. Purely from a dollars-and-cents perspective, it was a total waste of taxpayer money. I am a strong believer in border security—but experts agree that a wall will not secure our border. Moreover, I worried that those billions of dollars would be used to implement the administration’s anti-immigrant agenda—including raids that target California and its residents, and families across the country. For the same price tag, we could do anything from funding a full-scale effort to combat the opioid crisis to expanding rural broadband and upgrading critical infrastructure.
But there was a bigger reason to oppose the border wall. A useless wall on the southern border would be nothing more than a symbol, a monument standing in opposition to not just everything I value, but to the fundamental values upon which this country was built. The Statue of Liberty is the monument that defines to the world who we are. Emma Lazarus’s words—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—speak to our true character: a generous country that respects and embraces those who have made the difficult journey to our shores, often fleeing harm; that sees our quintessentially optimistic, can-do spirit in those who aspire to make the American Dream their own. How could I vote to build what would be little more than a monument, designed to send the cold, hard message “KEEP OUT”?
The immigration debate is so often defined by false choices. I remember a town hall I held in Sacramento, where a group of the president’s supporters showed up. One man said he thought I cared more about undocumented immigrants than I cared about the American people. It was a false choice. I care deeply about them both. Similarly, the budget debate was offering a false choice: fund the government or oppose the wall. I believed we could do both.
In the end, we were presented with two bills. I was proud to support the first, a bipartisan compromise drafted by Senators Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, and the late John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, which included measures to protect Dreamers from deportation and provide them with a path to citizenship, and did not include funding for the wall. The other proposal—which included the DREAM Act in exchange for the wall—was something I simply couldn’t get behind, regardless of the pressure. I voted against it. Ultimately, neither of the bills became law.
The fight on behalf of Dreamers continues. And here’s what I believe: These young people were brought into our country, in many cases before they could walk or talk, through no choice of their own. This is the only country they’ve ever known. This is their home, and they’re contributing. So I won’t let up until they are recognized as the Americans they are.
There’s a region in Central America known as the Northern Triangle, which includes three countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Together these countries have the menacing distinction of being among the most violent in the world. Between 1979 and 1992, El Salvador was undone by civil war that left as many as 75,000 dead. Between 1960 and 1996, Guatemala’s civil war resulted in the deaths of 200,000 civilians. Honduras didn’t have a civil war of its own, but the violence in neighboring countries bled across its borders and made it, too, one of the world’s most dangerous places to live.
Even after the wars ended, the violence didn’t. A broken economy with deep poverty and few jobs, awash in weapons and generational destruction, led to the formation of organized criminal organizations that used murder, rape, and other sexual violence to control territory and take over large swaths of the region. In the years since, more people have been killed and kidnapped in the Northern Triangle than in some of the world’s most brutal wars. Between 2011 and 2014, nearly fifty thousand people were murdered in the Northern Triangle, and just 5 percent of the deaths resulted in judicial convictions.
For residents of these countries, life is often defined by terror. Gang violence, drug trafficking, and corruption are rampant. The largest and most notorious of these transnational criminal organizations, MS-13 and the Mara 18, are reported to include as many as 85,000 members worldwide. They extort small business owners and residents in poor neighborhoods into paying hundreds of millions of dollars each and every year. Those who don’t pay risk death, for them and their families. The gangs recruit young men to join their ranks through threats and intimidation, and they force teenage girls to endure sexual violence as so-called gang girlfriends.
Indeed, for women and girls in these countries, violence is systemic. In July 2014, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women reported that violent deaths of women in Honduras had risen by 263.4 percent between 2005 and 2013. There are stories of children being robbed, raped, murdered—including an eleven-year-old girl in Honduras whose killers slashed her throat and stuffed her underwear in it. If there was a ground zero for brutality and bleakness, the Northern Triangle would be it.
The only option is escape. And so hundreds of thousands of people have fled the region into neighboring countries and up through Mexico to the United States. In the past, we have welcomed asylum seekers in accordance with international law, granting them special protected status because of the severity of the hardships they face. Sometimes they come as families. But all too often, the journey is impossible to afford, leaving parents with an excruciating choice: Do they keep their children close but in the midst of mortal peril, or do they send them to the United States, knowing that if they survive the perilous journey they will have a chance to be safe and free?
In the summer of 2014, an unprecedented surge of tens of thousands of children and adolescents fled the violence of the Northern Triangle through human smuggling networks that brought them to the United States.
I was attorney general at the time, sitting at home watching the evening news, when I saw an image that struck a chord. In Murrieta, California—a town roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego—several buses carrying roughly 140 undocumented children and parents were on their way to a processing center. A crowd had gathered, blocking the street, waving flags and signs and yelling, “Nobody wants you!” “You’re not welcome!” “Turn around and go back home!” There were children inside the buses, looking out of their windows at faces filled with hate and vitriol. Their only wrong was that they had fled horrific violence.
And it wasn’t just the protesters in the streets. At the same time, a big push was coming out of DC to expedite the decision-making process so that they could quickly turn undocumented kids and families back. The aim was to assess and reach asylum decisions in about two weeks. Now, to be clear, the process requires someone to make a decision about whether the asylum seeker was fleeing real harm. That means that children have to share facts and tell their story in a comprehensive way.
I knew, having prosecuted child sexual assault, that in these types of cases, it takes a long time to earn a child’s trust, and for a child to be able to tell his or her story in a court of law. What was worse, I learned that these asylum-seeking kids had no right to a lawyer to guide them through the process. And that mattered a great deal. If you don’t have a lawyer, there’s about a 90 percent chance that you will lose your asylum case. If you have legal advice, there’s about a 50 percent chance you will prevail. Given that deportation would take these children back into the heart of danger, whether or not they had a lawyer was a matter of life and death.
I had to do something about this, and I knew there wasn’t any time to waste. So I personally got on the phone with managing partners of some of the most prestigious law firms in California, as well as corporate lawyers from big entertainment companies like Walt Disney and Warner Bros. Entertainment, and asked them to come to my office to help me make sure these children, some as young as eight years old, had lawyers, and thus had access to due process. Representatives from dozens of law firms convened in the conference room of my downtown Los Angeles office, and I took on the role of auctioneer.
“Okay, can I get five hundred hours of pro bono from you? How about you? And you? What about your firm? What can you guys do for us?” Soon after, we held a similar meeting in Northern California, where I did the same. We rallied the private lawyers to work through one of the community agencies that was offering legal services to help unaccompanied kids. Then I sponsored legislation to provide $3 million to other nonprofits that were providing these children with legal representation.
This was my first experience with the crisis in the Northern Triangle and the consequences it had wrought on children and families. But it wouldn’t be the last.
In January 2017, one of the new administration’s first orders of business was signing an executive order that revoked the temporary protected status of immigrants from the Northern Triangle. As a result, some 350,000 immigrants are in the process of losing their right to live and work in the United States. The administration also ordered a change in the way asylum cases are considered, making it more difficult for immigrants to establish a legal basis for staying in the United States. Between February and June 2017, the number of applicants found to be eligible for asylum dropped by 10 percent.
In March 2017, Secretary Kelly went on CNN, where he was asked about a report that, in order to deter more people from the Northern Triangle from coming to the United States, he was actively considering the possibility of forcibly separating parents from their children at the border. “I would do almost anything to deter the people from Central America from getting on this very, very dangerous network that brings them up through Mexico into the United States,” he said, confirming that it was under consideration.
Shortly thereafter, Elaine Duke, the deputy secretary of homeland security, appeared before the Homeland Security Committee. “Do you know when this is supposed to take effect?” I asked her, trying to gauge the likelihood that something so atrocious could be under way.
“It is not a decision,” she said. “The Secretary—I talked to him personally about it. He considers it still a possibility. They are looking at a wide range of deterrents, and it was raised as a possible method of deterrence but there is no decision made and there is no implementation plan currently.”
It was an unacceptable answer. The next month, when Kelly appeared before the committee, I grilled him on the issue. He was evasive about whether this policy was under consideration, but he refused to rule it out.
“So are you unwilling, sir, to issue a written directive that it is the policy of this department to not separate children from their mothers unless the life of the child is in danger?”
“I don’t need to do that.”
I continued to press for answers through the end of 2017 and into 2018, but DHS was not forthcoming. Then, on April 6, 2018, Attorney General Sessions announced a zero-tolerance policy at the border, meaning that the administration would refer for criminal prosecution any adult crossing the border illegally, regardless of the reason, and that this could include separating children from their parents. We learned through a New York Times report several days later that, despite DHS’s insistence that there was no separation policy, seven hundred children had been separated from their parents since the previous October, including one hundred who were under the age of four.
There are few things more cruel, more inhumane, more fundamentally evil than ripping a child from her parent’s arms. We should all know this to be true on a gut level. But if we needed more proof, we could look at a statement released by Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, on behalf of the organization, stating that she was appalled by the new policy. Dr. Kraft wrote about the extraordinary stress and trauma of family separation, which “can cause irreparable harm, disrupting a child’s brain architecture and affecting his or her short- and long-term health.” These findings are shared by the American Medical Association, which has called for an end to the policy, noting that the children the U.S. government is forcibly separating from their parents may be scarred for life.
The administration claimed that it wouldn’t separate families seeking asylum if they arrived at an official port of entry, as opposed to other parts of the border. But that didn’t hold true. There were reports of a six-year-old girl from the Democratic Republic of Congo who was taken from her mother when they arrived at the San Diego port of entry seeking asylum, even though the mother was able to establish a credible fear of persecution. This was just one of many documented cases of family separation at ports of entry. A blind six-year-old was taken from her mother. So was an eighteen-month-old. This wasn’t just a tragedy; it was a violation of international law. It was a human rights abuse. And the toll it took was not just on the children. After a man from Honduras was separated from his wife, after his three-year-old son was ripped from his arms, after he was placed in an isolation cell, the trauma led him to take his own life.
On May 15, Kirstjen Nielsen, who had been confirmed as homeland security secretary after Kelly was named White House chief of staff, came before our committee. I told her that I was extremely concerned about the administration’s repeated attacks on some of the most vulnerable communities, children and pregnant women in particular, as enforced by DHS. I pointed to the DACA program, to the separation of children at the border, and to an agency directive that allows for more detentions of pregnant women. I expressed concern about a new information-sharing system between the Office of Refugee Resettlement and ICE that is likely to have a chilling effect on sponsors who otherwise would be willing to come forward to provide care for unaccompanied minors, because of fear that doing so would lead to their own deportation.
I also noted that the previous week, The Washington Post had reported that Nielsen was considering undermining an agreement that ensures standards of care for immigrant children, such as the provision of meals and recreation, and calls for them to be placed in the least restrictive setting possible.
I told her that the administration had routinely provided misleading information to the committee and had even gone so far as to claim that policies many consider to be cruel, such as routinely separating families, are carried out in the best interest of the child.
“So my question to you is, last Thursday, The New York Times reported that the president has directed you to separate parents from children when they cross into the United States as a way to deter illegal immigrants, is that correct? Have you been directed to separate parents from children as a method of deterrence of undocumented immigration?”
“I have not been directed to do that for purposes of deterrence, no.”
“What purpose have you been given for separating parents from their children?”
“So my decision has been that anyone who breaks the law will be prosecuted. If you’re a parent or you’re a single person or you happen to have a family, if you cross between the ports of entry we will refer you for prosecution. You have broken U.S. law.”
Again I pressed. “So your agency will be separating children from their parents—”
“No, what we’ll be doing is prosecuting parents who have broken the law, just as we do every day in the United States of America.”
“But if that parent has a four-year-old child, what do you plan on doing with that child?”
“The child, under law, goes to HHS for care and custody.”
“They will be separated from their parent. And so my question—”
“Just like we do in the United States every day.”
“So they will be separated from their parent, and my question then is when you are separating children from their parents, do you have a protocol in place about how that should be done and are you training the people who will actually remove a child from their parent on how to do that in the least traumatic way? I would hope you do train on how to do that, and so the question is, and the request has been, to give us the information about how you are training and what the protocols are for separating a child from their parent.”
“I’m happy to provide you with the training information,” she said, though she never did. Once again, Nielsen made the false claim that she had stuck with through the entire process: “Again, we do not have a policy to separate children from their parents,” she said. “Our policy is if you break the law, we will prosecute you. You have an option to go to a port of entry and not illegally cross into our country.”
Let’s call this what it is. The White House and DHS were using children—babies—as pawns in a profoundly misguided and inhumane policy to deter immigration. Attorney General Sessions admitted as much—proudly, it appeared, while quoting scripture to justify the abuse:
“Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for purpose and order,” he said, seemingly forgetting or omitting all of the teachings of Christ in the process.
For an added dose of cruelty, Sessions got rid of the right of women and children to seek asylum because of domestic abuse.
I often describe the balance of our democracy as resting on four legs: three independent, coequal branches of government and a free, independent press. As this horror unfolded, the press worked tirelessly to safeguard our true values. Crews of reporters went down to our southern border, filming, filing, and reporting in real time, showing Americans what was really going on, bringing the crisis into our living rooms. The vivid daily coverage informed and inspired a public outcry that eventually forced the administration to backtrack, at least temporarily.
On June 20, 2018, the president signed an executive order that ended its family separation practice. But that did not put an end to the story. Rather than separating families, the new administration policy was to hold those families indefinitely behind bars. As of this writing, jailing innocent children remains the policy of the United States. Children remain separated from their parents. And in the aftermath of the executive order, we were still greeted with headlines like this one, from The Texas Tribune: “Immigrant Toddlers Ordered to Appear in Court Alone.”
On a hot, dry day at the end of June, I visited the Otay Mesa Detention Center, not far from the border between California and Mexico. I’ve seen many prisons. Otay Mesa was identical in appearance. To get in the facility, which is surrounded by chain-link fences and barbed wire, you have to pass through multiple checkpoints. One gate opens, you stand in the middle area, and then it shuts behind you before another opens ahead. For anyone detained there, it sends a strong signal that you are locked away from the world.
Once inside the building, I met with mothers who’d been separated from their children. They were wearing blue jumpsuits with the word DETAINEE in block letters on their backs. I asked the facility staff to give us some privacy. They stood about twenty yards away while I asked the mothers about their experiences and came to understand the deep trauma they had endured.
Olga told me that she hadn’t seen her four children—ages seventeen, sixteen, twelve, and eight—in nearly two months and that she wasn’t even sure where they were. She had fled domestic violence in Honduras, taking a flight to Mexico. She stopped at the Tapachula shelter, in Mexico, where she learned that there was a caravan helping asylum seekers get to the United States. It wasn’t going to cost her any money, and it was going to drop her off in Tijuana just south of the border. They provided her and her family with food on the journey and offered to help her with the process of seeking asylum. She said she traveled by airline, train, and bus and at some points walked, though she was often able to hitchhike. People along the way had wanted to help.
When she arrived in Tijuana, she and her family were taken to churches and shelters, and eventually presented themselves to the U.S. Border Patrol. They were led to a holding cell and told to wait to be processed. That was when her children were taken from her, with no warning or explanation. She pleaded with the Border Patrol agents to tell her where her children had been taken. She presented their birth certificates. She needed answers. Desperately. But no answers were given. All she knew was that her three girls were being held together while her son was all by himself. Eventually a social worker was able to connect her by phone to her kids, who weren’t sure exactly where they were. She had come to believe that they were all in New York City, and though they said they were okay, it was hard to imagine that could be true.
Another woman from Honduras had a similar story. She, too, had fled the country because she was being abused, and she had brought her eight-year-old son, Mauro, with her. Her son was also taken from her cell with no explanation. The deportation officers told her that he was in Los Angeles, but even they weren’t sure. She had brought him with her because she thought he would be safe in the United States. But now that hope seemed lost.
The Department of Homeland Security had said that families seeking asylum at ports of entry would not be separated from one another. But when another woman at Otay Mesa, Morena, left El Salvador and presented herself with her two boys—ages twelve and five—at the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry processing center, her children were ripped away from her. She pleaded with the agents not to take her kids, but to no avail. She had to wait fifteen days to call her sons, because detainees were charged eighty-five cents per minute for calls and she didn’t have any money. She had to earn some by working at the facility. Morena had worked for seven days straight and was paid only four dollars. Olga had worked for twelve days and was also paid just four dollars. They said that when they tried to report abuse, they were yelled at. They told me they’d received a lot of verbal abuse from the officers, and had been forced to work late at night after long days of waiting for their hearings.
Six weeks had passed and Morena was still unable to get in touch with her children. She called the facility where she was told they’d been taken, but the phone just kept ringing, with no answer. She told me that the only time they were allowed to make phone calls was when their kids were in class and unavailable. Morena said she was finding it hard to eat because she was so distraught over not seeing or speaking to her children in such a long time.
When I spoke with the guards at the detention center, I had a lot of questions, and the answers didn’t add up. They told me, for example, that videoconferencing with kids was a service they offered that was available anytime and for free. They assured me that phone calls were free, too. But when I asked the mothers if they knew this, they immediately said no. They didn’t even know that videoconferencing was available. And when I returned to Washington and took part in a Judiciary Committee hearing with Matthew Albence, executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations at ICE, our exchange on this topic was revealing.
I told Albence how, during my visit to Otay Mesa, I’d learned from the parents being detained that when they were performing labor, such as cleaning toilets or doing laundry, they were paid one dollar a day. “Are you familiar with that policy? Or practice?” I asked.
“Many of the individuals that are in ICE custody are eligible to apply and work in a voluntary work program,” Albence replied. “It’s not mandatory; it’s voluntary if they choose to do so. Many do choose to do so, just to pass the time, while they’re awaiting their hearing or their removal—”
“Do you think that people voluntarily choose to clean toilets to pass their time? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I can say that we have a large number of individuals within our custody that volunteer to work in the work program.”
“To clean toilets? Sir, is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know every task that these individuals are assigned, but again, it’s voluntary.”
Voluntary? I don’t think so.
The most shocking answer I got during my time at Otay Mesa was when I asked the detention facility staff the question many people had asked me: “Who is responsible for leading the process to reunite these families?” They looked around at one another blankly for a few seconds, until one (who was apparently more senior than the others) answered, “That would be me.” He then admitted that he had no idea what the plan was or the status of any reunification efforts.
We would later learn that federal records linking parents and children had disappeared. In some cases, for unfathomable reasons, records had actually been destroyed. When a federal court ruled that families had to be reunited within thirty days, government officials had to resort to DNA tests to try to figure out which children belonged with which family.
Before I left the detention facility, I reassured the mothers that they weren’t alone—that there were so many people standing with them and fighting for them, and that I would do everything in my power to help them. As I walked down the long driveway toward the exit, I saw that solidarity personified. Hundreds of people had gathered outside the fence, holding vigil in support of the families. People of all ages and backgrounds—children, students, parents, and grandparents—had traveled to Otay Mesa because they shared the anguish and the heartbreak of the mothers inside.
I joined the throng of supporters, many of whom were carrying signs. ESTAMOS CON USTEDES . . . FAMILIES BELONG TOGETHER . . . WE WON’T BACK DOWN. Beneath the blazing summer sun, I told the press what I had seen.
“These mothers have given their testimony, if you will, have shared their stories, and they are personal stories of a human rights abuse being committed by the United States government. And we are so much better than this, and we have got to fight against this. This is contrary to all of the principles that we hold dear and that give us a sense of who we are when we are proud to be Americans. But we have no reason to be proud of this.”
These mothers had made the dangerous journey to America with their children because they knew that the danger of staying in their home country was even worse. They have the legal right to seek asylum, but when they arrive, we call them criminals. We treat them like criminals. That is not the sign of a civil society, nor is it a sign of compassion. The United States government has brought great shame to the American people.
The values at stake here are so much bigger than an immigration debate.
Nothing makes a child feel more secure than being tucked in by a parent at the end of a day, getting a kiss and a hug, a good-night story, falling asleep to the sound of their voice. Nothing is more important to a parent than talking with their child at night before the child goes to sleep, answering their questions, comforting and reassuring them in the face of any fears, making sure they know that everything will be okay. Parents and children everywhere relate to these rituals. They are part of the human experience.
As family reunification began, we heard horrific stories that showed us just how shameful this administration’s actions have been. The Los Angeles Times reported on a three-year-old boy who was separated from his father at the border. “At night, Andriy sometimes wakes up screaming in the bunk bed he shares with his mother and baby brother.” We saw video of six-year-old Jefferson reunited with his father after nearly two months of separation. The child’s body was covered in a rash; his face was bruised; his eyes were vacant. His father cried, enveloping the boy in a hug. Jefferson was stiff and expressionless. We also learned, through PBS NewsHour, of a fourteen-month-old who was returned to his parents, after eighty-five days, covered in lice, apparently having not been bathed. It is hard to imagine anything crueler than such blatant state-sponsored child abuse.
A mother who was separated from her children said that she had been kept in a cell with nearly fifty other mothers. She recounted that officers told them they weren’t allowed to eat because they were asking about their children. A pregnant woman fainted out of hunger. She said of the separated children that they had no shoes or blankets in the detention center and that there were people in the cells who had to sleep on their feet. The children were demeaned, she said, called “animals” and “donkeys.” These are surely just the examples we know, representative of horrors in the thousands that we may never hear of. These children, ripped away from their parents, will suffer lifelong trauma because of the actions of this administration. This behavior is not just immoral; it is inhumane. And I’ve introduced a bill in the Senate to put body cameras on immigration agents so we can deter such bad behavior and create transparency and accountability.
A society is judged by the way it treats its children—and history will judge us harshly for this. Most Americans know that already. Most Americans are appalled and ashamed. We are better than this. And we must make right the wrongs that this administration has committed in our name.