July 25, 2018
One of the most powerful Border Patrol officials—the chief of the San Diego sector—was furious at me. Rodney Scott, among the longest-serving members of the Border Patrol at thirty-plus years with the agency, had been stewing about the Dateline documentary, which included the interview we did almost half a year earlier while overlooking Tijuana from the United States side of the border.
It had been a full month since the broadcast aired. Izhar Harpaz, the lead producer, had, as a courtesy, sent Chief Scott the documentary on DVD with a thank-you note. Izhar’s good intentions didn’t land with the chief. Scott pulled out a piece of official Customs and Border Protection letterhead, complete with a giant watermarked eagle in the middle, and typed out a letter.
Dear Jacob and MSNBC Team:
Thank you for the DVD; however, I am returning it. I watched the show when it originally aired and have no reason to view it again.
To be perfectly honest, I was disappointed in the final product. I understand that you have editorial processes and a review cycle through which to clear programming. You also were clear from the beginning that the final storyline could change at the sole discretion of Dateline NBC management. None of that bothered me.
What bothered me was your personal decision to use the extremely inflammatory and emotionally charged description of our processing centers as “cages.” That few seconds of video overshadowed and erased any sign of neutral reporting. It became made-for-TV drama and little else.
To be fair, I also queried a number of private citizens who viewed the program in order to get their perspective. They also reiterated that their take away point was that the U.S. Border Patrol separates families and places them in cages. If that was your objective, you were successful.
Regrettably,
Rodney S. Scott
Chief Patrol Agent, San Diego Sector, U.S. Border Patrol
This is the same Rodney Scott who toured President Trump around his border wall prototypes for a bank of cameras. If any of the drama around separations was “made for TV,” it was created by the Trump administration itself. Katie Waldman, the Homeland Security spokeswoman, told me on multiple occasions that the policy was designed to play so shockingly in the media that it would force Congress to end it by passing harsh immigration laws, such as permitting indefinite detention of migrant families and the immediate deportation of unaccompanied Central American minors in its place.
As for my use of “cages,” the Border Patrol’s own officially released photos and video of the detention facilities testify to the accuracy of the description. I am happy the “private citizens” Scott “queried” took away that “the U.S. Border Patrol separates families and places them in cages,” as that was exactly what was happening. And, we told him “the final storyline could change at the sole discretion of Dateline NBC management” because nobody knew what Trump would do next along the border. It just so happened he decided to systematically separate thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border, and I ended up seeing it myself.
Maybe Scott was just having a bad day. He slipped the letter in a manila envelope, dropped in the DVD with Izhar’s handwritten note attached to it by a paper clip, and sent it to me, care of the Dateline NBC team at 30 Rock.
Meanwhile, the government was hours away from a deadline to put all parents and children back together, and it wasn’t going well.
July 26, 2018
Deadline day. “The government says every eligible parent will be reunited with their child on this day,” I told Today show hosts Carson Daly, Craig Melvin, and Hoda Kotb in Studio 1A.
We ran a report about one family I had met, Honduran Maria Gloria and her sons Franklin, eleven, and Byron, seven, who had been reunited in New York. You can’t call them the lucky ones, but their good fortune of getting back together earlier than many other families was more than hundreds of others could say.
“Honestly, it’s a mess,” I said of what was expected to be a large number of parents deported without their children. “The kids may be stranded here forever and not be able to get to their parents because those parents won’t be able to get back to the U.S. for reunification.”
It wasn’t so much that the reunifications themselves were a mess—in fact the emergency management team were completing a herculean task. Rather, the problem was that so many didn’t meet the criteria.
Sure enough, in a court filing later that day, the Trump administration admitted that while it had reunited more than 1,400 children with their parents, 711 kids had not been reunited, and of those, 431 had parents who had already been deported.
That night I flew home to Los Angeles. The next day there would be a status hearing in federal court in San Diego to discuss what would happen to those families. I drove down the following morning to be able to see it in person.
I HAD HEARD the voice of Judge Sabraw but never seen him with my own eyes, nor stepped foot inside the courtroom that would touch the lives of virtually every separated child I saw at the epicenter of the policy. As I walked toward the building from where I parked around one in the afternoon, I saw Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer, walking hurriedly across the street with a documentary camera crew in tow. Aarne, who met me down there, and I stayed back to avoid showing up in that footage.
The federal courthouse building, designed by famed architect Richard Meier, was immaculate, sixteen stories of terra cotta tiles and glass and polished metal elevators. Not at all what I had pictured. I walked up the ramp out front, the sunlight reflecting off the windows and blasting me in the face until I made it inside. Upstairs inside the courtroom, I pulled out my blue spiral notebook. There were three blank pages left.
Once the proceedings started, the normal telephone conference line that lets in people from the outside world went dead, leaving us in the courtroom as the only conduits of information. Good timing to be there. Sitting there in person just feet behind Lee Gelernt and Scott Stewart, the government’s attorney, I was struck that the interaction between the two felt far chippier than I had anticipated. On the docket was the issue of 120 parents who had signed forms, just like Juan at Adelanto, giving up the right to be reunified with their children. Gelernt was adamant those cases be revisited in some way so that those parents were not immediately deported without their children, as more than four hundred others had already been.
“The trauma that is going on is amazing,” Gelernt said of the reports he was getting from the ground. “It would be torturous to have a parent thinking the rest of their lives, I gave away my child because I was confused, and it was my mistake.
“I mean, they are going to go back to their home countries now and people are going to ask, where is your daughter? Where is your son?
“And they are going to be having to say, well, I was confused and didn’t understand.”
For much of the rest of the hearing, Gelernt continued to press this issue, and Judge Sabraw attempted to digest it as the Trump administration pushed back.
“I think we never anticipated that people could make the decision requested of them on the form without being with their child, because it is a family decision,” Gelernt admitted.
“So this would be a parent in a facility who has a removal order,” Judge Sabraw said, describing almost exactly the case of Juan in Adelanto. Gelernt, too, without knowing Juan or his case specifically, described his situation perfectly.
“It was virtually impossible to counsel parents when they were separated because they were constantly being transferred,” he said. Juan had been moved from Yuma to Florence to Victorville and finally to Adelanto, where he signed the form after it was presented to the Spanish speaker in English.
The Trump administration’s lawyer wasn’t buying it.
“The notice form is quite clear. It gives parents the information they need to know,” Stewart said. “As with any system, there could be imperfections of operation on the ground.”
“Do you agree that with the parents who claim they elected to remove separately but didn’t know what they were doing could be carved out,” Sabraw inquired of Stewart, “or whatever the term is, so that they can meet with counsel, and then determine whether to reunify and remove together?”
Stewart had a hard time answering the question, saying several times he wanted to “take it back.”
“When you say you could take it back, what does that mean?” Sabraw asked.
“Well, I would have to talk to the—just the clients and sort of see, you know, what the, you know, how we, you know, what we can kind of work out, what we might be able to work out there as to that group.”
Stewart was floundering. He was unsure of the total number of parents who had signed the form and were now saying they wanted to change their election.
“So, then, whether it is two hundred and six or one hundred and twenty,” said Gelernt, “I am not sure exactly I understand what the United States government’s legitimate position is in leaving a child behind who the parent doesn’t want to leave behind. That seems beyond the pale.”
This set off Stewart. I felt like a kid in the room when my parents were arguing. It was intense.
“My legitimate position there, your honor, is that it is one thing if a person here or there says they didn’t understand something.
“But my understanding of Mr. Gelernt is that his essential view is that if you elected to be removed without your child, then that somehow, like, presumptively implies coercion or misleading or inadequate information or lack of counseling.”
Judge Sabraw interjected like a referee in the ring, sending the two sides back to their corners, leaving the issue to be solved another day. Meanwhile, parents like Juan remained locked up, after the reunification deadline, as his son went through the daily repetitive routine of life in the custody of a shelter.
July 28, 2018
If the judicial branch of the federal government wasn’t keeping the Trump administration busy enough as it struggled to undo its family separation policy, the legislative branch had questions about the Trump-made disaster, too. On a summer Saturday, a select group of interagency officials gathered to prepare for a hearing called by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee.
The committee had called before it five administration officials: Matthew Albence, the executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who had advocated for family separations since the earliest days of the administration; Commander Jonathan White, who had done the exact opposite and was now in charge of reunification efforts; Carla Provost, the chief of the Border Patrol, whose agents carried out the separations; James McHenry, the director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, representing the Department of Justice, which initiated the zero tolerance policy; and Jennifer Higgins, the associate director of the Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for asylum claims.
They were participating in a “murder board,” what they called a practice session in which they would be peppered with hypothetical questions they would hear from senators. The gathering went about as well as you could expect, given the tension among the officials.
Part of the team questioning the soon-to-be witnesses were Katie Waldman, the Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, and her boss, Jonathan Hoffman, the assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS. Hoffman’s counterpart from HHS was also there, Judy Stecker, the assistant secretary for public affairs, as was Brian Stimson, the principal deputy general counsel for the department.
The group walked through the lead-up, implementation, and aftermath of the policy. But one question in particular caused the room to explode: Was separation harmful to children?
Commander Jonathan White, who had long warned of the impacts of separation on children, as had the American Academy of Pediatrics, among others, made it clear he believed it was. If asked, he would stick to the scientific facts.
Waldman suggested a line that was straight out of the Koch brothers’ climate denial playbook: “there’s no reason to think, or way to know, that separations were harmful to children.”
White couldn’t believe it.
“I cannot give that answer under oath because it would be perjury.”
Stimson, the Health and Human Services lawyer, jumped in. Commander White, he told the DHS flacks, was his “star witness” in the Ms. L. case “and you’re pressuring him to give this answer under oath?”
Waldman, Hoffman, Stimson, and Stecker started screaming at one another. After the blowup, Waldman approached Commander White and, as she had done to me on several occasions, used one of her favorite pejoratives.
“I’m sure you’re a bleeding heart liberal.”
That set Commander White off.
“Ms. Waldman, you should save that attitude for journalists. You literally traumatized these kids. Why don’t you go peddle your story to people who don’t work in immigration.”
Hoffman, looking out for his department and personal interests, interjected.
“Where are your loyalties?” he asked White, using a line that could have come from President Trump.
“I swore to protect the Constitution as a commissioned officer of the U.S. Public Health Service. Under oath I’ll answer truthfully,” he shot back.
The following Tuesday, he did. At the hearing, ICE’s Albence described his agency’s family detention facilities as “more like a summer camp,” an absurd comparison by any stretch of the imagination.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat from Connecticut, asked the five assembled witnesses, sworn under oath, “Did any member of this panel say to anyone, ‘maybe this isn’t such a good idea’?”
The room sat in silence for four seconds, until Blumenthal looked at Commander White, asking him to speak.
“During the deliberative process over the previous year, we raised a number of concerns in the ORR program about any policy which would result in family separation,” White admitted, “due to concerns we had about the best interest of the child as well as about whether that would be operationally supportable with the bed capacity we had.”
White leaned back in his chair, his hands folded in his lap as Blumenthal responded slowly.
“Now, I’m gonna translate that into what I would call layman’s language. You told the administration that kids would suffer as a result. That pain would be inflicted, correct?”
As he promised Waldman and Hoffman at the murder board, White didn’t mince words, and he told the truth.
“Separation of children from their parents entails significant risk of harm to children.”
“Well, it’s traumatic for any child separated from his or her parents,” Blumenthal said as White nodded. “Am I correct? I say that as a parent of four children.”
“There’s no question. There’s no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child.”