President Donald Trump’s administration must find the deported migrant-parents who separated themselves from their children in the United States, says the Californian judge who is trying to govern the nation’s immigration policies.
“The reality is that for every parent who is not located there will be a permanently orphaned child and that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration,” U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw said Friday as he announced that he would pick a federal official to help ACLU lawyers meet the deported migrants.
The ACLU’s lawyers want to offer free legal aid to the deported migrants, including advice on how they could join their children in the United States.
The California judge’s condemnation of Trump’s enforcement policies also helps progressives blame Trump for “separating families” — even as a growing number of migrants are show they separating and splitting their own families to exploit the immigration loopholes championed by progressives.
The migrants’ decisions to separate children from their own families is a political threat to the left because it undermines their media-magnified campaign to blame Trump for the family separations which are encouraged by the progressives’ migration loopholes.
Trump’s “zero tolerance” enforcement campaign seeks to prosecute all economic migrants — and so deter future migrants who help cut Americans’ wage, crowd into neighborhoods and schools, and eventually vote in Americans’ elections if they can become citizens. In 2017, for example, 400,000 asylum-seekers got work permits to compete for service-worker jobs in the United States, while illegals also birthed roughly 300,000 children in the United States.
Immigration laws require officials need to house migrants’ children in facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services while their parents’ legal claims — including requests for asylum — are processed over a period of roughly 40 days.
But Democrats argue the detention-and-housing practice is an illegitimate effort to deter migrants by taking their children away, even though federal law prevents the agencies from keeping children in the parents’ crowded detention centers, except in two smaller family detention centers.
During May and June, officials detained roughly 2,500 migrant parents and sheltered roughly 2,500 of their children at HHS facilities. But in late June, Trump was forced to stop most prosecutions of migrants with children amid a media-magnified pushback by progressives and pro-migrant judges.
But progressives have created and still defend the legal loopholes which encourage illegal immigrants to bring their children through the border.
For example, the vast majority of the migrant parents coming across bring a single child northwards to exploit the Flores loophole created in 2015 by another progressive judge, Judge Dolly Gee. The Flores loophole requires that officials release children from federal detention centers within 20 days of their detention. But under President Obama, and because of progressive pressure, the parents are being released with their children, so enabling the parents to use his or her separated child to get past the border and find work in U.S. cities.
The New York Times admitted:
Some migrants have admitted they brought their children not only to remove them from danger in such places as Central America and Africa, but because they believed it would cause the authorities to release them from custody sooner.
A July 24 article in the Washington Post, for example, described the tactics while painting the illegal migrants as sympathetic heroes:
EL PASO — Two by two, they came through the double doors of the shuttered retirement home: mothers tightly clutching their children, fathers holding fast to small hands.
They had been among the more than 2,500 parents stripped of their children and imprisoned after illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border…
But the Washington Post report also admitted the migrants’ tactics:
With his wife staying behind to safeguard their house, [Jose Luis Villanueva Alvarado] borrowed $9,000 from relatives to take the girl to the United States, never thinking she could be taken from him …
The fathers had a more modest goal — to stay in the United States long enough to pay off the debts accrued in getting here.
Also, progressives are trying to defend the easy asylum rules created by Obama’s deputies, which allowed migrants to file for asylum if they say they had to separate from a spouse because of abuse, or if they fled from their extended family because they are threatened by criminals. Attorney General Sessions ended those easy-asylum rules in July.
Another major cause of the family separations are the “sanctuary cities” where Democrats offer migrants the hope of working in low-wage service-jobs while their children use public schools created for blue-collar Americans. Without employment, migrants would not be able to repay the huge debts they accept to funding their migration.
Despite the repeated intervention by progressives, judges and friendly media, Trump’s enforcement agents have deported hundreds of the 2,500 parents, and hundreds more are slated for quick deportation.
But hundreds of the deported parents have chosen to separate themselves from their children by exploiting another loopholes which allows their children to live with relatives in the United States. Many of the relatives are illegal immigrants who were let stay in the United States by officials working for President Barack Obama.
The migrants can leave their children in the United States because the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005 allows the HHS agency to put the children in the custody of people picked by migrants. Throughout 2018, Democrats have refused to endorse any reforms of the TVPRA.
When government officials anounced that migrants were using the TVPRA to consciously leave their children in the United States, progressive lawyers claimed the parents were deceived by border officials and would not wish to separate themselves from their children.
That claims has been used by the legal groups to demand government aid in contacting the deported parents. In a statement to the judge, the progressive legal firms said:
Not only was it the government’s unconstitutional separation practice that led to this crisis, but the United States Government has far more resources than any group of NGOs (no matter how many NGOs and law firms are willing to try to help). Plaintiffs therefore hope that the Government will take significant and prompt steps to find the parents on their own.
Progressives also want to reward the deported migrants for separating their families by offering free legal-services to move the rest of the family into the United States. Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney in the Sabraw court, told NPR:
What I think the judge has understood over the last few weeks is that without us looking for the families, without us attempting to reunify the families, this may not get done as quickly as it needs to. So we have said we have NGOs here in the United States, abroad. We are willing to help if the government would just give us enough information to let us find these [deported] parents.
The legal groups have also won access to migrants who have not yet been deported. In those cases, the pro-migration lawyers advose parents on their right to separate themselves from their children so the children can apply for asylum in the United States. Once hte children can get asylu, tje parents may be able to use other legal tactics to reunited with them in the United States.
The status of all 2,500 migrant parents is unclear. NPR said:
According to data released Thursday, 1,535 children have been reunified with their parents in custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Another 444 were discharged to a sponsor other than their parents; reunified with their parents in the custody the Department of Homeland Security earlier in the process; or the children turned 18.
There are still 572 children who remain in the custody of DHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement because their parents aren’t available or are considered ineligible for reunification if they have a criminal record.
Those NPR numbers hide at least 120 deported parents — and perhaps 400 more — who have chosen to leave their children in the United States, often with close relatives who are living illlegally.
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