A teacher, Mary R. Hyde, and students at the Carlisle Indian Training School. Source: here and here.
At least two years before 2016, large numbers of Central American families, nearly all from the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador began to arrive in walking caravans at the Texas Border. Well before Donald Trump emerged, the U.S. immigration system at the border was overtaxed. Ronald Reagan knew it; George W. Bush (fluent in Spanish) knew it; Barack Obama knew it. All tried to address it, explaining that congressionally authorized resources were simply inadequate to manage the realities permitted by U.S. immigration law, especially the legal right foreign nationals to seek asylum or refugee status under a federal statute essentially unchanged since 1965.
Efforts for change and improvement all died at the altar of partisan self-interest. Legislators from across the country—not only those with constituents on the border—concluded that any solution would be more problematic to individual political fortunes than continuing the status quo and arguing the positions most favored by the particular local and regional voters they needed to be elected.
Stoked by political rhetoric from both sides, the public worried about large numbers of new citizens entering the country. Legitimate worries included concern about the strain on public health, school resources, and transportation infrastructure in local communities. Unfounded worries included concerns about crime. Numerous studies have documented that immigrants, including those entering legally by asylum and even those “undocumented” persons who are in the U.S. without legal status, commit crimes at materially lower rates than American-born citizens.[1] The other objection, that newcomers cause Americans to lose or find jobs, has also been refuted. Employers hiring large numbers of workers almost unanimously want as many immigrants allowed in as is possible to fill jobs for which they cannot find applicants otherwise. And increases in the number of immigrants, by adding to the economy and success of businesses, actually increases the wages and employment opportunities of American-born citizens.[2]
2017 and 2018
But in 2017 and 2018, the Trump administration moved, without Congressional authority, to stop the Central American caravans with a new measure: the broadscale involuntary separation of parents from their children at the Texas border, primarily at El Paso. The intent of the new policy was deterrence: to discourage asylum seeking families from making their journeys. If they began to be separated, finding themselves in different countries, it was thought, the seekers would stop seeking.
The program was initially undisclosed by the administration (on the ground that it was merely a “pilot program”) and drew little public or media attention. It worked as follows.
A family presented itself to the Border Control agents at the crossing (the recommended pathway for entrance) or on American soil near the border, having managed to reach it by other means (not recommended, but still a legal way to seek asylum under U.S. law). Following brief interviews, nearly all parents were either detained temporarily in a government facility without their children or summarily deported and sent to the Mexican border, again without their children. The children, regardless of age, were immediately deemed “unaccompanied minors,” since their parents were no longer present with them, and turned over to the custody of the Homeland Security Refugee Service for temporary housing, often in a church-affiliated respite center, and then ultimately placed in either American foster homes or the home of a qualifying relative somewhere in the U.S., if such a person could be identified. If a relative could be found at all, the process was often lengthy.
Data on the actual number of children taken from their parents during the Trump Administration are imprecise. But studies by relief organizations such as the American Council of Catholic Bishops, the Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Service, and the Washington Office on Latin America have documented that at least 2,000 children were removed from parents between February 2017 and the date the policy became public and official in May 2018; another 2,500 were separated in the 50 days thereafter. Some estimates are as high as nearly 6,000 children and 3,000 families. The Trump administration ostensibly stopped the practice on June 20, 2018, in response to public furor and condemnation from all sides of the political spectrum.[3] Anti-immigrant positions might earn votes for some politicians, but taking children from their parents earned votes for nobody. What it did was provoke the abhorrence of the vast majority of (but not all) Americans.
Historical context
But was the widescale forced separation of parents and children in 2018 actually new in historical American immigration policy and practice? Could such a policy have been a reality earlier in the American experiment? The truth—many would say sad truth—is that it was. Two prior examples are obvious and known to most Americans.
The first was the long period of legal slavery in the U.S., when millions of African and Caribbean black men and women were forcibly transported to the United States with the approval of the federal and state governments and held here in involuntary servitude. Those slaves who were able to bring their children with them, or who gave birth to them once here, were routinely sold to new owners, never to see their children or grandchildren again. There is no denying that slavery in the U.S. was tragically replete with the separation of families.
The second instance was the common practice for decades in the 19th century of removing Native American children from their natural parents and tribes and placing them either in “Indian” boarding schools or the strange Christian homes of white Americans. (A moving portrait of the practice—and its harmful effects—is depicted in Conrad Richter’s classic novel, The Light in the Forest.) These involuntary relocations were massive. Federal and state governments separated as many as 35% of all American indigenous children from their families, according to a 1978 report by the US House of Representatives.[4]
Most of us learned of the above practices in our American educations, if incompletely. But many may be surprised to learn that family separation in the U.S. occurred at the hands of some state and city governments even into the early 20th century, condoned or overlooked by the federal government. Prior to 1920, when specific immigration rules were enacted by Congress, state and city governments, motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment, removed an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 children of Irish and Polish immigrants and placed them in Protestant or Anglo-American households, away from their local areas.[5]
We can hope that such interference with the family unit, based on religious hatred, would be unthinkable today. But it is part of our past.
2015 report
In 2015, the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration published a report entitled
Family Immigration Detention, Why the Past Cannot be Prologue. The report addressed the difficult and sad question of the morality of detaining whole families at the border under the Obama administration. It preceded the family separation policy that the Trump administration implemented 3 years later, which most Americans believe was even sadder and more immoral.
The authors of the ABA report must be disappointed. The “past” that it examined—the detention of whole families—did not improve. Instead, it worsened, with a government policy that, at least temporarily, divided the nuclear family unit itself.
In this instance, we did not advance from the lessons of our past. But in history, there is always hope. Maybe we will learn them at last.
Joseph Bauer is the author of Sailing for Grace (Running Wild Press 2024), a novel that explores a white widower’s quest to fulfill a promise to his dying wife: to reunite Central American parents with their children separated from them at the Texas Border in 2018. Mr. Bauer’s previously published novels are The Accidental Patriot (2020), The Patriot’s Angels (2022), and Too True to be Good (2023). His latest finished manuscript of historical fiction about the lead-up to and conduct of WWII is titled, Arsenal of Secrecy, The FDR Years, A Novel.
[1] See e.g., Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate, University of Wisconsin research study funded by the National Institute of Justice (September 2024). This and many other studies conclude that undocumented “illegal” immigrants commit about or less than half as many crimes as Americans for the same number of persons. This is true across all kinds of crimes, including murders, other violent crimes, and drug trafficking. Admitted asylum seekers and refugees also commit far few crimes than American-born counterparts.
[2] Immigration’s Effect on US Wages and Employment, Caiumi, Alessandro and Peri, Giovanni, National Bureau of Economic Research (August 2024).
[3] Many sources, including an audit by U.S. have reported that family separations at the Texas border continued in significant numbers well after the Trump Administration announced a halt to them in June 2018. See e.g., Long, Colleen; Alonso-Zaldiver, Ricardo. “Watchdog: Thousands More Children May Have Been Separated”. U.S. News & World Report, January 18, 2019.
[4]Sinha, Anita. An American History of Separating Families, American Constitution Society, November 2, 2020.
[5]Americans today almost unanimously believe that our Constitution, by its First Amendment, assures inviolate an individual and collective right to freedom of religion and worship. But that Amendment, until applied to State and local governments much, much later, did not prevent any state from religious discrimination in its own laws. Catholics were so generally despised in Massachusetts in the early days of our nation that Catholic priests were forbidden by state law from living there and subject to imprisonment and even execution if they did.
