Trump Administration Unveils Policy Of Taking Children From Their Parents At The Border, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Federal Government Had No Deterrent It Could Inflict On A Three-Year-Old

SAN DIEGO. Standing before a bank of cameras Monday, the Trump administration formally unveiled a new border policy under which every adult crossing the southern border without authorization would be criminally prosecuted, a procedural step that officials confirmed would have the entirely foreseeable effect of removing that adult's children and placing them somewhere else.

Under the "zero tolerance" initiative, Justice Department officials explained, the federal government would refer all illegal-entry cases for prosecution, and because children cannot be held in criminal detention alongside their parents, the children would simply be taken. Administration officials described the resulting separations not as the goal of the policy but as its mechanism, a distinction they stressed repeatedly while declining to identify any other purpose the mechanism served.

"The policy is working exactly as designed," said one official within the Department of Homeland Security, speaking on condition of anonymity because the design was the part people kept objecting to. "A parent considering the journey now knows that if they come, we will take the child. That is the deterrent. We looked at the available deterrents, and this was the one we had left."

Over the following weeks, more than 5,500 children, including infants and toddlers too young to state their own names, were separated from their parents and placed into a nationwide shelter network. Officials acknowledged that the government had not built a corresponding system to record which child belonged to which parent, with the result that when a federal judge ordered the families reunited within 30 days, the administration could confirm only that the children and the parents were each, broadly speaking, somewhere. In several hundred cases, the parents had already been deported to Central America without them. President Trump, asked about the policy, identified its cause as a statute passed by his opponents. "Separating families at the Border is the fault of bad legislation passed by the Democrats," Trump wrote, referring to a law that did not exist, and which he would prove did not exist on June 20 by ending the separations himself with a single executive order.

Constitutional scholars noted that the episode established a useful precedent, confirming that the federal government, upon determining that a policy is not landing, retains the option of applying it instead to the policy's smallest available bystanders.

At press time, the administration was reviewing whether the roughly 1,400 toddlers placed in its shelters could be made to understand that the entire experience had been the fault of the Democrats.