Trump Administration Separates Thousands Of Children From Their Parents At The Border, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Families Seeking Asylum Were Arriving In The United States Intact

WASHINGTON. Citing a renewed commitment to the rule of law, the Trump administration confirmed this week that it had begun separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, putting to rest years of unease that families fleeing violence were managing to reach American soil without first being broken into smaller, more manageable units.

The policy, formalized in an April 6 directive ordering the criminal prosecution of every adult who crosses the border without authorization, ensures that parents are routed into federal custody while their children, who cannot lawfully be jailed alongside them, are reclassified as "unaccompanied" and placed in separate facilities. Officials praised the arrangement as an elegant solution to the problem of intact families, a category of arrival the government had long struggled to address.

"We have to have a real border, not a fake border," the President said, noting on a separate occasion that he hated to see the children taken away even as he attributed the practice to a law that did not exist and that his own administration had in fact written. Sources within the administration described the separations as a powerful deterrent, expressing confidence that word would travel back to Central America that the United States could now be relied upon to take a person's child.

By the time the program drew national attention, more than 5,500 children had been removed from their parents, some of them infants, with no system in place to record which child belonged to which adult. Administration officials characterized the absence of any reunification plan as evidence of how seriously the deterrent was meant to be taken.

Facing bipartisan outrage, the President signed an executive order on June 20 halting the separations he had spent weeks insisting he was powerless to stop. Days later a federal judge ordered the government to reunite the families within 30 days, a deadline the administration would go on to miss for hundreds of children, several of whom remained unaccounted for years afterward.

At press time, the administration was quietly studying whether the policy it had ended, apologized for, and been ordered by a court to reverse might be worth trying again.