Young Center Recommendations to Prevent Family Separation
In response to the Department of Homeland Security seeking public comments on how the government can prevent family separation at our borders, the Young Center in collaboration with the Center for the Human Rights of Children at Loyola University in Chicago submitted a joint comment with our recommendations.
Our comment focused on parents who are separated from their children on the basis of criminal histories, the majority of which have no bearing on a parent’s ability to care for their child. In particular, we examined the impact of: 1) the criminal prosecution and increased use of imprisonment for immigration law violations, 2) the unjust penalization of parents and children when criminal history is used as a proxy for child safety, 3) the rampant racial bias in criminal legal systems which has a disproportionate impact on immigrants of color, and 4) the reality that DHS often separates children from parents only to reunite them for the sole purpose of repatriation, belying their supposed concern for child safety. For each of these deeply problematic outcomes, we provide recommendations that the Biden-Harris administration could immediately undertake to end ongoing family separation.
A child’s separation from parents is a deeply traumatizing experience and can carry significant physical and emotional consequences well beyond the period of separation. The American Psychological Association has raised grave concerns that the sudden and unexpected separation of a child from their parent can cause severe emotional trauma, noting that “the longer that parents and children are separated, the greater the reported symptoms of anxiety and depression are for children.” In our comment, we recommended that for all families impacted by family separation, the administration should ensure a pathway to permanent legal status, access to counsel at government expense, and access to holistic, culturally competent case management and mental health services.
Black, Indigenous, and communities of color in the United States have faced family separation for generations. Migrant families regularly experience separation, but so too do immigrant families who have been living in the United States for generations, and Black and Brown U.S. citizen families who face separation due to paternalistic child welfare policy and practice or because of over policing, criminalization, and mass incarceration. U.S. immigration policy perpetuates and reinforces these biases against people of color, deeming immigrant children and their families suspicious, likely to commit crimes, engage in trafficking, or at a minimum, to be unable to adequately care for themselves, judging them against biased cultural norms about family. While the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy was perhaps the most public display of family separation in recent history, discriminatory, unjust, and egregious separations of children from their families have been all too common for families of color in the United States and they persist today. The Biden-Harris administration has an obligation to do everything in its power to stop this. We also believe that the government has an obligation to minimize the separation of children from non-parent/non-legal guardian family members and even fictive kin consistent with best practice in child welfare and federal law.
While “Zero Tolerance” is no longer implemented, family separation at our borders continues because of unlawful and inhumane immigration policies such as Title 42 and Remain in Mexico. For many years and across multiple administrations, immigrant families have been separated at our southern border. Separations continue today as a result of the Remain in Mexico policy (“Migrant Protection Protocols”) and improper reliance on an obscure part of the U.S. code – Title 42 – which has been in place since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, to close the border to almost all asylum-seekers. It is difficult to understand how the recommendations of the Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families will be taken seriously within this policy context where family separation has become an accepted consequence of larger enforcement and unlawful deterrence goals. We hope that the Task Force’s upcoming report can illuminate the irony of this situation and put an end to these ongoing family separation policies.