Central to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for president was a commitment to roll back Donald Trump’s harsh immigration policies, including the controversial practice of separating families at the southern border.
“It makes us a laughing stock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation,” Biden said of Trump’s family separation policies during a 2020 presidential debate.
However, a new report from UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy reveals that while the Biden administration does not take the intentionally harsh approach of Trump’s policy, family separations are still happening.
“The report is simply meant to debunk the myth that all family separations as part of border processing began under the Trump administration and ended when President Joe Biden took office,” said Monkia Langarica, one of the report’s authors.
Under the Trump administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy, separations were calculated and deliberate.
The goal of zero tolerance was to criminally prosecute all adult migrants who entered the country illegally. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would detain parents and transfer their children into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“Cruelty was the point of that policy,” Langarica said.
Biden rescinded the policy in January 2021. Yet, three years later, more than 1,400 families remain separated, according to the latest update from the Family Reunification Task Force.
The report argues that separations have happened for decades, but under the Biden administration they are a result of bureaucratic processes, lack of transparency and accountability — not purposeful cruelty.
“What this report seeks to do is illustrate how family separation is a feature of many long-standing CBP practices and policies that, frankly, should change,” Langarica said.
A big reason why family separations continue, is the federal government’s narrow definition of a family, which is limited to parents or legal guardians and their minor children, the report said.
The result is frequent separations among spouses, parents and their young adult children; and also grandparents and their grandchildren, according to the report.
Separations can happen in all sorts of ways when migrants are processed by CBP officials.
For example, CBP may release a parent into the United States but send their adult child to a detention center. Or a grandmother will be sent to one detention center while her grandson is transferred to a different holding site.
The report notes that humanitarian workers from the Los Angeles-based immigrant advocacy group Al Otro Lado documented more than 1,000 separations among migrants released to the streets of San Diego between September 2023 to December 2023.
The report includes several recommendations CBP can take to avoid family separations. They include making sure that all family members are either released or detained together.
CBP has already followed one of the report’s recommendations, according to Langarica.
The agency publicly released an internal memorandum that laid out a plan to expand the definition of a family unit to include parents with “unmarried adult children 18-25 years old,” as well as grandparents with grandchildren and adult siblings between 18 and 25 years old.
CBP did not respond to a request to comment.
