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WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security was not ready to carry out the Trump administration’s family separation policy, and some of the government’s practices made the problem worse, according to a report issued Tuesday by the department’s inspector general.
Under the policy, announced in April but abandoned in June after a public outcry, adults arriving illegally were charged with a crime, and their children were put in separate holding cells until they could be transferred to long-term custodial care.
“DHS was not fully prepared to implement the administration’s zero-tolerance policy or to deal with some of its after-effects,” said John Kelly, the acting inspector general.
Tuesday’s report said Customs and Border Protection held children for long periods in facilities intended to be used for only short terms, lacked the ability to reliably track children separated from their parents, and in some cases failed to adequately inform parents about the separation policy.
The inspector general also said that while the Trump administration urged asylum seekers to come through ports of entry, CBP officers were overwhelmed and regulated the flow into those facilities. “Backlogs created by these competing directives likely resulted in additional illegal border crossings,” the report said, when families grew tired of waiting and looked for other ways to enter the country.
Immigration law allows CBP to hold unaccompanied children for up to 72 hours before transferring them to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, because the facilities often lack adequate bedding or separate sleeping rooms for children. But the report found the limit was succeeded often. About one-fifth of the children were held at least five days, and one child remained in custody for 12 days.
Computer systems used by CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement lacked the ability to share data about parents whose children were separated from them. And those systems were not integrated with the resettlement agency.
“DHS struggled to provide accurate, complete, reliable data on family separations,” the report said, despite a DHS announcement in late June that the government had a central database.
A DHS official said the report understated efforts to reunify children and their parents who were separated during enforcement of the zero-tolerance policy. “The government took exhaustive efforts to overcome the challenge and stand up a process to safely reunify families expeditiously,” said Jim Crumpacker, director of the office that responds to inspector general reports.
In late September, the government reported that it had reunified or released 2,251 children out of the 2,654 who were separated from a parent.