Originally Posted by Jim in CT
the cause of torn apart families, was adults who chose to take children with them on an illegal
journey. it’s also always worth noting that none of the snowflakes uttered a syllable
about separated families and caged children, when obama was doing it. selective outrage is fake outrage.
The Trump administration has chosen to prosecute immigrants under criminal statutes, rather than simply placing apprehended immigrants into civil immigration removal proceedings. Under the Immigration and Naturalization Act, people can be prosecuted in the criminal justice system for illegal entry, illegal re-entry, or assisting someone in illegal entry. However, past administrations have chosen to simply deport most offenders from the United States rather than use the resources of the criminal justice system to prosecute them. Criminal action had rarely been used in cases of families or parents and children coming across the border.
The use of criminal charges against parents caught crossing the border triggers a legal situation that necessitates separating children, while the use of civil immigration detention and removal does not require this to occur. When adults are detained and prosecuted in the criminal justice system for immigration offenses, their children cannot, by law, be housed with them in criminal jails, so the family unit is separated. The children are placed with the Department of Health and Human Services in shelters until they can be released to a family member, guardian, or foster family in the United States.
Previous administrations used family detention facilities, allowing the whole family to stay together while awaiting their deportation case in immigration court, or alternatives to detention, which required families to be tracked but released from custody to await their court date. Some children may have been separated from the adults they entered with, in cases where the family relationship could not be established, child trafficking was suspected, or there were not sufficient family detention facilities available. Both the Obama and Trump administrations have tried to establish more capacity to detain families and children, rather than releasing them until their hearing date. However, the zero-tolerance policy is the first time that a policy resulting in separation is being applied across the board.
if we didn’t separate the kids, and threw everyone into one facility, and even one of those kids was hurt by an adult there, then the same people would be complaining that we threw the children to the wolves.
it’s very common for adults who are being processed through the criminal justice system, to temporarily lose custody of their children. happens all the time. it’s necessary.
The Trump administration has chosen to prosecute immigrants under criminal statutes, rather than simply placing apprehended immigrants into civil immigration removal proceedings.
and if i was born in mexico and couldn’t find work and couldn’t come here legally, i’d come here illegally if i had to. i absolutely get the motivation. but regardless of intentions, breaking the law has consequences, not all of them pleasant.
take every single penny we confiscate from mexican drug dealers and gangs, and use that money to improve those facilities. we have to detain these people
until their hearings, common sense and empirical data suggest that 90% of those released dont show up for their hearings, but they deserve compassion and
dignity.
Most Released Families Attend Immigration Court Hearings
The latest case-by-case records from the Immigration Courts indicate that as of the end of May 2019 one or more removal hearings had already been held for nearly 47,000 newly arriving families seeking refuge in this country. Of these, almost six out of every seven families released from custody had shown up for their initial court hearing. Usually multiple hearings are required before a case is decided. For those who are represented, more than 99 percent had appeared at every hearing held. Thus, court records directly contradict the widely quoted claim that "90 Percent of Recent Asylum Seekers Skipped Their Hearings."
Under our current system, there is no legal requirement that immigrants actually receive notice, let alone timely notice, of their hearing. Given many problems in court records on attendance and in the system for notifying families of the place and time of their hearings, these appearance rates were remarkably high.
These and other findings discussed below are based upon an analysis of court records conducted by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. These court records, updated through May 2019, were obtained through a series of FOIA requests submitted by TRAC to the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).
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