Fact Check: Family separation has always been policy, including under Democrats

On Thanksgiving Day in 1999, a 5-year-old boy, Elian Gonzalez, was found clinging to an inner tube floating off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

His mother had attempted to enter the country illegally after fleeing Cuba while embroiled in a custody dispute. At some point, the makeshift boat they were in capsized, and she and others drowned. Elian survived, was granted refugee status and sent to live with an uncle in Miami. His father, still living in Cuba, demanded that he be sent home.

At the end of the Clinton administration, in December 2000, the head of Immigration and Naturalization Service ruled that Elian must be returned to his father. Attorney General Janet Reno authorized his removal. What followed sparked a national debate after a photographer captured the image of a terrified child being apprehended by Border Patrol agents holding semi-automatic rifles. The photograph made international headlines, the photographer won a Pulitzer Prize, and Elian was removed from the U.S. and reunited with his father. Now a member of the Cuban legislature, he turns 32 in December.

Elian’s family separation, as well as millions of others, began with illegal immigration.

That incident occurred at the tail-end of the Clinton administration, which was responsible for more than 12 million deportations. According to a Migration Policy Institute analysis, more illegal foreign nationals were deported under Clinton than under former President George W. Bush (10 million) and former President Barack Obama (5 million). According to another analysis, more illegal foreign nationals were removed under Obama than under former President Donald Trump, with removals from the interior peaking in 2011.

Under Trump, multiple media outlets claimed he began a family separation deporation policy. The claim resurfaced after he was reelected, vowed to implement a massive deportation operation, and tapped Tom Homan, the former director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as his border czar to implement it.

Trump and Homan worked to end several Obama-era policies, including catch and release, which President Joe Biden reinstituted and expanded. Under Trump, federal authorities began prosecuting illegal border crossers in an attempt to deter illegal entry, led by Kevin McAleenan. McAleenan served in several leadership roles at U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, under Bush, Obama and Trump.

Homan, who’s served under six presidents, explained to The Center Square that “entering the country illegally is a crime. When we started prosecuting, of course, when the parent goes to jail, the child can't go with them. They're put in custody of ORR,” he said, referring to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Under the Biden administration’s ORR, allegations of abuse of unaccompanied children increased exponentially, The Center Square reported. Children were sent to live with nonfamily members, including gang members and sex offenders, and human trafficking assistance requests skyrocketed, according to several reports.

Prosecuting illegal border crossers “wasn't about separation,” Homan, who worked with McAleenan, said. “It wasn't about cruelty. It wasn't about being inhumane. It's about if you start prosecuting people they will stop coming illegally and hopefully more lives will be saved.”

After they began prosecutions, “the numbers across the board went down drastically,” he said.

In the spring of 2018, Border Patrol agents were inundated with a surge of illegal border crossers; under McAleenan, prosecutions ramped up. The purpose was to “dissuade crossings between ports of entry, which is dangerous for the people making these crossings,” he told The Los Angeles Times.

McAleenan also emphasized the difference between “the concept of family separation and prosecuting adults who cross the border illegally, even if they are bringing in children with them. We do not have a policy of administrative separation. We are not doing that,” he said at the time. “Families or people that come across as a group, as a family-unit group, are being separated only if the adults are being prosecuted or if there's a determination made by the agent that there's not actually a family relationship, which has happened several hundred times just in the sector this year.”

He also reiterated what Homan and others have explained to The Center Square: cartel operatives and smugglers use fake families to exploit a federal detention policy ruling stemming from an Obama-era class-action lawsuit. In 2015, an Obama-appointed U.S. District Court judge in central California ruled on what is referred to as the Flores Settlement Agreement. Among other things, it prohibits ICE from detaining illegal border crosser families throughout the entirety of their immigration process, allowing for a quick release. The ruling incentivized “people to pretend to be families even if they're not,” McAleenan, and others, have argued.

The purpose of arresting illegal border crossers, including fake families, Homan argues, “is about saving lives and stopping the sexual assault of women and children coming across the border.”

Homan is working on a plan to find more than “300,000 children that were smuggled into this country at the hands of the criminal cartels,” he told The Center Square. “Who knows what the hell happened during that journey with these animals. Then they were released into the United States to unvetted sponsors,” adding that the media “won’t talk about” the children who were separated from their parents under the Biden administration and are still missing.