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The Atlantic Interview: Caitlin Dickerson
00:40:17
How the Trump administration came to separate migrant children from their families
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- [00:01]
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- [00:33]
Caitlin Dickerson
I was shocked that to this day, many people involved in this decision making still don't understand how immigration enforcement works.
- [00:46]
A.C. Valdez
Hi, and welcome to the Atlantic Interview. I'm senior producer A.C. valdez. Today we're bringing you a conversation between our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and staff writer Caitlin Dickerson. Caitlin is the author of the recent piece An American Catastrophe, a comprehensive investigation of the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant children from their families.
- [01:13]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Caitlin, we have a good amount of time, but we've got a lot to cover, so let me jump in, and why don't we just start at the beginning? And by the beginning, I mean the beginning of your interest in immigration as a subject, and in particular, when you came to realize that the Trump administration was doing something novel in terms of its enforcement or its ideology surrounding preventing illegal immigration. Why don't you just start with when you came to the beat? Obviously, it wasn't at the Atlantic. You can take us back a little ways.
- [01:52]
Caitlin Dickerson
Sure. So I actually fell into immigration reporting because immigration happened to be something that I knew a lot about when I started out as a journalist. And as you know, Jeff, early on in a newsroom, your job is to kind of stand out and have smart ideas and show that you can bring something to the table when you're working alongside people who've been doing this a lot longer than you. And so I was a production assistant at npr. That was my first job in journalism. Had grown up in a part of the country that has lots of immigrants, in Merced, California, in the Central Valley, and then studied it in college. So my best pitches were always immigration stories. And so naturally, when I became a reporter, I began to cover it. In 2016, I was hired to cover immigration at the New York Times. It was the summer of 2016, and at that point, a lot of the country and a lot of news media assumed that Hillary Clinton would become the next president. Of course, she didn't become the next president. And so all of a sudden, my mandate changed really dramatically. And the time staffed up and we had a whole team of people dedicated to covering this one issue because Trump obviously really emphasized immigration more than any presidential candidate in the last several decades. As he was running, we knew he was going to take it really seriously as an issue and push really hard to change policies. I don't think anybody anticipated how far the administration would go. And as it relates to family separation, I think there were two things here that really stood out from historic policy norms in the United States here. The first with family separations is just the mere fact that they took place in relative secret. In 2017, they began. Hundreds of separations took place, starting out in El Paso, Texas, in a program that later expanded. But when reporters would ask about it, the administration would tell us, no, this isn't happening. We're not separating families. There's some complicated reasons which we can get into, but that's really not normal. As a reporter, you're used to hearing no comment in response to a story that the government doesn't want you to report, or you're used to hearing public affairs office or change the subject or offer some context that at least helps to soften the blow of a story that they know the public is not going to react kindly to. But in this case, we actually got denials. And that's part of why I really wanted to stick with this story, because it's my responsibility to inform readers, and I just wasn't getting good information. And then, of course, having looked back at immigration policy all the way back to the 19th century in the United States, separating children from their parents as an immigration policy, it hasn't happened before. It was the harshest application any of us have seen of this basic concept of prevention by deterrence, which is how we approach immigration enforcement generally. It was just so harsh, and it was just so painful for parents and for children, and continues to be that I just had to stick with it.
- [04:48]
Jeffrey Goldberg
So to be clear, going into the discussion about family separation, no presidential administration going back all the way had ever done anything this dramatic.
- [05:00]
Caitlin Dickerson
No. I mean, as you know, there are examples of kids being taken from their parents in American history, not in a border context. And we've had some pretty cruel and pretty harsh border enforcement policies. This is one that had ever been applied, even during the days of Chinese exclusion, for example, during the days when people crossing the border from Mexico were gassed on their way into the United States in order to be cleaned because of this presumption that Mexican immigrants were somehow unclean. I mean, this is back in the 1920s and 30s. The forceful separation of children from their parents is just not something that the Border Patrol has ever engaged in in American history.
- [05:36]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Well, let's go into this. And one of the fantastic aspects of this story, one of the great achievements of your story, is that you take us into the decision making process and you take us into all the way in to the bureaucratic decision making all along the way that sort of allowed this to happen. And it developed its own momentum. It developed its own bureaucratic momentum. But somebody had to think of this first. The assumption is on the part of people who think about this that it must have been Stephen Miller who is Donald Trump's very hard line. Not just immigration advisor, but somebody who was thinking about immigration in a very hard line way, worked for Jeff Sessions and brought a lot of his ideas to Donald Trump. But it's more complicated than just a story of Stephen Miller thinking of very extreme prevention by deterrence measures.
- [06:33]
Caitlin Dickerson
That's right. It took a lot more than Stephen Miller and Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions to forcefully separate thousands of kids from their parents. And the idea actually came originally from within the border enforcement apparatus. A man named Tom Homan, who started out as a Border Patrol agent in his early 20s and spent a career in enforcement and ultimately became the head of ice, Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Trump. He first came up with the idea to separate families as an escalation of this concept of prevention by deterrence, this idea to introduce consequences to discourage illegal border crossing, even when it's for the purposes of seeking asylum. He first proposes separating children from their parents. 2014, during the Obama administration, which is when we saw the first major surge of children and families crossing the border. And really the Border Patrol was totally overwhelmed at the time. Congress didn't intervene. And so you have essentially a police force that's left to figure this out. You know, this policy, which is really humanitarian policy, it's economic policy. And when you leave this to the Border Patrol, the solution that they have come up with time and again is punishment. And so Homan proposes it. Jeh Johnson, who was Homeland Security Secretary at the time, rejects the idea. And then the idea resurfaces very soon after Donald Trump takes office.
- [07:56]
Jeffrey Goldberg
So there is a bureaucratic impetus from below. So take us through that. So Donald Trump wins in 16, comes into office. This dormant idea is brought where Trump.
- [08:10]
Caitlin Dickerson
Comes into office and is obviously announcing publicly, but also visiting Border Patrol headquarters and Customs and Border Protection headquarters and saying, hey, we gotta shut this border down. And really we'll stop at nothing to do it. Bring me your Best ideas. And so you have Tom Homan, who is the head of ice, and you have a man named Kevin McAllen and who is the head of Customs and Border Protection, very quickly re raise this concept that they'd already talked about and already favored. They tell Miller about it, who gets really excited and kind of obsessed with it. And so Miller continues to push for the next year and a half until it's officially implemented for it. Donald Trump also begins to favor it. And I was surprised about this ultimately, but the story ends up being kind of a case for the bureaucracy. I learned in doing it that in the way that policies are made, typically you have principals who are the heads of agencies who have great decision making power, but they have huge portfolios. And so policy ideas should only ever reach the desk of someone like Kirstjen Nielsen, who was the Homeland Security secretary who ultimately signs off on family separations, should only ever reach her desk if they've been thoroughly vetted. And so subject matter experts have determined these policies are logistically feasible. They're legal, they're ethical, they make sense politically for the administration in office. All these layers exist to prevent bad policies from ever even reaching somebody who has the authority to sign. And these systems were really either sidelined, disempowered, or just completely cut out of the conversation. And so you had members of the bureaucracy who were opportunistic, saw an opportunity to win a lot of favor if they pushed for policies. They knew they were going to make the president happy. Those folks were allowed to be in the room when decisions were made. Everybody else who was raising red flags was really cut out.
- [10:01]
Jeffrey Goldberg
What's so interesting here, and maybe ironic, is that this idea came from the quote, unquote, deep state, the permanent bureaucracy that's supposed to manage the whims of politicians and sort of regularize things. It's a radical idea comes up. But before we go to the next phase, talk about. I want you to talk about child separation. In its details, the idea is preventative. In other words, if word gets out into Guatemala, Honduras, wherever, that if you try to cross the border with your kid, the US Government will take your kid from you, actually kidnap your child in some kind of bureaucratically legal way, all of the people who are trying to come to America, asylum seekers, workers, et cetera, will not come because they'll be too scared. Is that the theory of the case?
- [10:54]
Caitlin Dickerson
That is the theory of the case. And there's a lot of reason to believe it's not a good theory.
- [10:59]
Jeffrey Goldberg
So prevention, why is it Not a good theory. It sounds pretty scary if you're sitting in Guatemala and somebody tells you you might lose your kid, maybe I won't try to go across.
- [11:07]
Caitlin Dickerson
It does. And that's what's difficult about it, is that it is somewhat intuitive, this idea of prevention by deterrence. So I'll walk you through it. Academics have been studying it for a long time and know really well, you know, in what ways it works and in what ways it doesn't work. So in the early 2000s, we start in the United States prosecuting individual adults who cross the border illegally. It's a misdemeanor crime the first time around, and then it becomes a felony the second, third, fourth time, and beyond. So to begin with, this program, it's called Operation Streamline, it completely floods courts along the border and immediately prosecutors, you know, assistant US Attorneys are unhappy with it because they're saying it's taking away resources from these more important cases that we need to deal with. And not only that, but it doesn't seem to be influencing long term trends. So if you look at shifts in migration that have taken place over the last 20 years, those can be explained entirely by looking at economic shifts and demographic shifts in the United States and the countries where people are coming from. All of those changes are attributable to the availability of resources here and the availability of jobs here. And then, you know, in the inverse, what opportunities people have available to them in their home countries, as well as the general public safety situation, and whether people can actually stay home and feel safe that way. But nevertheless, even though prevention by deterrence, first in the form of streamline, didn't seem to be working, it wasn't making a dent in border crossings in any significant way. It was also overwhelming courts and taking resources away from more important national security considerations, important drug trafficking cases, weapons trafficking cases. This idea becomes more and more popular until ultimately we get to the point of separating children from their parents. But, you know, anecdotally, legalearnt, who's the ACLU lawyer who's heading up the federal case against family separations, the main case that prompted family reunification, he talks about asking every parent that he interviewed for that case, if you had known about family separation, would you have left your country to begin with? Would you have decided to stay home? And he says they just kind of shrug their shoulders and say, well, what was I going to do? You know, we left because our lives were in danger. I couldn't stay. That, I think, is something that people like Tom Holman, who came up with the idea to separate families didn't really.
- [13:24]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Take into account the level of desperation at home.
- [13:27]
Caitlin Dickerson
That's right.
- [13:28]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Is a key determinant and whether somebody's going to start the trek.
- [13:31]
Caitlin Dickerson
It's a very, very high bar to surpass when you're talking to a parent who not only can't feed themselves or their child, but on a day to day basis fears that their child may be killed. You know, in many cases.
- [13:43]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Stay on that for one second. So people understand this population. You're talking about people who are living in very dangerous Central American countries mainly like talk about the conditions a little bit more that prompt this group, the group affected by family separation prompted them to try to come across to the United States.
- [14:03]
Caitlin Dickerson
So you're talking about a lot of times a combination of deep, deep poverty and a daily fear of death and a daily encounters with violence. So I can just tell you about my experiences reporting in parts of Mexico where people come to the United States from in Central America. When the New York Times sent me to Guatemala to write about a family that was trying to get into the United States, I had security with me the entire time. I mean, many people just within this family had been murdered. It's kind of a domino effect where a gang identifies one person in a family and wants that person to join the gang or decides on their behalf that they have some responsibility that they have to uphold for the gang. If that first individual doesn't do right by the gang, then it's like one after another after another, relatives continue to be murdered. When I would go house to house to visit with people associated with this family, we were hiding. I mean, they couldn't let anybody know where they lived. They couldn't let anybody know that I was there because it would have put them in greater danger. And then the poverty too is really something that I don't know. A lot of Americans have really sat down and thought about houses that have no roofs, houses that have no floors, families that are splitting a tortilla among them. You know, a family of four per day. Very, very little nutrients. Access to school is almost non existent. You know, kids don't have shoes. I mean, it's stuff that I think most Americans maybe have a hard time envisioning. It's a set of circumstances where a lot of parents just feel really, really helpless and hopeless and scared. You know, think about how scared you would have to be to decide to go to the United States knowing that you're going to have to travel through a hot and dangerous desert knowing that you're going to encounter murderous gangs. Nobody signs up to do that unless they feel like they have absolutely no choice.
- [15:58]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Right. We can get a little bit later toward possible solutions to this dilemma. And obviously, a lot of the solutions have to do with the economies and political structures of other countries, not ours. But come back to the narrative of the adoption of this policy. One of the reasons that when we were talking about doing this story over the past year, year and a half, one of the, one of the, one of the reasons to do it is to try to understand the mentality of government officials and bureaucrats. And it is not actually true that when you put a frog in water and slowly boil him, the frog lets himself get boiled, the frogs actually jump out. But this is a kind of situation like that in which, you know, the heat is put on. Gradually you move from this form of deterrence to that form of deterrence. And somehow the idea that taking children from their parents becomes socialized within these government structures. Talk about that. And specifically, as this idea is being socialized in the upper reaches of the Trump administration, are there people who said, wait a second, are you serious? You're going to take small children from their parents and move them 1,000 miles away and not even know where they are? Did anybody along the way say, hey, I'm all for deterrence. I have these views on immigration. I'm a hardliner, but this does not seem to comport with my notions, and I'm using this term advisedly, my notions of family values.
- [17:35]
Caitlin Dickerson
A lot of people said that. And ultimately, when the decision to pursue separating families is made, by then they had been left out of the room. Basically, they had been cut out of the conversation. So when family separations are first proposed, they're described as such in pretty blatant terms. And I interviewed Jeh Johnson again, who was the Homeland Security secretary under President Obama, who did believe in deterrence, did pursue other deterrent policies, but said, that's too far for me. I'm not comfortable with it. And John Kelly, who was President Trump's first Homeland Security secretary, who also considered the idea after it was proposed by Tom Homan, Kevin McAleen and others. Kelly said the same thing. Yes, I believe in enforcing the law. I'm willing at least to crack down. He wasn't really a big believer in deterrence, but he'd taken the job for the Trump administration, but this felt too far for him.
- [18:24]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Can I just interrupt here, because people are going to want to know this. John Kelly then goes to the White House's chief of staff and is there when all of this stuff is still going on. So what role did he play there?
- [18:34]
Caitlin Dickerson
That's right. So Kelly told me that his approach to opposing family separations was to focus purely on the logistics. So when the idea is formally proposed to him, he requests a briefing to find out whether it's possible. And he learns, rightly that the federal government did not have the resources to impose such a program without total chaos, which we ultimately saw, you know, without losing track of parents and kids, without really inhumane situations where kids are being physically taken out of their parents army. You know, you need training theoretically, to do this in a way that isn't chaotic if you're going to do it at all. And so he told me he knew that appealing to the president, appealing to Stephen Miller on some sort of moral basis wasn't going to be effective. They weren't going to listen to him. And so he said he focused purely on the logistics. It's not possible. We just can't do it. And he would say, Mr. President, if you want to pursue this, you need to go ask Congress for the money, knowing he said, that Donald Trump wouldn't be willing to do that. The problem is that ultimately, when you ask these more hawkish members of the administration what their understanding of John Kelly's view is, they would say to me, well, I didn't know he had any issue with it. All he said was that we needed more money, we needed more training. So you can see there's logic behind Kelly's approach, but there's also, as a result of it, you know, repeated instances, repeated meetings with this idea is being discussed. And he could have jumped up and down and screamed and said, I oppose this. I don't want to do it. But he didn't. He just said, sir, we don't have the money.
- [20:03]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Right. I mean, he did have to be fair to him. He did have a reasonable understanding that Trump would never respond to the humanitarian argument. Is that fair?
- [20:15]
Caitlin Dickerson
I think it is. And there are so many different approaches that people say they took to try to prevent this from happening, and they just ultimately didn't work. I mean, other people say that they just try to change the subject, focus on policies that seemed more realistic, hoping that if the President got the outcome he was looking for, if he got border crossings to lower sufficiently, that he would give up on the idea to separated families. And that didn't come to fruition, which, again, is a testament to the fact that migration and these fluctuating numbers are typically outside of the control of any given White House. And so you can try these other tactics, but depending on what's happening in Central America or Mexico or right now, what's happening in Ukraine, we just can't control that. And that the higher the numbers rose, the more obsessed Donald Trump became with finding some way to minimize them.
- [21:10]
Jeffrey Goldberg
So let's. And I'm going to go to some of the questions. There's tons to talk about here, but at the risk of, you know, let me issue a spoiler alert here, I want people to read the piece, but I do want to ask about two people whose names are very intimately associated with this, apart from John Kelly and Donald Trump. Nielsen, Kirsten Nielsen, who's the DHS secretary who signed off on this, and Stephen Miller. I want you to talk about, if you could, her role, which is actually, when you read the piece, you'll see, if you haven't read it, more complicated morally than we initially thought. And Miller, who obviously is still the ideological driver of a whole set of policies.
- [21:50]
Caitlin Dickerson
Kirsten Nielsen came into the Trump administration a moderate. She was a cybersecurity expert who helped to establish DHS the first time under George W. Bush.
- [22:02]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Not no experience in immigration.
- [22:03]
Caitlin Dickerson
No experience in immigration and no real strong feelings about immigration. She's one of a lot of people who I interviewed who joined DHS under Trump and just said, you know, I didn't know all that much about immigration. I really wasn't thinking about it that much. It wasn't that important to me from the very beginning. They seem a bit misguided in terms of what their expectations for their job might look like, given how much this White House clearly cared about the issue. But family separations are proposed to her right after she's confirmed in December of 2017, and she says, absolutely not. John Kelly has said no to this. I'm not doing it. I oppose it. You know, I don't believe in it. And then over time, this alternative version of achieving the same end is proposed to her via prosecution, and it's conveyed to her in these terms that are quite bland. We're going to pursue a prosecution initiative. There are people who've been committing misdemeanor crimes. We've been letting them go simply because their parents. There was a lot of fear mongering around this idea that a lot of the parents might have been smugglers, that families may not have actually been related at all, that these children might all have been victims of trafficking. I mean, there's no evidence to support that a significant number of those false families existed. I mean, it's always been an issue, but a relatively small one compared to all the legitimate families that come to the United States. So it's proposed to her in these bland terms. She's also told it's been done before systems and processes exist to prevent chaos from ensuing. And so, based on that information, she ends up approving the policy. Another really important thing to know about her is she came into her role at a disadvantage because she was viewed as a moderate. She was one of a lot of people, you know, Kevin McAleen and who is the head of Customs and Border Protection is another, who were viewed very skeptically in the White House, and they had a lot to prove.
- [23:51]
Jeffrey Goldberg
So I would ask you that, are these people who are trying to prove they're tough so that Donald Trump likes.
- [23:56]
Caitlin Dickerson
Them or keeps them in their job? Yes. And some of them would say, you know, I wanted to stay in the job, because if not me, then who. Although who might have been somebody who didn't sign off on separating families. Others are a little bit more open about the fact that, yeah, I had a big career and I wanted to hold on to it. And so, yes, I mean, they were trying to appear tough enough. I heard in my reporting that you're not tough enough is a quote that Trump repeated to Nielsen all the time. At one point, an advisor suggested, maybe you should write a memoir and call it Tough Enough, because he's always telling you you're not tough enough. And so Nielsen was always trying to kind of meet these expectations and try to show that she wasn't a moderate, that she wasn't a closeted liberal. And so she eventually signs off on this policy that she intellectually, at least prior, seemed to totally oppose, but just had convinced herself of a lot of illogical realities and decided, okay, I agree to zero tolerance. I think that families aren't going to be separated. I mean, it doesn't make sense. And she's a really smart person, but she worked so hard to please her bosses. The other person you asked me about was Stephen Miller.
- [25:03]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Yeah, well, I mean, there's no gray in Stephen Miller's approach to this. He thinks this is a good idea, or thought it was a good idea. One of my questions maybe you can answer in the broader context of Stephen Miller, is does he still think it's a good idea?
- [25:18]
Caitlin Dickerson
Stephen Miller, from what I understand from people close to him and familiar with his thinking, tell me that he continues to believe that President Trump's harshest immigration policies, obviously zero tolerance being the pinnacle of them, were Trump's most, most popular and successful accomplishments of the entire administration. I think he does still believe in separating families and really doing anything to seal the border, kind of stopping it at nothing to do that. And he's even made clear to close confidants and, again, people familiar with where he is on these issues, that the groundwork has been laid so that in a future Trump administration or a future Republican administration that looks anything like Trump's, these same policies can be pursued even more quickly and even more dramatically than they were in the past. And he believed. Yes, as you said, he did unequivocally in this idea and exerted pressure really kind of shamelessly. So he would call not only Kirstjen Nielsen, who was Homeland Security secretary, but all of her advisors and even lower people in dhs, people who had no authority to sign off on anything. I mean, he was calling people incessantly to press for his policies and to press for his ideas, trying to get buy in. I heard about something that he would do on a conference call where he would introduce an idea and say, hey, I believe X, Y and Z needs to happen. This head of this division of DHS agrees with me. And that head of the division might say, oh, well, I have some questions about that. You know, I'm not exactly sure. And Stephen would say, well, are you saying that this isn't a priority? And they would say, oh, well, no, I do agree with you that it's a priority. And Steven would say, great, I have your support. And then he would go into White House meetings and repeat and say that he had buy in from dhs. I mean, literally just bullying people to kind of accidentally or tacitly or passively agree with his ideas. And, you know, was not embarrassed to keep people on the phone after midnight, just ranting, really, not even letting the other person speak at all. It was a singular focus for him.
- [27:22]
Jeffrey Goldberg
John Kelly would give him the cold shoulder. But not everybody had John Kelly's power.
- [27:26]
Caitlin Dickerson
Right, Exactly. And John Kelly, obviously is a career military official in general. He believed really strongly in the chain of command. So to him, it was just. He couldn't believe that Miller would call people below Kelly and make demands and try to pressure Kelly into making decisions. I mean, that whole idea was just totally anathema to Kelly's whole career and his beliefs. And so Kelly at the time would call the White House and actually try to get Miller in trouble. He's one of the few people to do it. But other people, you know, cabinet secretaries, people much higher than Miller in the official chain of command, really let themselves be bullied by him. And when I would ask why, they basically just said Miller had this mystique. He was so close to the president and he was so protected because of this narrative that, again, as we've just discussed, persists, that immigration is the reason why Donald Trump was elected president and was the key to him being able to hold onto power. And so because of that, Miller was insulated from any kind of accountability, even as he defied the chain of command over and over again.
- [28:31]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Even if it was, quote, unquote, effective. You know, it's more effective is shooting people coming over the border with machine guns, obviously, but we don't do that. Donald Trump proposed various crazier things, and they were rejected because they were so absurd. But these men, mainly men who still believe that this is effective, you actually think, given the. Not only the uproar, but the photographs and video of children screaming, wanting their parents, these horrible audio and videos that we all saw no effect, no effect on them.
- [29:09]
Caitlin Dickerson
I think a lot of them would say now that there was a big hullabaloo in the media over family separations. A lot of them said to me, reporters really made these seem more dramatic than they actually were. It really wasn't that bad. And I think they might also look to the fact that there's not to prevent family separations from occurring moving forward. You know, if the country really opposed this, why hasn't anything happened? There was the time when there was so much frustration across the political spectrum over family separations that Paul Ryan recounted in the story goes to John Kelly, who at the time was Trump's chief of staff, and says, you know, we need a law banning the separation of families for deterrence or we're going to get crushed in the 2018 midterms. Where did. I mean, none of us have ever heard of that law ever since, you know, such a bill being written up because support for it seems to have dissipated. And so I think that these career enforcement officials would say to me, if the country didn't favor scaling the border at this cost, why is it still perfectly legally permissible?
- [30:13]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Another question that people are asking has to do with the good guys. Are there any heroes in the story from your perspective?
- [30:21]
Caitlin Dickerson
There are a lot of people within the federal bureaucracy who tried to prevent family separations from taking place kind of on the same ground that John Kelly tried to stop it. So you have, within the Health and Human Services agency that cares for children, a man named Jonathan White, who oversaw at the beginning of the Trump Administration, that program that houses kids in federal custody. He found out about this proposal to separate families in an early and rare meeting where you actually had HHS invited to meet with the law enforcement side. Normally, those two agencies, which have to work together on immigration, they really don't play well together because HHS is made up of a lot of people like White, who are social workers and have backgrounds in child welfare and sitting in the room with cops. The two groups don't tend to get along. And so they have this fraught relationship that is really detrimental for all sides. So he finds out in an early meeting about this proposal to separate families, and he starts writing up reports, talking about the fact that the agency did not have enough space to house children who are separated, who tend to be younger than those who crossed the border on their own. They didn't have the resources to just deal with the emotional fallout that was easily anticipated by any expert familiar with child welfare, what state a child is going to be, and when they've just been separated from their parents. And he also pointed out that children who cross the border with their parents don't necessarily have anywhere to go. You know, a child who chooses to cross the border on their own is typically coming here because they have an aunt or, you know, a relative, somebody who can take them in. In the United States, a child who comes in the United States with their parent is expecting to remain with their parent. Whether they get asylum status or ultimately deported, the expectation is that they're going to stay together. And so White started to point out, along with several of his colleagues, that not only did they believe this was a bad idea, the resources just didn't exist. And you had versions of that same fight, that same argument being made within DHS as well. And then once people at DOJ find out about it, they too, in the US Marshals system, I found examples in all these places of people within the federal bureaucracy who tried to raise concerns with people at the White House, with people in their agency's leadership, about why this was such a bad idea. So there are a lot of people who fought back, and just ultimately, they didn't win the argument.
- [32:43]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Right. Another question that's come in. What's your assessment of the success of President Biden's executive order setting up the Task Force for Family Reunification? And I guess the corollary question, or the thing you have to answer first, is, how many children do we still think are out there floating in the bureaucratic abyss, who haven't been unified with their parents?
- [33:05]
Caitlin Dickerson
So almost all of the children who were separated have been released from federal custody. If they haven't been reunified with their parents, they're in the care of a sponsor. So an extended relative or a family friend who went through an application process and was approved to take that child in. That's of course, very different from reuniting them with the parent with whom they crossed the border and with whom they were living and planning to continue living almost four years ago. Or I guess at this point it's more than four years ago. Right. That number is between 700 and 1,000 those who have not been officially reunited with their parents, according to government records. Some of them may have and are kind of thought to have found their parents on their own and just not reported it to the US Government. Kind of understandably not wanting to deal with the US Government anymore after what happened and still fearing that they might face future consequences. The Biden administration had a really, really tall order in front of it when this task force to reunify separated families was established and that so much time had passed and record keeping was so poor that they had very, very little to work with in trying to reunify those remaining families. So far they've been able to track down it's more than 400 families that have been reunified, and there are several hundred more who are in the process of applying. What I hear from the ACLU and advocacy groups who are supporting this effort is that the Biden administration is working really hard and doing it its best to reunify these families. And they've had a significant amount of success in the face of this challenge. But now they're dealing with really complicated cases. You know, I've heard about parents, for example, who were deported without their kids, that happened in over a thousand cases, who then they've been back at home since then. They've had to perhaps take custody of an extended relative's child. I heard about one parent whose sister had been killed, and so the sister children were now being taken care of by the separated parents. And the separated parent is applying to come back and rejoin their own child. Are those other children eligible to come to the United States? It's not totally clear. I mean, this is what happens. It's very messy logistically when you separate a family for four years and then try to bring them back together. And so the numbers are shrinking, but the challenge is kind of growing in terms of getting these final families reunified.
- [35:18]
Jeffrey Goldberg
What is the aspect of this entire multi year saga that you still kind of can't get your mind around, even though you are in the handful of great experts in the world on this catastrophic policy, what's the thing that still stays in your mind as I can't believe that actually happened.
- [35:39]
Caitlin Dickerson
There are a number of things related to family separation. Maybe the most striking, and the one that I still can't really believe is the number of people I interviewed who held very significant roles in DHS or in the White House overseeing this issue area and to whom I had to explain basic tenets of the immigration enforcement system. At a very basic level, they would say to me, we never expected to lose track of parents and children, couldn't have imagined things would go as poorly as they did. That just doesn't make any sense. You can call up any prosecutor in the country and ask them, hey, if tomorrow I want to start prosecuting hundreds of parents at a time who are traveling with young children who are outside of their communities, nobody nearby to take those children in. And by the way, they don't speak the language that most government officials talking to them are going to be using. What do you think? Is that going to work? They would tell you it obviously won't work. But also, having spent years covering this issue, I know that these agencies don't communicate well together, don't have systems in place for keeping track of people in different departments in different areas. I was shocked that to this day, many people involved in this decision making just still don't understand how immigration enforcement works. And, and when I would ask people why that was, I got an answer that was troubling but helpful. I was told, you know, immigration is a career killer. You know, it's not something that our best and brightest minds in Washington are pursuing on any side of the aisle because there's not a whole lot of money, frankly, I heard in a career in immigration also, it's just, it's politically unpopular and so people don't want to touch it. And so that leaves a few. The small group that has really, really strong views on this and not a whole lot of concern for logistics, not a whole lot of concern for, you know, are these policies legal, moral, ethical? They're left alone to make these decisions for us.
- [37:33]
Jeffrey Goldberg
Fascinating. Totally fascinating. I hope that this conversation gave you a at least a taste of what Caitlin has discovered in her reporting. Obviously, I want to encourage all of you to read the story in full. I also want to encourage all of you, if you're not subscribers already, to subscribe to the Atlantic, go to theatlantic.com theatlantic.com, let me end again by just encouraging everyone to read this story, really sit with it. It's not just history, as Caitlin has suggested. There are people who think that this was a success and want to replicate it and would probably do a quote unquote better job next time around, a more efficient, effective job of doing this. And so this is not forensics here. This is about ideas that are still floating around in society and in certain circles in and out of government. So please read it. It's extremely important. I want to thank Caitlin for joining us. She's had a very busy week, as you may all imagine, talking about this story everywhere and just again, a magnificent achievement in journalism. And we're very grateful for all of her work, for her editor, Scott Stossel, who worked with her hand in glove for a year, year and a half to make this a reality. So, Caitlin, thank you for what you've done here and what you will do. Thanks to all of you for joining us. And I'll sign off on that note. Thank you very, very much.
- [39:10]
A.C. Valdez
Thanks for listening to the Atlantic Interview. If you're interested in reading more of Caitlin's piece, please, please check out theatlantic.com and look for an American catastrophe. Better yet, visit theatlantic.com subscribe to get access to this and all of our journalism. This episode was produced by A.C. valdez and Claudina Baid, with engineering and production help from Matthew Simonson. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.
- [40:05]
David Frum
To preserve democracy, one has to believe in it. To believe in democracy, one has to understand it, where it came from, how it works, what's true, what's not true, what others did before you, how it could be better, how to make a difference. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic. I'm starting a new show where each week I'll dig deep into the big questions people have about our politics and our society. I'll explain progress that the peoples of the democratic world have made together and remind you that the American idea is worth defending. Listen to or watch the David Frum show wherever you get your podcasts.