Thread by @DLind

I’ve been working on this—my first @ProPublica feature—for months. It’s the story of one family, split in half for no reason by Border Patrol. It’s also a story of how completely US border policy has changed in past yr.

Lemme (ahem) explain. 1/ propublica.org/article/women-…

@propublica At the border, the new normal is this: depending on where and when asylum-seekers cross, they can be put into any of a number of programs that are designed to get them off US soil as quickly as possible. 2/

@propublica The Trump admin has piloted & expanded several of these programs. There’s MPP (“Remain in Mexico”), which hasn’t attracted much public attn despite some GREAT reporting on it (I’ll link @ end of thread). 3/

@propublica More recently, they’ve started favoring HARP/PACR, designed to quickly deport families, & ACA, which sends ppl to Guatemala instead of letting them apply for asylum in the US. 4/

@propublica Together, I've started thinking of this patchwork of “pilot” programs (which inevitably expand) as parts of the same strategy — which in my head I've started calling "catch and disperse."

5/

@propublica But none of these policies actually covers _everyone_ arriving at the border. Which program each migrant is put into — if any at all — is pretty much totally up to Border Patrol. I met a Honduran family split in two: father/son put into MPP, mother/daughter allowed to stay. 6/

@propublica The problem is that Border Patrol doesn’t have a great track record with care in paperwork and processing. In the past, other agencies could catch this. Now, it’s (as one lawsuit says) a “legal black hole.”7/

@propublica On one level, this is the story of a mistake — the fact that after this family was told to board different buses to the same Border Patrol station, no one ever bothered to reunite them. 8/

@propublica But we have no idea how many of these “mistakes” there are. There’s no way to fix them. Border Patrol simply has near-absolute power over migrants’ fates — no matter how carelessly those decisions are made.

There is simply no due process. 9/

@propublica So here’s the story of David and Mirza, two parents who were separated because of carelessness, chaos and a broken system that has avoided outrage for the past year. 10/10 propublica.org/article/women-…

@propublica PS as promised: too much great MPP reporting to fit in a tweet but see esp latimes.com/california/sto… thisamericanlife.org/688/transcript reuters.com/article/us-usa… buzzfeednews.com/article/adolfo…

@propublica PPS Sorry the poll-push-notification gambit didn't work, but if you want to keep up with my work more reliably, sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter: go.propublica.org/bigstory-social