Thread by @ReichlinMelnick

A comprehensive new @HouseJudiciary report on family separation puts to bed any suggestion that the Trump administration intended to reunite families.

One damning new revelation? Former CBP head Kevin McAleenan tried to keep separations going after a court ordered them to stop.

https://twitter.com/pwolgin/status/1321803218628808704

The @HouseJudiciary report also sheds more light on the fact that family separation was the goal of the Trump administration from Day One.

High-level administration officials met to begin planning separations within a month of Trump taking office, and floated plans to CNN.

Within six months of taking office, the Trump administration had begun a family separation "pilot project" in El Paso.

Despite separating 281 families during a four-month period, the Trump administration never disclosed the project to the agency in charge of childrens' shelters.

As the hundreds of families were being separated, one high-level official in the Office of Refugee Resettlement wrote to his boss in alarm.

"We had a shortage last night of beds for babies."

By the time the Trump administration rolled out Zero Tolerance, more than 1,000 children had already been separated from their families.

Fifty children under the age of 5 were separated in that period, including four under the age of 1.

The administration moved forward anyway.

When Jeff Sessions announced Zero Tolerance, DHS ordered CBP to refer parents for prosecution—which meant children would be taken away.

The policy was rolled out chaotically, with individual Border Patrol sectors setting their own policies about separating small children.

While Zero Tolerance was going on, Border Patrol officers often treated children and families with contempt, as documented by extensive complaints.

Reports revealed children taken away without a chance to say goodbye and an 8-year-old kicked to wake him up.

When children were taken away from their parents so cruelly, they broke down pyschologically and physically.

Shelter operators reported horror stories, including children who'd wake up screaming in the middle of the night and others who "could barely eat or sleep for weeks."

As the outrage against family separation mounted, Trump administration officials struggled to even set up communication between parents and children.

By this point, the El Paso Pilot Project had begun nearly a year earlier, and yet there was still no system in place to reunify.

The chaos ran through the system. When one South Texas judge ordered CBP to maintain lists of separated parents, they couldn't even do that. So the judge threatened to hold them in contempt.

Agents panicked: "A Border Patrol agent exclaimed, I ain’t going to jail!!!!!!!!!!!!!'"

When the Trump administration finally ended Zero Tolerance, ICE began the process of trying to reunify parents still in ICE custody with their children. But again they ran into the same problems they'd had for almost a year—there were no systems linking parents with kids.

It was clear no plan existed to reunify families, even days before a court order.

"On June 23, 2018, ORR Director Lloyd emailed ICE ERO, stating, "'[j]ust writing to find out if you have any intel on ICE plans for the separated parents. Give me a call when you get a chance.'"

Because there had never been any real plan to reunite parents with their children, after a court ordered the Trump administration to do so, the situation quickly "devolved into chaos."

Kids were stuck on buses overnight, sent to the wrong place, and ICE missed deadlines.

By August, most families had been reunited. But as @HouseJudiciary's report makes clear, hundreds of children remain separated from their parents, because the parents were deported without their children as a result of a cruel and chaotic policy.

It must never happen again.

Much of the information included in this report has been revealed before, though there are some new bits of information, like McAleenan's brief attempt to restart Zero Tolerance prosecutions after a court order halting separations.

You can read it here: judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/…

If you've gone through this thread and want to read even more about the horrors of family separation and how the policy was rolled out, I also suggest reading @jacobsoboroff's excellent new book, "Separated," which covers much of this topic in extensive detail.

The @HouseJudiciary report is excellent, but there's so much more that could have been covered, because there was just so much cruelty.

For instance, we @immcouncil documented extensive coercion in the reunification process. americanimmigrationcouncil.org/advocacy/illeg…

Because the report is an overview, it doesn't get into all of the horrific stories it could. But there were just so many.

I remember shaking with anger and sadness when summarizing this story for our complaint. It was our government that did this to this woman.

A gruesome thought to end this thread. The woman whose story I highlighted above was sent to the Irwin detention center; the same place where at least 57 women have reported medical abuse, including unconsented hysterectomies.

The entire system is rotten. theintercept.com/2020/10/27/ice…