Officials grilled on migrants; kids centers like summer camp, 1 says

Carla Provost, acting chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, and Matthew Albence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are sworn in to testify Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Carla Provost, acting chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, and Matthew Albence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are sworn in to testify Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

WASHINGTON -- Officials from President Donald Trump's administration defended the rationale for their now-defunct family separation strategy during Senate testimony Tuesday as they faced Democrats' assertions that the immigration policy was a failure.

Tuesday's hearing was a wide-ranging inquiry into immigration enforcement practices and the administration's attempt to deter illegal border crossings by removing more than 2,500 children from their parents and sending them to government shelters.

Facing criticism from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, one senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official pushed back at allegations that authorities mistreated young migrants in their custody, instead likening his agency's family detention centers to "summer camp."

"These individuals have access to 24/7 food and water," said Matthew Albence, an agency official. "They have educational opportunities. They have recreational opportunities, both structured as well as unstructured. There's basketball courts, there's exercise classes, there's soccer fields we put in there."

Such statements drew the ire of lawmakers like Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who dared the five Trump officials to tell the panel that the administration's "zero tolerance" border crackdown was a success. No one raised a hand.

"Who is responsible for zero tolerance or family separation?" Blumenthal pressed.

"They probably can't answer that or they'd get fired," quipped Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the committee chairman.

Grassley said Trump's crackdown on people crossing the border from Mexico was well-intentioned but has had unintended consequences. He said the administration has "mishandled" the family separations.

Trump reversed the family-separation policy June 20, and days later U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, a Republican appointee, ordered the government to return the children as urgently as possible.

The administration has reunited more than 1,800 children and is now working on the more complex cases of parents with criminal records or the more than 450 who were deported without their sons and daughters. On Monday, Sabraw told the government to provide details of its plans to continue facilitating reunions for parents who have already been deported.

Cmdr. Jonathan White, the public health official who organized the reunification effort at the Department of Health and Human Services, said more than 250 federal caseworkers and contractors have been enlisted and that he has been working "18-hour days" for the past month.

White told senators that he had warned his superiors that separating children from their parents carried a "significant risk of harm" and could inflict "psychological injury." But he said he was assured the government was not planning to implement the practice.

None of the other top officials who testified Tuesday said they had been briefed in advance that the White House was moving forward with its crackdown until it was announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in early April.

When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., prodded the panelists to identify what went wrong, calling the separations "a calamity," White was the only official who called the government's actions a mistake.

"What went wrong is the children separated from their parents were referred as unaccompanied alien children when in fact they were accompanied," he said, describing some of the communication issues that forced members of his team to sort by hand through the more than 12,000 files of migrant children in government custody to determine which ones arrived with parents.

Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, asked the officials if they would want their children to be detained in one of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. She drew no affirmative responses.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told the officials that the children's entertainment venue Chuck E. Cheese had a better system for preventing children from being separated from their parents than the U.S. government.

Carla L. Provost, acting chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, defended the administration's intentions, saying, "We do not leave our humanity behind when we report for duty."

But she also said "the initiative was a prosecution initiative, and our focus was on the prosecution element only," citing the "zero tolerance" policy for border-crossers.

Albence added that it was "virtually impossible" to process the cases of migrant children within the 20 days required by a long-standing settlement that set strict standards for detaining such children, including those who crossed the border unaccompanied and those who were separated from their parents.

Because of those limitations, Albence said, children were leaving agency custody and sometimes falling through cracks in the tracking system.

Albence was referring to the Flores settlement, a federal consent decree dating to 1997 but amended in recent years that mandates standards for the care of children in immigration detention. The agreement requires the government to place children in the "least restrictive" setting appropriate to their age and any special needs.

Some Republican members of the panel were sympathetic to Albence's argument. "It's not your fault that Congress hasn't come up with a more sensible system," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. He expressed dismay that the reunification effort was distracting the immigration enforcement agencies from focusing on apprehending drug traffickers and other threats.

Cornyn also criticized calls by some Democrats to "abolish ICE," inviting Albence to tell the committee what the result would be.

"You cannot have strong border security with a void in the interior," Albence said. When he complained that the government was focusing on reunification because a judge was forcing the issue, he drew a sharp rebuke from Democrats.

"Blame other people if you wish," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., "but this started with somebody in the White House with a bright idea that turned out to be a disaster."

Tuesday's hearing also brought renewed calls from Democrats for the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., one of Nielsen's most persistent critics, pointed out that the panelists who testified were "not the shot-callers."

"They are following orders, they are carrying out policies that are clearly not of their own making," Harris said, adding: "I believe that those who created this policy and implemented it, including Secretary Nielsen, should step down."

PSYCHOTROPIC DRUGS

On another issue concerning the treatment of migrant children, a federal judge Monday found that government officials have been giving psychotropic medication to children at a Texas facility without first seeking the consent of their parents or guardians, in violation of state child welfare laws.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles ordered the Trump administration to obtain consent or a court order before administering any psychotropic medications to migrant children, except in cases of dire emergencies. She also ordered that the government move all children out of the Texas facility, Shiloh Residential Treatment Center in Manvel, except for children deemed by a licensed professional to pose a "risk of harm" to themselves or others.

Staff members at Shiloh admitted to signing off on medications in lieu of a parent, relative or legal guardian, according to Gee's ruling. Government officials defended this practice, saying they provided the drugs only on "an emergency basis" when a child's "extreme psychiatric symptoms" became dangerous.

The judge didn't buy that explanation, pointing to testimony from children who said they were given pills "every morning and every night." Officials "could not have possibly" administered medications to children on an emergency basis every day, Gee wrote in her order.

Shiloh is a collection of trailers and small buildings that can house up to 44 children, 32 of them migrants, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting, which has reported extensively on the facility. Shiloh has been contracted to house migrant children deemed unaccompanied minors since 2013, and it was also set to receive children separated from their parents under the Trump administration.

The facility also has a history of troubling practices, including allegations of child abuse, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting. Four years ago, the Houston Chronicle reported on long-running allegations of physical violence, excessive use of physical restraints and several deaths of children in custody.

In a statement on its website, Shiloh said it has been visited, audited or investigated by authorities at the state and federal level in recent weeks. "All of the widely distributed allegations about Shiloh were found to be without merit," the center wrote. "The children have been found to be properly cared for and treated. Shiloh Treatment Center has a specific treatment purpose within the federal system. It does not participate in border actions."

Information for this article was contributed by Nick Miroff, Karoun Demirjian and Samantha Schmidt of The Washington Post; and by Alan Fram of The Associated Press.

A Section on 08/01/2018

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