Recent news headlines have focused on the actions happening at our border when adults with children are caught illegally entering our county, falsely claiming asylum. As a father and grandfather, my heart breaks at the thought of children separated from their parents. No one wants to see a child removed from the loving arms of their parents.
Our laws provide protections for individuals seeking asylum who come to a port of entry instead of attempting illegal crossing. Those who come legally requesting asylum are NOT detained because they are not charged with the crime of illegally crossing the border.
Adults apprehended for illegally crossing the border are charged with that crime, and President Trump’s administration recently announced that their asylum claims would be promptly adjudicated. The Trump administration has sent more judges and prosecutors to our border to process these claims as swiftly as possible and deport those who do not have valid asylum claims. During this adjudication, the Border Patrol detains the adults who are charged with the crime of illegally crossing the border, but they cannot hold children in their custody under the law. In the same way that laws across our states require that if parents are arrested and no family member exists to care for their child, the son or daughter is placed in the state’s child welfare system.
Current law, sponsored by California Democrat Representative Zoe Lofgren in 2002, requires that any accompanying children must be placed in custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services. A legal settlement from 1997 requires the children be released from government custody within 20 days.
Often, that means sending the children to shelters run by nonprofits who have contracted with the government to care for these children who are required by the law to be separated from their parents. In these shelters, medical care and educational services are provided to these children, as well as communication between the parents and children via phone calls and video conferencing, and Department of Health and Human Service officials closely monitor each facility.
Previously, President Obama’s administration used a method commonly called “catch and release” that ignored these laws.When someone was caught illegally crossing the border and claimed asylum before it was determined to be true or not, they were released for a future hearing date. A majority of the time these individuals never showed for their hearing.
Human smuggling networks and migrant advocates caught on to how the Obama Administration was circumventing the law and passed word back to Central America that having an accompanying child guaranteed that individuals would be released into the U.S., even if apprehended crossing the border illegally.
We must secure our borders. Drugs have flooded across our porous borders, poisoning communities and costing lives. Gangs like MS-13 take advantage of our open borders and the loopholes in our immigration system, including by trying to recruit unaccompanied alien children. In many cases, human trafficking has become an easier and more lucrative business for drug cartels. They lure thousands of young women to the U.S. with promises of a better life, only to impress those women into sex slavery upon arrival.
U.S. Rep. Daniel Webster represents The Villages in the U.S. House of Representatives.
