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Immigrant children are being held in cages of all things. The government has shown this to the public.

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Horrifying Video Shows Immigrant Children In Cages

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"We are NOT criminals, we are hard workers!"

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"We are NOT criminals, we are hard workers!"

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Another hot topic in the debate. I chose this picture to illustrate the many opinions that people have. Statistics have shown that immigrants are not responsible for many of the supposed crimes.

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"I'm Mexican. Does that change your assumptions about me?"

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"I'm Mexican. Does that change your assumptions about me?"

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I chose this because it shows how people in the modern day feel about all types of immigrants, not just those from Mexico. She also demonstrates perfectly what its like to grow up in their shoes.

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I’m Mexican. Does that change your assumptions about me? | Vanessa Vancour | TEDxUniversityofNevada

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This website shows the real truth behind the so called "criminals" that we let in this country.

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The Trump administration's first year of immigration policy has relied on claims that immigrants bring crime into America. President Trump's latest target is sanctuary cities.

"Every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants, drug dealers, traffickers, gang members back into our communities," he said last week. "They're safe havens for just some terrible people."

As of 2017, according to Gallup polls, almost half of Americans agreed that immigrants make crime worse. But is it true that immigration drives crime? Many studies have shown that it does not.

Immigrant populations in the United States have been growing fast for decades now. Crime in the same period, however, has moved in the opposite direction, with the national rate of violent crime today well below what it was in 1980.

In a large-scale collaboration by four universities, led by Robert Adelman, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, researchers compared immigration rates with crime rates for 200 metropolitan areas over the last several decades. The selected areas included huge urban hubs like New York and smaller manufacturing centers less than a hundredth that size, like Muncie, Ind., and were dispersed geographically across the country.

According to data from the study, a large majority of the areas have many more immigrants today than they did in 1980 and fewer violent crimes. The Marshall Project extended the study's data up to 2016, showing that crime fell more often than it rose even as immigrant populations grew almost across the board.

In 136 metro areas, almost 70 percent of those studied, the immigrant population increased between 1980 and 2016 while crime stayed stable or fell. The number of areas where crime and immigration both increased was much lower - 54 areas, slightly more than a quarter of the total. The 10 places with the largest increases in immigrants all had lower levels of crime in 2016 than in 1980.

And yet the argument that immigrants bring crime into America has driven many of the policies enacted or proposed by the administration so far: restrictions to entry, travel and visas; heightened border enforcement; plans for a wall along the border with Mexico. This month, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against California in response to the state's restrictions on local police to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants charged with crimes.On Tuesday, California's Orange County signed on in support of that suit. But while the immigrant population in the county has more than doubled since 1980, overall violent crime has decreased by more than 50 percent.

There's a similar pattern in two other places where Mr. Trump has recently feuded with local leaders: Oakland, Calif., and Lawrence, Mass. He described both cities as breeding grounds for drugs and crime brought by immigrants. But Oakland, like Orange County, has had increasing immigration and falling crime. In Lawrence, though murder and robbery rates grew, overall violent crime rates still fell by 10 percent.

In general, the study's data suggests either that immigration has the effect of reducing average crime, or that there is simply no relationship between the two, and that the 54 areas in the study where both grew were instances of coincidence, not cause and effect. This was a consistent pattern in each decade from 1980 to 2016, with immigrant populations and crime failing to grow together.

In a majority of areas, the number of immigrants increased at least 57 percent and as much as 183 percent, with the greatest increases occurring in the 1990s and early 2000s. Violent crime rates in most areas ranged between a 43 percent decline and a 6 percent rise, often trending downward by the 2000s. Places with a sharp rise in the immigrant population experienced increases in crime rates no more frequently than those with modest or no growth in immigration. On average, the immigrant population grew by 137 percent between 1980 and 2016, with average crime falling 12 percent over the same period.

Because the F.B.I. changed how rape was defined in its crime figures, that category could not be included in this analysis. Focusing on the other components of the violent crime rate - assaults, robberies and murders - still fails to reveal a relationship with immigration rates.

Most areas experienced decreases in all types of violent crime. The change in assault rates ranged from a 34 percent decline to a 29 percent rise, while robbery rates declined in the range of 12 percent to 57 percent, and murder rates declined in the range of 15 percent to 54 percent.

This analysis is one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies of the local immigrant-crime relationship. It spans decades of metropolitan area data, incorporating places with widely differing social, cultural and economic backgrounds, and a broad range of types of violent crime.

Areas were chosen to reflect a range of immigrant composition, from Wheeling, W.Va., where one in 100 people was born outside the United States, to Miami, where every second person was. Some areas were home to newly formed immigrant communities; other immigrant pockets went back generations. Controlling for population characteristics, unemployment rates and other socioeconomic conditions, the researchers still found that, on average, as immigration increases in American metropolises, crime decreases.

The foreign-born data, which is collected through the census, most likely undercounts the numbers of undocumented immigrants, many of whom might wish to avoid the risk of identifying themselves. They are, however, at least partly represented in the overall foreign-born population counts.

This is not the only study showing that immigration does not increase crime. A broad survey released in January examined years of research on the immigrant-crime connection, concluding that an overwhelming majority of studies found either no relationship between the two or a beneficial one, in which immigrant communities bring economic and cultural revitalization to the neighborhoods they join.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for its newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter. Anna Flagg is an interactive reporter for The Marshall Project.

In the recent study, Mr. Adelman and his team collected crime and foreign-born population data for 200 metropolitan statistical areas for the years 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010. The Marshall Project extended the data set to include 2016, obtaining foreign-born numbers from the American Community Survey one-year estimates and crime figures from the F.B.I. Uniform Crime Reporting Program metropolitan area data sets. When either foreign-born or crime information was unavailable for 2016, the corresponding 2015 data was substituted.

Some metropolitan areas changed over time, growing to include additional regions, or splitting into separate ones. The Marshall Project consulted with the study researchers to determine when a larger area was still an appropriate match to the original described in the study. When an area split into components, raw data from each was added to calculate rates approximating the original region. When no reasonable approximation to the original area could be found, it was marked as missing for 2016.

When an area was missing information for a certain year, that year's data was interpolated using figures from the closest year available. For example, crime numbers were unavailable for Chicago for 2000 and 2010. Data for those years was linearly interpolated using the 1990 and 2016 figures. Charlotte, N.C., was not included in either the 2016 or 2015 U.C.R. metropolitan area data sets, so data from 2010, the most recent year with available data for this area, was used as an estimate.

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The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant (Published 2018)

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The Trump administration's first year of immigration policy has relied on claims that immigrants bring crime into America. President Trump's latest target is sanctuary cities. "Every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants, drug dealers, traffickers, gang members back into our communities," he said last week. "They're safe havens for just some terrible people."

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I chose this article because it shows how the oppositions to the argument and how they're wrong.

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The 14 Most Common Arguments against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong

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These are the main arguments against immigration, my quick responses to them, and links to some of the most relevant evidence.

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The two sides to the immigration debate.

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The two sides to the immigration debate.

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A quick explanation on the two sides of the debate

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This article appears in the Winter 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

During his campaign, Donald Trump used the issue of illegal immigration as a nativist dog whistle. According to Trump, Mexico was sending criminals over the border. He called for deporting the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Trump's strident appeals definitely contributed to his success in the Republican primaries, and probably were of net benefit to him in the general election, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa.

After the election, Trump accused undocumented immigrants of surreptitiously voting for Hillary Clinton in the general election. He and his attorney general have stepped up deportations, even for traffic offenses. And he has refused to extend the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows the children of undocumented immigrants, who came to the United States through no choice of their own, to avoid deportation. After agreeing to work with Democratic congressional leaders on a bill extending DACA, he reneged by attaching conditions, including funding for a border wall, that he knew Democrats would reject.

In fact, Trump has not come close to deporting the 12 million. According to reports last September, he has deported fewer undocumented immigrants than the Obama administration did in a comparable period. But his rhetoric, and his rejection of DACA, have sown fear among immigrants. A friend reports that in parts of Texas, where there is little public transportation, undocumented immigrants who cannot obtain driver's licenses are trapped in their homes, fearful that if they are apprehended while driving, they will be deported. Trump's policies are cruel and inhumane; and they help reinforce the existence of a fearful, docile underclass that can be exploited by political demagogues and avaricious business managers and owners.

Democrats and liberals have rightly rejected Trump's words and deeds. And they have reasserted the need to find an eventual path to citizenship for the 12 million. But in responding to Trump's xenophobia, many have gone to the opposite extreme and denied, in effect, that a problem really exists. They have consistently downplayed or denied that there is any urgent need to stanch the flow of unauthorized immigration. The party's 2016 platform plank on immigration gave short shrift to the problem of illegal immigration, merely calling for law enforcement that is "humane and consistent with our values."

They have also denied that the massive influx of unskilled labor over the last five decades has held down wages, increased social costs, or undermined unionization in some sectors, including construction, agriculture, and meatpacking. A major Democratic think tank, the Center for American Progress, put out a position paper asserting that "immigrants complement native-born workers and increase the standard of living for all Americans" (my italics). Democrats and liberals have joined business conservatives in insisting that unskilled immigrants are simply taking jobs that American-born workers won't take, ignoring, for instance, the displacement of African Americans in the hotel industry.

The Democrats' penchant to reject without consideration any stance associated with Trump-even if it merits discussion-is borne out by their reaction to the immigration reform proposal (the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment, or RAISE, Act) put forward by Republican Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue. Cotton and Perdue had originally introduced their plan in February to little fanfare, but in August Trump endorsed the plan, making it his own.

To anyone familiar with the history of immigration debate, Cotton and Perdue's proposals strikingly resembled those put forward in 1997 by the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by former Democratic Representative Barbara Jordan, a leading liberal of her day. In line with Jordan's recommendations, Cotton and Perdue propose giving priority to skilled immigrants, narrowing the criteria for family reunification, and reducing the annual number of immigrants.

At the time, Bill Clinton reacted favorably to the Jordan Commission's recommendations, but when Cotton and Perdue made similar recommendations, and when Trump endorsed them, the two leading Democratic senators rejected them out of hand. Illinois's Dick Durbin, the Democratic whip, accused the plan of "gutting legal immigration" and of being "nothing more than a partisan ploy appealing to the racist and xenophobic instincts Trump encouraged during [the] campaign." Minority Leader Chuck Schumer dismissed it as a "non-starter." That reflects, of course, the even more polarized politics of the Trump era, but also the Democrats' out-of-hand dismissal of proposals that once seemed sensible.

Democrats believe, of course, that in downplaying illegal immigration and insisting that immigration benefits everyone, they are standing up for their own constituents. They think that working-class Americans who backed Trump on this issue failed to understand their own interests. But Democrats are wrong in this case. While many American businesses and the well-to-do have clearly benefited from the massive influx of unskilled immigrants, many middle- and working-class Americans, including such key Democratic constituents as African Americans, have not.

AMERICA'S CURRENT IMMIGRATION policy dates from 1965, when Congress passed a bill eliminating the quotas on national origin that had been adopted in 1924 to limit immigration from eastern and southern Europe. The 1965 act was adopted on civil rights and humanitarian grounds. It was not expected to increase immigration dramatically. Lyndon Johnson's Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach told a Senate hearing: "This bill is not designed to increase or accelerate the numbers of newcomers permitted to come to America. Indeed, this measure provides for an increase of only a small fraction in permissible immigration."

But the bill created a large and growing increase, particularly from Latin America, because of a provision that allowed for family reunification. In 1990, Congress passed another bill-this time enthusiastically backed by business-that increased still further the total quotas on immigrants. The immigrant population exploded. In 1970, the foreign-born accounted for 4.72 percent of the U.S. population; by 2014, it was 13.3 percent.

During the same period, illegal immigration across the border also grew, the result in part of the repeal in 1964 of the bracero guest-worker program, but also of a huge increase in Latin American population that was not matched by growing prosperity. (NAFTA played a role by decimating small-scale agriculture in Mexico.) There are now an estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, although some labor economists would put the number higher.

In 1986, Congress and the Reagan administration tried to stem illegal immigration by making it illegal for employers to knowingly hire workers without citizenship papers, but employers did not have to check whether the papers were authentic. Attempts to create a more rigorous computerized system of checking have been resisted by business lobbies. Employer fines were few in the Clinton years-417 in 1999-but virtually ceased under George W. Bush, who levied three fines in 2004. That has put the emphasis on border control, even though half or less of undocumented immigrants actually come across the border. Most just overstay tourist or other visas.

About one-third to one-half of the immigrants coming legally into the United States are unskilled or lower-skilled. According to a Brookings Institution study, almost one in three don't even have a high school diploma. About half lack proficiency in the English language. Those percentages are considerably higher among undocumented immigrants. About 70 percent lack proficiency in English. As a result, the greatest percentages of immigrants find unskilled work in agriculture, construction, health care (as aides), maids and housekeeping, and food service.

Many of the studies of the effects of immigration are financed by business groups and lobbying organizations that have a stake in the outcome. I put them in the same category as the "studies" of business-financed think tanks that predicted that NAFTA and China's entry into the World Trade Organization would reduce the American trade deficit.

But there are a number of studies that show that while immigration has resulted in a rise in overall wealth, it has been a significant, though not the only, factor in the decline of wages among the low-skilled workers who had to compete with the influx of new immigrants.

In 1997, the same year the Jordan Commission issued its findings, the National Academy of Sciences published a report on immigration. While lauding the overall effects of immigration, the report acknowledged that "almost one-half of the decline in real wages for native-born high school dropouts from 1980 to 1994 could be attributed to the adverse impact of unskilled foreign workers." Last year, the National Academy of Sciences published a new extensive study of immigration. It found again that "to the extent that negative wage effects are found, prior immigrants-who are often the closest substitutes for new immigrants-are most likely to experience them, followed by native-born high school dropouts, who share job qualifications similar to the large share of low-skilled workers among immigrants to the United States."

These findings would accord with the simple law of supply and demand. A rapid increase in supply either holds down increases in wages or results in reduced wages. Harvard economist George Borjas, who participated in the NAS study, estimates that within a particular skill group, a 10 percent increase in supply results in at least a 3 percent reduction in wages.

As the NAS study notes, the two groups in the labor force most immediately affected are prior immigrants and high school dropouts. Many of the first-generation immigrants are Hispanic, and many of the high school dropouts, or those with only a high school degree, are African American. And there are studies showing that workers from these two groups have been hit hard by competition from immigrants.

In a 2014 survey, sociologist Stephen Steinberg concluded that legal and illegal immigration had damaged opportunities for African Americans "in construction, light manufacturing, building maintenance, the hotel and leisure industry, the health care industry, and even public-sector jobs where one-third of blacks are employed."

In 2010, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission issued a report on "The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers." It concluded that "illegal immigration to the United States in recent decades has tended to depress both wages and employment rates for low-skilled American citizens, a disproportionate number of whom are black men." As Steinberg notes, one of the great ironies of our recent history is that immigration policy, which was partly inspired by the civil rights movement, has probably had a negative effect on African Americans at a time when African Americans might have been able to take advantage of the passage of civil rights acts outlawing employment discrimination.

Some pundits and political scientists insist that unskilled immigrants don't take jobs from native-born Americans. On building crews, for instance, immigrants and non-immigrants work side by side; most construction laborers are native-born. In other sectors, however, as businesses use legal and illegal immigrant labor to drive out unions and drive down wages and working conditions, native-born workers do begin to shun certain jobs. They become too "dirty" for Americans to take, and are then cited by business lobbies as grounds for increasing the number of unskilled immigrants-including so-called guest and temporary workers.

A good example is the transformation of the meatpacking industry. In 2001, The New York Times described what had happened to the industry over the preceding 20 years:

Until 15 or 20 years ago, meatpacking plants in the United States were staffed by highly paid, unionized employees who earned about $18 an hour, adjusted for inflation. Today, the processing and packing plants are largely staffed by low-paid non-union workers from places like Mexico and Guatemala. Many of them start at $6 an hour.

This didn't happen because the people who worked in meatpacking plants decided they wanted to become computer programmers. The companies brought in immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, to undermine the unions and depress wages. Something similar has happened in construction and low-skilled services, where documented and undocumented immigrants were brought in to undermine unionization. Some unions, such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and UNITE HERE, have succeeded in organizing immigrants in hotels, restaurants, and janitorial services, but they are basically fighting an uphill battle.

The labor movement lobbied for the restrictions on immigration that Congress adopted in 1921 and 1924. The leaders of organized labor believed at the time that the huge inflow of immigrants was making it impossible to organize workers to better their conditions. During the prior decades, employers had used immigrants as strike-breakers. The legislation itself was tainted with nativism and anti-Semitism and contributed to the tragic denial of asylum in the 1930s to Jews fleeing Central Europe, but the restrictions imposed on the numbers of low-skilled immigrants were a factor in union successes from the 1930s through the 1960s and in wage increases during that period.

The temporary cessation of mass immigration also, as Borjas argues in his new book We Wanted Workers, facilitated the assimilation of the millions of immigrants who had entered the United States before 1920. They were able to work their way up through the new industrial economy that employed them and that, thanks to the growth of unionism, paid middle-class wages in the decades following World War II. But many of the low-skilled and unskilled immigrants who have come into the United States since 1965 and are employed in the lower rungs of a service economy may not find it as easy to attain middle-class incomes and living standards.

Well through the 1990s, Democrats and the labor movement worried that this massive immigration was undermining unionization and holding down wages. That was reflected in the findings of the Jordan Commission in 1997 and in union support for the enforcement of the law prohibiting employers from hiring undocumented immigrants. But that understanding has disappeared. In the face of the government's failure to stem illegal immigration, unions had no choice but to attempt to organize immigrants and push for a path to citizenship for them. But for Democrats, uncritical backing for immigration was also the result of a political calculation that may turn out to be wrong.

MANY DEMOCRATIC LEADERS assume that in opposing measures to stem illegal immigration or to change the priorities of our current law, they are winning the support of Hispanic voters. And there is, or has been, some truth in that. When Republicans have accompanied arguments against illegal immigration with naked xenophobic appeals, as California Republicans did in promoting Proposition 187 in 1994, they have alienated Hispanic voters. That dynamic is still with us. In a current Gallup poll, 78 percent of Hispanics oppose or strongly oppose Trump's plan to deport all illegal immigrants-compared with 62 percent of non-Hispanic whites.

But at the same time, pluralities or majorities of Hispanics are leery of illegal immigration, and want it restricted. They look with disfavor on the massive immigration of unskilled workers. In a 2013 Gallup poll, 74 percent of Hispanics favor and only 24 percent oppose "tightening security at U.S. borders," and 65 percent favor and only 34 percent oppose "requiring business owners to check the immigration status of workers they hire."

Politico/Morning Consult ran an extensive poll last August to gauge the public's reaction to the Cotton-Perdue bill. The poll found significant support among Hispanics for some of its provisions. For instance, 42 percent of Hispanics thought the United States allowed too many "low-skilled workers" to immigrate, and only 21 percent thought the number was "about right." Hispanics thought job skills should be a higher priority than family reunification by 49 percent to 33 percent, and by 50 percent to 37 percent thought that English proficiency should be a factor in immigration decisions. In other words, Hispanic voters were favorably inclined toward a proposal that aimed to change the priorities in our immigration policy.

Hispanic preferences were roughly the same as those of all registered voters. One of the few groups in the poll that was evenly divided on whether there are too many or just the right number of low-skilled immigrants were people who make more than $100,000. A plurality of the other income groups thought there are too many low-skilled immigrants coming into the country. In sum, the Democratic stance on these issues is not only unpopular with most voters, but with many Hispanics as well. Except as a response to Trump's xenophobia, the Democrats' response makes no political sense, and is not benefiting their own working-class constituents.

There is one more political dimension to the argument about immigration that is voiced by leading Democrats and Republicans. It is that continuing large-scale immigration of unskilled workers will help the Democrats politically and hurt the Republicans. That calculation lies at the bottom of Democratic hopes and Republican fears of immigration. It encourages Democrats to ignore the downside of mass and illegal immigration and Republicans to seek to cut immigration and to do whatever they can do to discourage immigrants already here from voting.

The parties' complementary calculations may prove correct. Democrats, after all, have historically been the party of immigrants. But I'd contend that on several counts, it could prove short-sighted. If one assumes that Hispanics will, like previous immigration groups, eventually move up the economic ladders and assimilate-becoming "white" in the perverse language of American racial categorization-then Hispanics may not prove to be a dependable Democratic constituency. Outside California, there are indications that may be the case. Republican candidates for governor in Texas and the Senate in North Carolina have almost broken even among Hispanic voters. And Trump, perhaps because he appeared to promise jobs, actually did better with Hispanic voters than 2012 candidate Mitt Romney.

Secondly, the continual surge of low-skilled immigrants into the United States will contribute to an impoverished underclass that holds down wages and creates welfare costs for small towns and states. The existence of that underclass has helped fuel bitter cultural-economic conflicts that have riven America over the last 30 years. It undercuts any promise of an American social democracy or extension of New Deal liberalism, which must be based on a common sense of community. It is already threatening the social solidarity that sustained European social democracy. So in the long run, even if some Democrats benefit at the ballot box, an uncritical stance toward immigration is bad news for the country.

What, then, can the Democratic Party do? On the one hand, it is reasonable to push for a path to citizenship, and especially to prevent the cruel deportation of immigrants who were brought here illegally as children and often literally have no home country to return to. It's also important to defend the labor rights of all residents of the United States, even those without papers, and to resist wholesale raids. But Democrats make both a policy mistake and a political one when they become cheerleaders for illegal immigration and for expanded immigration in general, while denying the plain fact that in many cases immigrants do indeed lower the wages of local workers. Building a wall is bad policy, but so is ignoring the plain realities.

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This article appears in the Winter 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. During his campaign, Donald Trump used the issue of illegal immigration as a nativist dog whistle. According to Trump, Mexico was sending criminals over the border. He called for deporting the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

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Some families are still being separated at the border. Kids being taken away from their families.

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CLOSE

The Trump administration has quietly resumed separating immigrant families at the border, in some cases using vague or unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing or minor violations against the parents, including charges of illegally re-entering the country, as justification.

Over the last three months, lawyers at Catholic Charities, which provides legal services to immigrant children in government custody in New York, have discovered at least 16 new separation cases. They say they have come across such instances by chance and via their own sleuthing after children were put into temporary foster care and shelters with little or no indication that they arrived at the border with their parents.

ProPublica stumbled upon one more case late last month after receiving a call from a distraught Salvadoran father who had been detained in South Texas, and whose 4-year-old son, Brayan, had literally been yanked from his grasp by a Customs and Border Protection agent after they crossed the border and asked for asylum. Julio, the father, asked to be identified only by his first name because he was fleeing gang violence and worried about the safety of relatives back home.

"I failed him," said Julio, 27, sobbing uncontrollably. "Everything I had done to be a good father was destroyed in an instant."

ProPublica tracked down Brayan, who has reddish-blond hair and an endearing lisp, at a temporary foster care agency in New York City, and reached out to the lawyer who represents him. Until that phone call, the lawyer, Jodi Ziesemer, a supervising attorney at Catholic Charities, had no idea that Brayan had been separated from his father. The chaos, she said, felt disturbingly like zero tolerance all over again.

"It's so disheartening," Ziesemer said "This was supposed to be a policy that ended."

Officially it has. On June 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order retreating from his so-called zero-tolerance immigration enforcement policy, which called on authorities to criminally prosecute adults caught illegally crossing the border and separate them from any children they brought with them. A week later, a federal judge, Dana M. Sabraw, issued an injunction against the separations and ordered the government to put the thousands of affected families back together.

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Sabraw, however, exempted cases in which the safety of the child was at risk, and crucially, imposed no standards or oversight over those decisions. As a result, attorneys say, immigration officials - taking their cues from an administration that has made it clear it still believes family separations are an effective deterrent - are using whatever justification they can find, with or without substantiation, to deem immigrant parents unfit or unsafe.

"If the authorities have even the most specious evidence that a parent was a gang member, or had some kind of blemish on their record," said Neha Desai, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, "anything they can come up with to say that the separation is for the health and welfare of the child, then they'll separate them."

'Nothing to do with zero tolerance'

In an email, a senior CBP official acknowledged that immigrant families are still being separated, but said the separations had "nothing to do with zero tolerance." The official added that "this administration continues to comply with the law and separates adults and children when required for the safety and security of the child." The official declined to say how many children have been taken from their parents for what was said to be their own protection.

CBP officials explained that Brayan was such a case. One official said that the agency had conducted a routine background check on Julio, and that it "confirmed his gang affiliation with MS-13." Spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer declined to provide the evidence the agency had to support the allegation, saying only that it was "law enforcement sensitive." Nor would she say why CBP believed Julio was a danger to his child. But Sabraw's order, she said, "did not prevent these separations, in fact it explicitly allows DHS to continue with this prior practice."

CBP has also not shared any evidence supporting its assertion of Julio's gang ties with his lawyer, Georgia Evangelista, who said she wonders whether it exists.

(On Tuesday, a government lawyer repeated the allegation to an immigration judge in South Texas but said he could not provide documentation to the court because it was "confidential," according to Evangelista. She said the immigration judge did not press for release of the evidence but freed her client on an $8,000 bond. Evangelista was frustrated by the outcome, saying, "How can we fight these charges when we don't know what they are.")

According to Evangelista, Julio arrived at the border in mid-September, carrying a letter prepared by a Salvadoran lawyer that explained that he had fled El Salvador with his son because he had been attacked and threatened by gangs there for years. At Evangelista's request, the Salvadoran lawyer and Julio's former employer sent sworn statements vouching for Julio's character, and stating that he was never involved in criminal activity.

"I'm furious about this. They aren't playing by the rules," Evangelista said, referring to U.S. immigration authorities. "They're treating him like a criminal so they can justify taking away his son. Where's the proof? It's his word against theirs. It sickens me."

Susan Watson, a civil rights and family lawyer, said this kind of action could not be done without a judge's review in custody cases that do not involve immigration issues. "Constitutionally, before a parent is separated from a child, you are entitled to due process," she said. "Some decision in a dark corner by the Border Patrol doesn't meet that standard."

In New York, Ziesemer says the new separations identified by her organization involve children between the ages of 2 and 17, including Brayan. All of them arrived in New York City without any records indicating they had been separated from their parents at the border and why. A few weeks ago, the ACLU, which brought the lawsuit over the first round of family separations, sent a letter to the Justice Department raising concerns about the new cases, specifically about the grounds for the separations and why the ACLU hadn't been notified about them.

'Flimsy excuses'

Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney who led the organization's lawsuit against family separations in the spring, said, "If the government is still secretly separating children, and is doing so based on flimsy excuses, that would be patently unconstitutional and we will be back in court."

Lawyers at the ACLU and Catholic Charities said that the DOJ responded that it wasn't obligated to report the new separations to the ACLU because they hadn't been done as a part of the zero-tolerance policy. The DOJ said that in 14 of the 17 cases flagged in the ACLU's letter, the children were removed from their parents' custody because authorities suspected the parents had some kind of criminal background that made them unfit - even dangerous. But the agency would not specify what crimes the parents were suspected of committing and what evidence authorities had to support these allegations.

Protesters rally against President Trump's immigrant family separation policies in Philadelphia, Penn., June 30, 2018. (Photo: DOMINICK REUTER, AFP/Getty Images)

The ACLU and other groups representing immigrant children said the DOJ's secrecy is highly troubling on several counts. They worry that the Department of Homeland Security has allowed authorities without formal training in custody issues - primarily Border Patrol agents - to make decisions using standards that could violate the spirit of the court order and that would never hold up in non-immigration cases. Ziesemer has talked to relatives and social workers and says she suspects that at least eight of the cases involve parents whose crime is illegally re-entering the country. Illegal re-entry is a felony, although previous administrations did not typically separate families in such cases. Ziesemer said the allegations the government has advanced to justify separations in eight other cases were either vague or unsubstantiated. The final case she identified involved a parent who was hospitalized.

"The government's position is that because these are not zero-tolerance cases, they don't have to tell us, or anyone, about them," Ziesemer said. "Our position is that when children are separated from their parents, there needs to be some oversight."

More: Timeline: Immigrant children separated from families at the border

Brayan's case is a vivid example of how government officials are interpreting the court order to allow separations of families.

I found out about him by accident. Early last month, after the government reported that of the more than 2,600 immigrant children separated under the zero-tolerance policy, only one child under the age of 5 remained in their care. I decided to try to find that child, thinking the case might make a compelling bookend to a story I'd written this year about a girl named Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, whose cries were recorded inside a Border Patrol detention facility in June. The recording ignited a storm of outrage that tipped the political scales against the Trump administration's family separation policy.

An attorney on the border, Thelma O. Garcia, said she represented a 6-year-old Salvadoran boy named Wilder Hilario Maldonado Cabrera, who was in a temporary foster home in San Antonio. Wilder had been separated from his father in June, Garcia said, and hadn't been reunited because the father had a 10-year-old warrant for a DUI charge in Florida.

The father, Hilario Maldonado, called me from the South Texas detention facility in Pearsall and said he'd tried to keep in touch with Wilder by phone, but his social worker didn't always pick up. When they did connect, he said, Wilder, pudgy, precocious and missing his two front teeth, scolded him for not coming to take him home.

I told Maldonado that it appeared he would be one of the last parents to go through such a separation because the government had agreed to stop them.

Maldonado, 39, said that wasn't true. The separations are still happening, he said, and he knew of one.

A few minutes later, I got a call from Julio, who was at the same detention facility. He sounded desperate, crying and pleading for answers. He said he'd turned himself and Brayan into the authorities as soon as they'd crossed the border, asked for asylum and told immigration agents that his mother, who lives in Austin, Texas, was willing to help him get on his feet. Seven days later, a Border Patrol agent took Brayan, dressed in a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt, away, screaming.

Julio said all he knew was that his son was somewhere in New York. As soon as we hung up, I called Ziesemer at Catholic Charities, which has a government contract to provide legal services to the unaccompanied minors in the city. I asked whether she'd heard of Brayan.

"We do know this kid," Ziesemer quickly responded, "but were not aware he was separated from his father."

Ziesemer was audibly shaken. "Until you called, all I had was his name on a spreadsheet," she said.

Ziesemer immediately arranged to have Brayan, who had been placed in a temporary foster home, brought to her office. Her experience told her not to expect much from their first interaction, partly because Brayan was likely to be afraid, and partly because he was only 4. So she tried putting Brayan at ease by opening a box of crayons and a Spider-Man coloring book.

He warmed up to her quickly, putting down his crayons to show her his Spider-Man moves and squiggling lines on a piece of paper when she asked whether he knew how to write his name. But, as Ziesemer expected, he was too young to make sense of what had happened to him on the border, much less explain it to an adult he'd just met. And his lisp made it hard for Ziesemer to understand the few things he could tell her.

After the meeting, she sounded both exasperated about having to grill a tiny child and terrified that there might be other children like him buried in her spreadsheets.

"We, and the caseworkers and the consulates, do what we can to fill in the gaps and figure out where these kids came from," she said. "But that means days and weeks go by with a child not knowing where his parents are and vice versa. And it doesn't have to be that way. It shouldn't be that way."

After Ziesemer's meeting with Brayan, I traveled to Pearsall to meet Julio. He said he'd fled the country with Brayan because street gangs had threatened to kill him after finding out that he reported one of their members to the police. His wife and stepson stayed behind because there wasn't enough money to pay for everyone to come. I spoke to his wife, who told me she was hiding out at her parents' house because she didn't want to be home if gang members came looking for her husband.

In photos his relatives sent, Julio looked sort of like a cop, stocky with a crew cut. But after a month in detention, he looked pale and deflated. He wore navy blue detention garb and his dark brown hair was wet, though neatly combed. He didn't have any tattoos, which are common among Central American gang members.

'Ice box'

Through tears, Julio told me he'd replayed the days since his arrival at the border in his mind, trying to make sense of why authorities took away his son. Julio and Brayan had been taken to the "ice box," a notorious air-conditioned cellblock that is the first stop for most immigrants intercepted at the border. Brayan developed a high fever and had to be taken to the hospital for treatment. A Border Patrol agent who drove Julio and his son scolded Julio for bringing a small boy on such a harrowing trip. Could that be the reason they took his son away? Was it because the agents had looked at the color of Brayan's hair and didn't believe he was the boy's father?

Julio wonders whether he had been fooled into signing a document at the hospital - they were all in English - surrendering his rights to his child. Was it because he'd once been arrested for a robbery in El Salvador, but exonerated two days later when authorities realized they had the wrong person? Why would they consider him a danger to his child?

It wasn't until I told him that Julio learned his child had been taken from him because Border Patrol agents suspected he was a gang member. The news hit him hard, and it was confounding because at the same time the CBP had deemed him a gang member, another agency within DHS had found that his asylum petition, in which Julio claims he was a victim of gang violence, was persuasive enough to be heard by an immigration judge.

In early October, Julio had met with an asylum officer for what's known as a credible fear interview. According to the report of that interview, which Julio provided to ProPublica, the asylum officer not only asked him why he fled El Salvador, but whether he had a criminal record. Among the questions were: Have you ever committed a crime in any country? Have you ever harmed someone for any reason? Even if you did not want to, have you ever helped someone else harm people? Have you ever been arrested or convicted of a crime? Have you ever been a member of a gang?

Julio answered no to all of them. The asylum officer who conducted the interview deemed Julio's account credible, and, even more significantly, indicated that she had been provided no derogatory information or criminal records that would automatically bar Julio from winning asylum.

The discrepancy reflects differences in the legal standards for asylum and family separation. While the asylum officer's decision is subject to review by a judge, the Border Patrol's decision to take away Julio's child was not.

"I don't know what information, if any, they really have on Julio," his attorney, Evangelista, said. "They have total discretion when it comes to separating him from his child. They can do what they want. And they don't have to explain why."

Julio said his own father had abandoned him when he was about Brayan's age. Then his mother left for the United States when he was 7. He said he vowed never to do the same thing to Brayan, which is why he didn't leave the boy behind in El Salvador. He wonders now whether that was a mistake. In every phone call with Brayan, Julio says, he feels his son slowly slipping away.

"He tells me: 'You're not my Papa anymore. I have a new Papa,'" Julio said of his son, adding: "He doesn't even call me Papa. He calls me Papi. I never taught him that word."

Happening again?

Back in New York, Ziesemer said she worries family separations may be beginning all over again.

Sitting with Brayan in her office, she said, brought back the faces of the 400 or so separated kids who had shuffled through over the summer. As Catholic Charities' point person during the crisis, she said she came to know every single one of those kids by name. One 9-year-old girl went into a full panic attack when she was asked to step into a room without her sister because she thought Ziesemer was going to take her sister away like officials had taken her mother. "At one point, we had to have a meeting with the entire office to explain why the conference room was full of all these wailing kids," she said.

Catholic Charities, the ACLU and several other large immigrant advocacy groups took the lead in putting the families together again; working the phones to find parents who were still in immigration detention and dispatching colleagues to Central America to track down parents who had already been deported. In addition to the "huge, heavy lift" of reunification, Ziesemer said, there was a crush of calls and emails from Congress, consulates and the media - all seeking information about the separations.

Ziesemer said she and her team worked around the clock for months, and though there are still several dozen kids awaiting reunification, she thought things were winding down. That's when she began seeing new cases, like Brayan's, which had some of the same hallmarks of the old ones.

Ziesemer didn't know much about Brayan, except the little bit of information she'd gotten from him during their meeting. So I shared with her some of the things I'd learned about him from his family: that he could eat four hard-boiled eggs in one sitting; that he loved Lightning McQueen, a character from the Pixar movie "Cars"; and that he had a dog, Lucky, whom he insisted on seeing during every WhatsApp video call with his mother. His grandmother in Austin had fixed up a bedroom for him, filled with Mickey Mouse dolls, remote-control cars and winter coats. I told Ziesemer how distraught Brayan's father was that his son called him "Papi."

"A couple of weeks is a long time for a kid his age," she said about Brayan. "They start losing attachments to people, even their parents."
This article was originally published by ProPublica. Its content was created separately to USA TODAY.
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