30 Issues: Immigration, Asylum and the Border

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Nancy Solomon: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Nancy Solomon from the WNYC Newsroom. I also host a podcast here called Dead End and today I'm filling in for Brian Lehrer who's off today. On today's show, we're going to talk about the implications of a case from Hudson County, New Jersey, where the suspect was identified using facial recognition software from the NYPD. An attorney from the ACLU of New Jersey will join us to explain why this case is concerning, plus, a big storyline from the 2018 midterm elections was the suburban women activists who were instrumental in flipping the house to Democratic control.

Two of those activists will join us to talk about what they're up to ahead of this year's midterm elections, and to wrap it up in today's show, we're going to tackle an age-old geographical debate. Where does Upstate New York begin? We'll take your calls on that and what fall stuff you might want to do when you go upstate this weekend or anytime this fall, but first, we'll continue our series 30 Issues In 30 days. Today, we've reached issue number five, immigration, political asylum, and the border.

Our guest, Caitlin Dickerson, who covers Immigration for The Atlantic, spent 18 months investigating the Trump administration's family separation policy. We'll get a few key takeaways from her on her reporting on that. We'll ask her what's changed since then and whether Biden and the Democrats are struggling to come up with an immigration plan, and of course, we'll look at the way immigration is playing out as an issue in the lead-up to November's midterm elections. Joining me now is Caitlin Dickerson, staff writer at The Atlantic. Hi, Caitlin. Welcome back to WNYC.

Caitlin Dickerson: Hi. Thanks so much for having me, Nancy.

Nancy Solomon: Listeners, help us report this story. How high is immigration on your list of priorities ahead of the midterms, and how are you seeing immigration and border policy play out in the congressional races in your own backyard? The number is 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Or you can tweet at us @BrianLehrer. Caitlin, you spent months exploring the details of Trump's family separation policy at the southern border. I want to get to that in a moment, but I wonder how much influence you believe Trump still has on Republicans and the Republican immigration policy and the reaction from Democrats nearly two years after he was voted out of office.

Caitlin Dickerson: Well, I think there's no question that Trump's positions on immigration are still definitely influencing Republicans, prominent Republicans. Of course, I'm thinking of Ron DeSantis in Florida. I'm thinking of Governor Ducey in Arizona who seem to completely take a page right out of former President Trump's book by starting this initiative to bus migrants from the southwest border to northern cities that run by progressive governments. Not a meaningful policy choice in any way, but, but something that was meant to stir up emotions, get a base of voters who are really focused on trying to clamp down on the southwest border.

Enthusiastic to get their attention to show that these other Republicans who are trying to make a bigger name for themselves are on their side. It's very reminiscent of the track Trump began taking when he was running for president in 2016, and then obviously carried into the White House, and I think that to the point of your question on whether it's influencing Democrats, I think it's fair to say it is because I think that when you see the really enthusiastic and positive response to those efforts, even though it's small, it's not by any means a majority of Americans.

I think that the enthusiasm around stunts like the ones that we're seeing now, I think help to put Democrats on the back foot in a way, to make them feel defensive. I think we can get into it, but we've seen a real sense of fear when it comes to the Biden administration and Democrats who maintain majorities in both chambers of Congress a resonance to push forward, and I think that's because of a fear of backlash and just uncertainty over just how many Americans actually want to change the immigration laws in the way that Biden suggested he did in his first few weeks in office. We've seen very little movement there.

Nancy Solomon: We will get into the current landscape in a few minutes. I definitely want to return to what you just said, but let's take a step back first. You published this tremendous piece of reporting about Trump's separation policy, the separation of families at the border which all began in secret. Let's back up and tell us about that story and remind us about what happened with separating families and what you found out about it.

Caitlin Dickerson: Sure. I had covered the separation of families at the time. I was a reporter at the New York Times and just watching it unfold alongside the rest of the country, as you mentioned, it started in 2017 in secret, and so it started with me and other reporters finding examples of families that were being separated and then going to the administration asking what was going on and being told nothing to see here. We're not actually separating families. Ultimately, the Trump administration came out into the public and in the summer of 2018 announced that they were going to begin separating families even though they'd already been doing it for a year at that point.

It was a huge national story, but we didn't really understand the origins of it because it began so quietly, which was really outside the norm for an administration that had previously seemed to enjoy shouting from the rooftops about all the things that it was doing to crack down on the southwest border. I went back to the beginning try to figure out how it happened, why it happened, who is responsible.

I found that the roots of family separation really stretch all the way back to 9/11 when this approach to border enforcement known as prevention by deterrents came out of a goal of the George W. Bush administration to just do anything it possibly could to crack down on terrorism, including things prevention by deterrents which have not had any meaningful impact on terrorism, nor have they had a meaningful impact on flows across the Southwest border, but it's the best that law enforcement could come up with at the time, and in the absence of reform by Congress, here we are 20 years later, it's still the status quo, and that remains true today.

This idea is to basically punish people for crossing the border without authorization it starts being used against mostly single men who are migrant laborers crossing the border that way. It's then expanded and applied effectively to asylum seekers and through the Obama administration, families were exempt, but that changed under Trump. The idea came from a man named Tom Homan, who rose to be the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement but had been in enforcement for decades.

It was the combination of the enthusiasm for this prevention by deterrence approach that already existed within the rank and file and then an administration that was willing to throw out all procedures, all systems that existed to prevent bad policies from being made that existed to prevent logistically nightmarish policies from being implemented. Those all went out the window and so these two groups came together and decided that it would be a good idea to take people's children away from them to discourage migration despite all the evidence that such an effort wouldn't work, didn't work, and also, of course, was devastating to the thousands of families that were impacted.

Nancy Solomon: Then how do things change at once it becomes not secret, but once Trump publicly acknowledged it?

Caitlin Dickerson: Well, the numbers increase really dramatically. You have hundreds of separations happening per day at individual border patrol facilities. Even though there were a year of separations prior to this publicly being announced, you still didn't have any processes or procedures for keeping track of where parents and children were ending up for reunifying them ultimately.

It's really striking, much has been made and I think appropriately so of the morality and of the decision to separate families whether it was a good idea or not, but setting that aside, I also spent a lot of time focusing on just the complete lack of logistical planning, really almost none prior to this policy being implemented publicly, and you even had after you-- Listeners may remember that most of the parents who were separated from their children were prosecuted, and that was the pretense, but even after those prosecutions were complete, you had officials within the Trump administration trying to prevent families from being brought back together.

Nancy Solomon: You reported on what the Trump administration, what they understood about the potential outcomes from this practice. Tell us a little bit about some of the documents that you were able to unearth and what did they know about what this would do.

Caitlin Dickerson: When family separations becomes public, and, frankly, Republicans and Democrats, Republicans who you never expected to hear from people like Ted Cruz come out against it because of the logistical chaos that I'm describing. Then you hear an argument start to come out of the White House and out of the Department of Homeland Security that these logistical challenges never could have been anticipated. That was something that I wanted to fact-check and sure enough, I found that there were many people within the government who were raising red flags about all that would go wrong with a policy to separate families on a large scale.

In granular detail, you had the civil rights and civil liberties department within the Department of Homeland Security writing reports that said if this is pursued, you will have "future populations of US orphans". You will have babies and infants separated from their parents, you will lose track of parents and children, you will have parents deported without their children, you'll have children deported without their parents. All of this was anticipated in advance. I also got a hold of records associated with an early prosecution initiative in 2017 where some of those first separations took place in El Paso.

It later became known as an El Paso Pilot Program, because it was eventually held up as a model, "Hey, we did this in El Paso, so we should expand it nationwide." Again, coming out of the El Paso program, I was told by officials leading DHS under President Trump that they had no idea anything had gone wrong. In Washington, as far as officials were concerned, everything went smoothly, and that's just not true. I got a hold of the reports that came out of that early prosecution initiative, which were shared with these high-level officials. The reports, sure enough, say that magistrate judges were raising concerns about parents and children getting lost.

The document, actually, it concludes with one recommendation, which is to come up with a process for keeping track of parents and kids, and still, it never happened and then this policy is implemented on a much wider scale. The level of ignoring expertise and ignoring all of these recommendations to try to prevent harm was really, really striking. It goes on for over a year and involves lots of people who just seem to have wanted to put this into place no matter what.

Nancy Solomon: You're listening to the Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Nancy Solomon sitting in for Brian. Listeners, we want to hear from you about how you see immigration and where does it sit on the list of priorities ahead of the midterms, and what you're hearing in your own districts from those running for election in November. The number to call is 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can tweet us @BrianLehrer. We're talking with Caitlin Dickerson about immigration and the midterms. We've been talking about the separation of families at the border, the Trump policy. What have you been able to find out about what has happened now, years later, with the families that were separated?

Caitlin Dickerson: Between 700 and 1,000 families remain separated today, according to official government records, which is a really high number. It's important to point out that lawyers and those working in the Biden administration on reunifications believe that some of those families may have found each other independently and not reported it to the US government, understandably, from a position of wanting to avoid any further interaction. That still leaves many families separated years after this policy was put into place and you have over 150 children whose parents to this day still have not even been located by the US government. We don't know where they are.

We took their children away as a country and just haven't been able to find them ever since. That's, of course, not to speak of the thousands of children and parents who were reunited but are very much still dealing with the consequences of what they experienced today. Very, very severe PTSD symptoms are being reported by the healthcare practitioners who are treating separated parents and children. There is a federal case that requires those families that are in the United States, at least, to be offered mental health care. What I heard from therapists who've treated many of these families who I interviewed for my story is that this is really just the beginning.

Right now, what they're working on is trying to reconnect parents and kids and rebuild a relationship that was really deeply harmed. The trauma that results from separation is something that continues to come out over the course of a person's life that doesn't resolve in six months or a year that really can be lifelong. That was also something that was warned about in some of those records we were talking about earlier that I obtained through FOIA requests, and then eventually lawsuits against the government. All of this was anticipated and so these families, whether they're reunited or not, are very much still dealing with the ramifications of what happened.

Nancy Solomon: Let's now come back to current times, do you see a direct thread from family separation to now what we're seeing with Texas Governor Greg Abbott, or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and the others? This attempt that they're doing of busing asylum seekers to New York City or Martha's Vineyard and elsewhere. How are these two things connected?

Caitlin Dickerson: One of the themes that emerged prominently in my reporting on family separation was just the distance that existed in a lot of decision-makers minds between the humanity of the individuals being impacted by family separation, and the choices that they were making. People become numbers, they become data points. I don't want to oversimplify it because when you are in DC and you're making policies that impact thousands of people, sure, it can be hard to grapple with that on a granular level on a day-to-day basis. When you're talking about separating kids from their parents, I really can't overstate how significant that is.

Don't take it from me, you can call up any mental health professional and ask them a question. For that matter, really, any prosecutor in the country who's worked on cases involving parents and kids will tell you that pursuing an initiative that's going to do this to thousands of families is a really big deal. That's going to have really big consequences for everybody involved.

The people who made the decisions to implement the family separation, ultimately, seem to just forget that to the point where we would be talking about, in a bland way, their decision making, and why or how they supported separating families, and in the middle of our interview, they would say, "Oh, hold on, Caitlin, I need to go and talk to my child. I need to go and drop my kid off at school. Let me give them some crayons and paper so that they're distracted so you and I can have a conversation." They didn't see the connection between the humanity of their own children and the children that they chose to separate from their parents.

I suppose you can see something like that in the way that migrants who have been, at the very least those who seem to have been misled, told that they were going to be given jobs, told that they were going to be given safe haven and housing, but actually just bused to a random location. Martha's Vineyard, for example, and tricked into that for the sake of a political stunt or for the sake of news coverage, and I suppose a boost to these Republican candidates, these Republican governors, and decision-makers to their reputations. I think that there's a failure to acknowledge humanity there and so I think that's a potential link you can draw.

Nancy Solomon: Of course, we talk about this all the time, the country is so divided. I'm wondering, has there been any blowback against Abbott or DeSantis from the Republican Party, from their voters about the way that these people were not treated as human beings?

Caitlin Dickerson: I think there has been some, and it remains to be seen. I think that subsequent elections will tell us something about that as well but what I have noted in the last several years covering immigration is that historically there was a pretty significant part of the Republican party who was very pro-immigration from a business perspective, for example. That segment of Republicans has been really increasingly quiet.

We don't hear pro-immigration Republicans dominating national discourse or even at the state level discourse. That compassionate conservatism that is often used to describe people like George W. Bush it really seems to have gone away and given way to an approach to immigration that looks more like that, of former President Trump. I do think that those conservatives are out there, and I have seen, at the very least on the local level, some people who've come out and criticized Ron DeSantis' stunt, for example.

People who support border security, who support an immigration law that is modernized to address the current circumstances and that isn't enforced, one that actually has some weight behind it but that is thoughtfully rewritten, which only Congress can do, but who feel that using people and sending them to a far-flung location just for a headline is counterproductive. I have seen that a little bit, but as I said, most of what you hear from the more prominent Republican politicians today it looks more like what President Trump had to say about immigration when he was in office.

Nancy Solomon: Well, there's plenty of criticism to go around, and I think we can direct some of that at Democrats when we come back, but first, we're going to take a short break. After we come back, we'll also take your calls, so stay with us.

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It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Nancy Solomon from the WNYC newsroom, filling in for Brian Lehrer who is off today. I'm speaking with Caitlin Dickerson, staff writer at The Atlantic, and we're talking about immigration, political asylum, and the border for our series, 30 Issues in 30 Days. Caitlin, a new NPR Marist Poll found that immigration was the most important issue for Republican voters behind inflation. It was nowhere near the top for Democrats. Is it a fair criticism from Republicans that Democrats haven't done enough to fix the immigration system?

Caitlin Dickerson: Absolutely. Neither the Democrats or Republicans have meaningfully changed our immigration laws in decades, and there have been plenty of opportunities. The current situation with Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress is one example, but it's not the only example. I think that part of the reason why we haven't seen a change from Democrats is that polling that you mentioned, but certainly both sides carry a blame here.

Nancy Solomon: Let's go to the calls. We have Patrick in Fanwood, New Jersey. Hi, Patrick.

Patrick: Hi. Good morning. How are you?

Nancy Solomon: Good morning.

Patrick: I just wanted to say that one of my frustrations is with the Democratic party because I don't think the Democrats are very good at articulating why the country would benefit from immigration reform. Basically, the Republicans control the conversation. For instance, this morning I was listening to another story in NPR about how the US auto industry is trying to transition from combustion engine to electric vehicles and how they don't have the expertise in engineers to do that. One solution would be to liberalize the immigration laws to allow more people to stay. That can contribute to that change.

Another issue would be, an article that I read last year about how, during COVID, there've been less births in the United States and how going forward that's going to be detrimental as the population gets older. Well, one solution would be to help increase immigration so that there are people to actually care for an aging population. It's frustrating because I think the Democrats could do a much better job at articulating how the country would benefit by change, but they don't do that.

Nancy Solomon: Yes. I think that's a really interesting point. Caitlin, in your reporting, do you ever get a sense of why it is that Democrats don't articulate these kinds of vision of how immigration is good for the country?

Caitlin Dickerson: I do. Thank you for your call. I've been doing some reporting recently on what happened to the push for legislation around family separation but also immigration reform generally. President Biden came into office with a pretty explicit plan for reforming the immigration laws that didn't go anywhere. I think, Patrick, you're right. The Donald Trump Republicans have a clear message on immigration, which is we are being invaded as a country.

Despite all of the inaccuracies and complexities and nuances and problems with that argument, it's clear. You don't have a clear argument on the other side. It tends to be a very defensive posture, but not one that seems to lead, that seems to tell Americans what, the current White House for example, what their view of where our immigration system should go is. I do think that that is a key problem or a key part of what has held Democrats back from actually substantively changing our immigration system in moments like this one where an opportunity may have existed.

I think that part of the issue with immigration frankly with the country in trying to move forward here is that we're all talking about different things when we talk about immigration reforms. Some people want immigration reform because they want more robust humanitarian policies. Some people want immigration reform because they want to feel safer and they worry about how their safety might be impacted by immigration. Some people want immigration reform because they want to help businesses boom. Some people want tighter restrictions because they think it might harm business.

I think what we're missing is evidence a lot of times in the national discourse over immigration, but also clarity about what it is that we're talking about. Are we talking about economic policy or humanitarian policy or criminal justice? You have the country really talking past each other, but through it you have, again, the Republican party currently persisting with this clear message and then a lack of, I think, that type of clarity on the side of Democrats, and so we're stuck.

Nancy Solomon: Thanks for your call, Patrick. Now, Caitlin, isn't there a part of what DeSantis and Abbott are doing that actually makes sense even if the way that they've gone about it is seriously messed up? Wouldn't it be better for immigrants coming across the border to be helped with settlement and be spread across the country so that cities and towns all across the country take on new immigrants coming across the border and it isn't as much of a huge impact on the southern states along the border?

Caitlin Dickerson: That actually happens regardless of whether migrants are handed a bus ticket by the government of Florida or the government of Texas. People who've crossed into the United States recently don't tend to stay in the southwest border for a very long time. I think there's a lot of misinformation around this. Have you seen a news story that says the South Texas public school system is buckling under the weight of new migrants or that the hospitals are unable to provide healthcare to South Texas residents? You don't see those headlines because it's actually not as if these communities are crumbling.

People when they come to the United States, as I said, they don't tend to stay in one place for very long. They tend to go and join, whether they have family or whether they have friends or just other people from the community they left behind, and join an immigrant community in the United States where they're going to be surrounded by people that they can communicate with, have some cultural association with, and can work. People are doing that moving around anyway.

I think the only thing that changed here was where they got their bus ticket with the exception of those who were actively misled, those who were sent to Martha's Vineyard, for example, and offered something that was never actually on the table.

Nancy Solomon: Let's talk about the midterm elections. Should Republicans win back control of the house in November? What types of immigration, political asylum or border policies might we see in the near future?

Caitlin Dickerson: Throughout the remainder of the Biden administration, if Republicans take back one or both chambers of Congress I think we're unlikely to see really substantive reform because of the disagreements between both sides. What tends to happen in discussions around changing immigration laws which don't tend to actually change very often but it's this balance between Republicans wanting to push for more enforcement, more border security and then Democrats wanting to push for an opening up of visas and avenues toward legal status.

Whether that's for people like dreamers, whether it's for farm workers people who have temporary protected status but want something more permanent. Even people who've been here with years or decades with that status, but want to just feel a little more secure that they're not going to have deportation hanging over their heads at a sort of random increment of time.

It's that push and pull between the two but what I'm hearing in my reporting and I was surprised to hear it in a way, is that the toxicity and lack of willingness to come together around immigration has never been worse. It's what I hear over and over that even the low-hanging fruit, if you will, something like DACA where you have a vast majority of Americans supporting a pathway to citizenship for dreamers, Republicans are not wanting to get behind something like that just simply because Biden is president and they'll say, we have a Biden border crisis and shut the conversation down there.

At the same time, you have moderate Democrats who are very worried again about those same voters that Ron DeSantis and are trying to appeal to right now. These moderate democrats don't want to alienate voters and so they're really avoiding the conversation as well. I think there's a really difficult path forward, even if Democrats were to maintain control of both chambers of Congress, it's very unlikely to me, sorry, I didn't want to say unlikely but unclear rather that anything would happen and then take away one or both and create even more attention between Democrats and Republicans. I think that the likelihood goes down even more.

Nancy Solomon: Are you seeing any shifts in terms of the narrative and the discussion and the debate going on, given that we're in a really remarkable time period where we're seeing labor shortages and wages are finally starting to climb up, it seems like it's a moment where maybe people's feelings about immigration would change but I don't know. Are you seeing any of that?

Caitlin Dickerson: I think that academics and business owners and journalists are starting to talk about the link between immigration reform and our economy and I think that politicians are behind, but I think it's a logical link. It's a discussion that needs to be had and so I think that they're going to be forced to catch up. I do think it's possible that in the latter half of President Biden's first term here, that you could see a shift toward trying to lead on immigration and that would probably harness some of this discourse and some of this discussion around the economy.

Right now, everything has really gone quiet and I think both sides are pretty scared of bringing up a controversial issue beyond in a substantive way and to talk about legislation.

I've all but been told it's just simply not on the table. Pre midterms in the next two years, it's possible that you could see President Biden try to bring immigration up again, go back to the plan or a version of it that he introduced soon after taking office, and to start bringing the economy into the conversation.

Again, you have Republicans out there who for a very long time have thought about immigration policy from a business perspective. As I mentioned earlier, you don't hear very much from them right now. They're not leading the party, but they could also reemerge depending on what happens economically in the next couple of years.

Nancy Solomon: Let's go back to the phones. We have Lewis in Jamaica on the line. Hi, Lewis.

Lewis: Hi. How you doing, Nancy? You're doing a great job.

Nancy Solomon: Good. Thank you.

Caitlin Dickerson: I just wanted to make the comment that it plays over and over. Republicans always, in election time, bring up immigration. That's their culture to hit Democrats on. Whenever they have elections, they bring up, like in 2018, they brought back the car that there was a whole of people coming and going to come in. Mind you, it was strong in power that he had power on the border and everything and this was happening under his watch.

Every time they have backed up from a compromise. If we remember in the '90s, Clinton signed a immigration bill, it made border stronger. The penalties for felonies made us stronger to try to get to a compromise. They were almost out of compromise. They backed out because they wanted to use it every time on election. It would bush the same thing. They had Immigration Reform Act and who backed out? That right wing of the party of that Republican party.

Every time it's the same thing. They bring it up to distract from abortion issues, from stuff that people don't agree with, from tax call from the rich every time they bring it up to get back to the same thing. I don't agree with your guest, like she's saying, "Oh, no, it's that the Democrats had a way to do immigration reform." The problem is the [unintelligible 00:37:01] you never had that. Every time you got close, there's no way to get there.

If what they offering is let's close the border, which is what they did in the Trump administration because people don't think of what they did. They closed the border so people that had asylum claims couldn't go to the border. What they did? They tried to get into the states and they asked for asylum in the United States because [unintelligible 00:37:37] international right. If you don't allow that, then that's what's going to happen. Then it is like [unintelligible 00:37:46] says, they try to destroy the administrative state. They try to gum up the words that gears to stop immigration completely.

Nancy Solomon: Lewis, let me ask you a question and then I'll let Caitlin address some of what you've said, but are you happy with what the Democratic party has done? I hear your criticism of the Republicans, but I couldn't quite understand where you stand with the Democrats, which, of course, are who represents this area.

Lewis: The problem is that Democrats [unintelligible 00:38:25]. They have Fox News feeding fake news to more than half of the population on everyday basis. How you get consensus when you tell in lies every day? For example, [unintelligible 00:38:48] let's stop the administrative state. The only way that you have to solve immigration is to get more charges, if it's an asylum claim, then you get more charges and get to a conclusion. What they did was stop all that and try to stop all immigration. They made legal immigration, almost half of ours, they stop refugees and by the end, they said they wanted to stop all immigration. Steven Miller said that.

Nancy Solomon: Let's get Caitlin in here and thanks for your call, Lewis, and we're running out of time, so let me get a response for you. Caitlin?

Caitlin Dickerson: Thanks so much for your call, Lewis. I completely agree with you that it's very clear the Republican Party has identified immigration as an effective tool for getting voters enthusiastic and to come out and vote mostly from a place of fear, prior to midterm and general elections, and we've seen a pattern of that for years now. I think that's right.

I think Democrats have not as effectively figured out a way to talk about immigration in a way that's going to that is moving voters, and you see that in polling that shows, it's an issue that Republicans care about more. I also take your point about the negotiations over reform that come up, and they go away, they come up, and they go away, and I think it's right, that you say there's been some negotiating in bad faith there, because of a desire to hold on to this message that has been so effective for Republicans.

I will say in my reporting that I have not found the Democrats in congress clamoring for immigration reform if only the filibuster didn't exist, and I agree, as well, that that is a meaningful hindrance even with Democrats controlling the House and the Senate, but the filibuster aside the enthusiasm for change on the side of Democrats, other than those who tend to focus on immigration, who tend to feel most passionately about it and introduce bills over and over again, it's really not there, moderate Democrats have, in many cases, gone quiet on this issue, and so I think both things are true that you've had some disingenuous negotiation over the years, but also just a lack of commitment to the issue that I think allows it to go away again and again.

Nancy Solomon: Okay, I think that's a good spot to leave it there. Caitlin Dickerson is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Thanks so much for speaking with us, and congratulations on your terrific reporting on the issue.

Caitlin Dickerson: Thank you for having me.

 

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