Tyler, Texas Correspondent
I write policies for people who would rather not read them, so let me start with the part of this story that nobody in Washington wanted to read either. Zero tolerance was not a new law. It was a decision, announced by the Attorney General in April, to prosecute every adult who crossed the border without authorization instead of exercising the discretion that every prior administration of both parties had exercised. Once you charge the adult with a crime, the adult goes to a federal courthouse and a federal holding facility, and a child cannot go to either of those places. The separation was not a side effect that surprised anyone who had thought it through. It was the mechanism. That is the first thing to be honest about, because a good deal of the defense of the policy in May and June consisted of pretending the mechanism was an accident.
I will also be honest about the other side of it, because I live in a state with twelve hundred miles of that border and I have clients who operate within an hour of it. The people who are angriest about the separations are, in my experience, the least interested in the question of what you do with an adult who crosses illegally with a child when you have decided, as a country, that crossing illegally is actually illegal. Catch and release was the old answer, and it produced exactly the incentive you would expect, which is that showing up with a child became the surest way to stay. The administration was right that the incentive existed. It was wrong that the way to kill the incentive was to run two thousand children through a system that had no capacity to track them. Capacity and growth are not the same word, as I learned on a planning commission, and capacity and resolve are not the same word either.
So what did it do to our politics? It handed the opposition the single most effective image of this presidency to date, and it did so in an election year. The audio recordings from the holding facilities, the chain-link enclosures, the figure of about two thousand three hundred children that the Department of Homeland Security put out in mid-June, all of that moved public opinion in a way that two years of arguing about the wall never had. The polling I saw had something like two-thirds of the country opposed to the separations, and that number held across independents, who are the people who decide Texas House seats in the suburbs north of Dallas and west of Houston. Republican members who had spent a year and a half avoiding any daylight with the White House found daylight fast. Senator Cruz, who is in a closer race than he expected, filed a bill to keep families together. Laura Bush wrote the sharpest op-ed any member of that family has written in a decade. When the former First Lady of your own party calls your policy cruel in the Washington Post, you have lost the room.
The executive order on June 20 was the President recognizing that he had lost the room, and it was written the way those documents get written when the lawyers are told to produce something by afternoon. It directs families to be held together, which runs straight into the Flores settlement that limits how long you can hold a child in detention, and then it asks a federal court to modify Flores, which the court is not obliged to do. Six days later Judge Sabraw in San Diego ordered every separated child under five reunited within fourteen days and the rest within thirty. That order is the actual policy now, and the government has already told the court it is not sure it can comply because the two agencies involved did not keep matching records. I underwrite businesses for a living. A business that could not tell you which inventory belonged to which customer would not get coverage from me, and it should not get the benefit of the doubt from anyone else.
On the international side I am more skeptical of the hand-wringing than my fellow correspondents may be. Yes, the UN human rights commissioner called the separations unconscionable, the Pope objected, Mexico’s foreign ministry protested, and the Canadian prime minister said what Canadian prime ministers say. The same week, the United States withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council, which rather limits the leverage of a UN human rights commissioner. Governments abroad were already recalibrating their view of this administration over tariffs, Paris, and Iran. The separations confirmed a narrative that had already formed. They did not create one. Where it does cost us is in the softer currency of being the country that can lecture others about how they treat the weak, and that currency has been devalued before, and it recovers slowly, and it does recover.
The lasting effect at home is the one that interests me. The administration has now established, in the plainest possible way, that enforcement without infrastructure is not enforcement, it is theater with a body count of paperwork. If Congress wants a border that is actually controlled, somebody has to appropriate the judges, the family detention capacity, and the case management that a prosecute-everyone policy requires, and then somebody has to answer for what it costs. The House voted on two immigration bills in late June and both failed, one badly. Nobody wants to name who pays. Until somebody does, we will be back here, and the next version will have a different image and the same arithmetic.
Long Island, New York Correspondent
I spent ten years in a district attorney’s office, and the first thing I learned there is that a prosecutor’s discretion is not a loophole. It is the job. Every office in this country declines to charge cases it could legally charge, because the alternative is a system that cannot function and a docket that never clears. When Attorney General Sessions stood up in April and announced that the Department of Justice would charge one hundred percent of adults who crossed without authorization, he was not closing a loophole. He was announcing that the government would stop doing the one thing every prosecutor does to keep the machinery running. Anyone who has worked inside that machinery knew what would happen next, and it happened.
I want to be careful here, because the question asks about effects and not about whether the policy was right, and my own views on the border are not what the readers of this forum might assume from my zip code. I think the border should be controlled. I think the asylum system is being used by people who are not refugees in any sense the 1951 Convention intended, and I think the previous administration’s practice of releasing families with a court date years away was a quiet invitation that a great many people accepted. None of that is in tension with saying that what the government did between early May and June 20 was a failure of basic competence, and that the failure, more than the policy, is what has done the damage.
Consider the sequence from a legal standpoint. The adult is charged under 8 U.S.C. 1325, a misdemeanor for a first offense. The adult is transferred to the custody of the U.S. Marshals. The child, now legally unaccompanied, is transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement within Health and Human Services, an agency built to place genuinely unaccompanied teenagers with sponsors, not to track toddlers whose parents are forty miles away in a different federal facility. The two agencies did not share a case number. We know this because the government admitted it in filings before Judge Sabraw, who on June 26 issued a nationwide injunction ordering reunification on a fourteen- and thirty-day clock. I have read a lot of injunctions. That one reads like a judge who was genuinely astonished at what he was being told. He wrote that the practice had no system to track the children and no system to reunite them, which in my old office would have been the kind of sentence that ended careers.
The domestic political effect flows from that. Had the administration built the infrastructure first, with family detention capacity, with a tracking system, with a plan for Flores, it could have defended the policy on the ground that it was simply enforcing the law. Instead it spent six weeks defending the mechanism, then insisting there was no policy, then blaming the Democrats for a law that does not exist, then signing an executive order reversing a decision it claimed it had not made. The President’s own party could not hold that line and did not try. By the third week of June, Republican senators were lining up to say they would not support separations, the House leadership was rushing a compromise bill that failed on June 27 by a margin that embarrassed everyone, and the First Lady was in Texas visiting a shelter. The administration took an issue on which it had the stronger structural argument, that the asylum system is broken, and converted it into an issue on which it had the weaker one, that it could not find the children.
On international standing I will defer somewhat to the correspondents who follow it more closely than I do, but I will note one thing that comes from my own work. In zoning and assessment practice you learn that reputation is a form of standing. A property owner who has repeatedly been found out of compliance does not get the benefit of the doubt on the next application, even when the next application is sound. The United States has spent seventy years telling other countries how to treat the vulnerable, and that record is an asset the way a clean compliance history is an asset. It can absorb a bad month. It cannot absorb a bad month in which the government’s own filings describe losing track of children, because that is the kind of admission that other governments file away and quote back to us the next time we object to something they have done. The protests from Mexico, Canada, the Vatican, and the UN commissioner are not in themselves consequential. The quotation that will matter is the one from the Justice Department’s own lawyers.
What lasts? Three things, I think. First, the Flores settlement is now at the center of immigration policy in a way it has not been since 1997, and the next fight will be over whether Congress amends it to permit long-term family detention, which is the only way zero tolerance can be made to work legally. Second, there is now a federal court supervising the reunification of several thousand children, and that supervision will produce a public record, week by week, of exactly how many were not found. Third, and this is the one I would put money on, the next administration of either party will remember that the phrase enforcement of the law is not self-executing. The law was always there. What was missing was the capacity to enforce it without doing something that two-thirds of the country refused to accept, and that is a cost somebody will have to appropriate before the next Attorney General announces anything.
Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent
From where I sit, the question of America’s international standing is not an abstraction. The United States is the hemisphere’s reference point. When it changes course, the small states around it do not debate the change; they absorb it, and they adjust. So I will leave most of the domestic politics to my American colleagues, who are closer to it, and spend my time on what this episode looks like from the outside, and why I think the damage is both smaller and more specific than the headlines suggest.
Let me begin with what did not happen. No government in the hemisphere recalled an ambassador. No trading partner altered a tariff schedule in response. The condemnations from the United Nations human rights commissioner, from the Vatican, from Ottawa, and from Mexico’s foreign ministry were sincere, but they were also costless to deliver and they were delivered to an administration that had, in the same week, withdrawn from the Human Rights Council and made plain that it did not regard that body’s opinion as a constraint. I have spent enough years in regional development work to know the difference between a statement and a lever. These were statements. The leverage, such as it is, lies elsewhere.
It lies, first, in the Northern Triangle. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador supply the overwhelming majority of the families who presented at the border this spring, and the governments of those countries are in an awkward position. They depend on remittances from their nationals in the United States, which in Honduras and El Salvador amount to roughly a fifth of national income. They depend on American security cooperation and on the aid programs that Washington has already threatened to cut. They cannot defend the separations to their own publics, and they cannot afford to antagonize the administration that ordered them. What they will do, and what their foreign ministers were already signalling in June, is accept whatever the United States proposes next, whether that is accelerated deportation, expanded processing in their own territory, or pressure to stop the flows at their own borders. The separation crisis did not weaken American leverage over those governments. It demonstrated the lengths to which Washington was prepared to go, and small states read that kind of demonstration very carefully.
It lies, second, with Mexico, and here the timing matters. Mexico votes on July 1, and the candidate who will almost certainly win, López Obrador, has built his campaign in part on the promise that Mexico will no longer be subordinate to Washington on migration. The separations gave him a gift. His opponents could not defend cooperation with an administration that was, in the Mexican press, caging children. Whatever government takes office in December will have a mandate to be less accommodating, and that affects everything from the NAFTA renegotiation, which is already stalled, to the question of whether Mexico will agree to serve as a safe third country for Central American asylum seekers, which is the arrangement Washington most wants. I would say the separations cost the United States that arrangement for at least a year, and possibly longer.
It lies, third, in the broader loss of a certain kind of argument. For as long as I have followed hemispheric affairs, the United States has been able to criticize the treatment of detainees in Venezuela, of journalists in Cuba, of migrants in the Dominican Republic, with the understanding that its own house was in reasonable order. That understanding was always somewhat generous, but it was functional. The images from Texas this month, and more than the images, the government’s own admission in court that it could not match parents to children, will be quoted back at American diplomats in every forum where the United States raises a human rights concern for the next several years. That is not a dramatic consequence. It is a slow one, and it compounds.
Now, in fairness, I should say what the view from outside often misses. The United States is not the only country that detains families, and it is far from the harshest. Australia’s offshore processing regime is more severe and has been in place for years. The European Union pays Turkey and Libya to keep migrants from reaching its shores under conditions that no European government would tolerate at home. The international reaction to the American separations was so loud partly because the United States is held to a standard that nobody else is held to, and partly because this administration has spent eighteen months giving its critics reasons to be loud. A Jamaican is well placed to notice that the moral vocabulary of the international community is applied selectively, and that the selection often has more to do with who is being criticized than with what was done.
So my assessment is this. The separations did real but bounded damage to American standing: a lost year with Mexico, a stronger hand for every government that wishes to deflect American criticism, and a durable image that will outlive the policy. They did not weaken American leverage over the small states that actually generate the migration, and in some ways strengthened it, because those states now understand there is very little the administration will not do. For the small states of the hemisphere, the lesson is an old one. When the reference point moves, the question is never whether to adjust. It is only how quickly, and at what cost to oneself.
Prescott Valley, Arizona Correspondent
I taught special education for the better part of two decades, and the question I kept returning to this month was not a political one. It was a professional one. What happens to a four-year-old who is taken from a parent by strangers in uniform, held in a facility with children she does not know, and given no information she can understand about when or whether she will see that parent again? I know the answer, because I have worked with children who went through versions of that experience in the foster system, and the answer is that some of them recover and some of them never quite do. The American Academy of Pediatrics said the same thing in plainer language, and so did the American Psychological Association. I bring this up first because I think the policy conversation has been conducted almost entirely in the vocabulary of law and politics, and the children in question were not experiencing law or politics. They were experiencing abandonment.
That said, this is a forum about consequences, and I will try to be disciplined about them. I live in a state that has lived with this issue longer than most. Arizona’s border with Mexico runs about three hundred and seventy miles, and the Tucson and Yuma sectors have for years been among the busiest in the country. People here are not naive about illegal crossing, about the cartels that control the routes, or about the asylum claims that are coached rather than genuine. I have had students whose parents came here without papers and students whose parents were Border Patrol agents, sometimes in the same classroom, and I can tell you that the conversation in a Yavapai County school is far more complicated than the one on cable television. Most Arizonans want the border controlled. Most Arizonans also recoiled from what they saw in June, and those two facts coexist without any difficulty for the people who hold them both.
The domestic political effect, as I read it, was to make that coexistence visible to the national parties for the first time. For two years the immigration debate had been framed as a binary: you either wanted the wall or you wanted open borders. The separations broke the binary. You had Republican governors, including ours, pulling National Guard troops back from the border in protest. You had evangelical leaders who had been among the President’s most loyal constituencies, Franklin Graham among them, calling the policy disgraceful. You had a former First Lady of the President’s own party writing an op-ed. None of those people became open-borders advocates. They simply refused to accept that enforcement required this, and their refusal was loud enough that the President signed an executive order on June 20 reversing a policy his administration had defended for six weeks. I have watched a lot of political reversals. I have not seen one that fast on an issue the President cared about that much.
Whether the reversal lasts is a different question. The executive order directs families to be detained together, which collides with the Flores settlement’s limit on child detention, and the government is now asking a federal court to let it hold children indefinitely. Judge Sabraw’s reunification order of June 26 gives the government fourteen days for children under five and thirty days for the rest, and the Department of Health and Human Services has already told reporters it is not certain it can locate every parent, some of whom have been deported without their children. As a former teacher I will say this plainly: a system that cannot tell you where a child’s parent is has failed at the only thing a system that holds children is required to do. Everything else is secondary.
On America’s standing abroad I am less confident than some of my colleagues that the damage is small. I think of it the way I think about a school’s reputation in a community. A school earns trust over years and loses it over an incident, and the incident that costs the most is the one where the adults could not account for the children. The international reaction, from the United Nations to the Vatican to our closest allies, was not primarily about immigration policy. Other countries detain migrants and some do it worse. It was about the specific image of a government that separated small children from parents as a deterrent and then could not reunite them. That image will be in textbooks, in the way the photographs from Little Rock or Abu Ghraib are in textbooks, and the country will spend some time explaining it.
What I hope lasts, and what I am not confident will, is a recognition that policy is experienced by people who did not design it and often cannot understand it. I spent my career translating institutional decisions into terms a child or a struggling family could act on. The administration made a decision that no one translated for the people on the receiving end, including the agencies charged with carrying it out, and the result was a month in which the United States looked both cruel and incompetent, which is the worst possible combination. The cruelty was a choice. The incompetence was a failure of preparation. Either one alone might have been survivable. Together they produced a reversal, a court order, a sustained collapse in the administration’s standing on the one issue it considered its strongest, and a set of children whose futures were altered by people who will never know their names.
Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent
I am going to say something that will not be popular with half the people reading this, and then something that will not be popular with the other half, and I will not apologize for either. The first thing is that the administration was right about the problem. The second is that it was wrong about the solution in a way that anyone who has ever run a compliance program could have predicted, and the gap between those two statements is where the political damage lives.
Start with the problem. For years the practice at the southern border was that a single adult caught crossing illegally was detained and removed, while an adult with a child was processed and released with a notice to appear in court, often years out, because the Flores settlement limits how long a child can be held and the government had nowhere to hold families together. Everyone involved understood what that did. It created a reason to bring a child. The number of family units apprehended at the border went from a small fraction of crossings to a large one, and the smugglers who run the routes through Mexico, who are not charities, built a business around it. Anyone who tells you the system before April was humane has not thought about what it meant for the children being carried north by people who were not always their parents. The administration looked at that and decided to end it. On that narrow point I will not join the chorus.
Now the solution. I work in energy compliance, which means I spend my days making sure that what a company says it will do matches what it is actually equipped to do, because the regulator does not care about intentions. When the Attorney General announced in April that every adult crossing illegally would be prosecuted, the equipment question was obvious. Where do the children go while the parent is in federal criminal custody? Who tracks them? What is the system for putting them back together? The answers turned out to be: to a different agency, nobody in particular, and there was not one. The government has now admitted as much in federal court, and Judge Sabraw has ordered reunification on a thirty-day clock that the Department of Health and Human Services has already signaled it may not meet. In my world, announcing a program without the capacity to run it is not a policy failure. It is a finding, and it goes in the file.
That gap is what moved the politics, and I watched it move here in a state that voted for this President by thirty-six points. North Dakotans are not sentimental about illegal immigration. We are a long way from the border and we have our own labor shortages that make the whole debate feel somewhat theoretical. But we are also a state of ranch families and church congregations and Guard units, and the thing that landed here was not the policy argument. It was the audio of children crying for their parents and the fact that the government could not say where the parents were. Senator Hoeven, who is not a man given to breaking with the White House, said the separations needed to stop. Our Lutheran and Catholic bishops said the same. When the executive order came on June 20, the relief in this state was not that the President had changed his mind on enforcement. It was that he had stopped doing the one thing nobody could defend.
The lasting domestic effect, I think, is that the administration spent political capital it needed for the harder fights. There is a real argument to be had about amending Flores, funding family detention, hiring immigration judges, and tightening the asylum standard so that economic migrants cannot claim credible fear and disappear into the interior. All of those are legitimate, and all of them require votes from Republicans in suburban districts who are now terrified of being associated with the word separation. The House leadership’s compromise bill failed on June 27, and it failed in part because the moderates had stopped trusting that the White House would not do something indefensible in the name of whatever they voted for. That trust will be slow to come back.
On international standing I will be brief, because I think the people who follow that closely overrate it and the people who ignore it underrate it. Foreign governments condemned the separations, the United Nations condemned them, and in the same week we left the Human Rights Council, which tells you how much the administration cares about that particular audience. The real cost is quieter. We lecture other countries about how they treat people in their custody. That was a useful thing to be able to do, and it will be less useful for a while. I do not think it changes any alliance or any trade negotiation. I do think it means that the next time an American ambassador raises a human rights concern in a foreign capital, somebody across the table will have a photograph ready, and the ambassador will have to sit through it.
Here is where I come out. The problem was real. The deterrent logic was not crazy. The execution was a textbook case of a program launched without the capacity to run it, and the people who paid for the gap were children, which is the one outcome that no amount of policy argument will ever make acceptable to the people I live among. The administration has now reversed course by executive order, is asking a court for permission to detain families together indefinitely, and is under a reunification deadline it may miss. If it wanted to prove that the system was broken, it has succeeded. It has also proved that it was not ready to fix it, and in my line of work those two findings go on the same page.
Gastonia, North Carolina Correspondent
I edit copy for a living, which means I spend my nights reading wire stories before anyone else in the building does, and I can tell you the exact moment this story turned. It was not the Sessions announcement in April. It was not the first reports of separations in May. It was the ProPublica audio on June 18, the recording from inside a Border Patrol facility of children crying for their parents and a consular official reading them a list of countries. I heard it on a Monday night with a stack of other stories in front of me, and I sat there for a minute, and then I went back to work. By Wednesday the President had signed an executive order reversing a policy his administration had spent six weeks insisting was both necessary and not a policy. I have been in newsrooms for a long time and I have never seen anything move that fast.
So my answer to the first half of the question is that the separations changed the politics not because of what they were but because of what they sounded like. That is not a cynical observation, or not entirely. Politics has always run on what people can picture. For two years the immigration debate was abstract, a wall that did not exist and a caravan that had not yet arrived, and the public sorted itself along the usual lines. The separations gave the debate a face and a voice, and the face was about four years old. The polls that came out the following week had roughly two out of three Americans opposed, and the number that mattered was not the Democrats, who were always going to oppose it, but the fifty-something percent of Republicans who either opposed it or would not say. A policy that loses that many of your own people is not a policy you can keep, and the White House figured that out about forty-eight hours after the rest of us did.
I will say, because I have been a lot of things in my life and most of them involved working next to people who came here without papers, that I do not think the people who supported the policy are monsters, and I do not think the people who opposed it are naive. I worked on a farm in this county where the crew was from Oaxaca and the foreman was from Gaston County and they got along better than most of the city council. The honest version of the argument is that the previous system rewarded bringing a child, that the asylum process is being used in ways it was not designed for, and that something had to change. The equally honest version is that whatever had to change, it could not be this, and the administration found that out in public. Both things are true, and the fact that most of the coverage could only hold one of them at a time is a problem with the coverage, not with the public, which seems to have managed both just fine.
The lasting domestic effect is that the administration has given the opposition its best midterm issue and given its own party a reason to keep its distance on the one subject that was supposed to unite them. The House leadership put two immigration bills on the floor in June and both failed, the second one on June 27 by a wide margin, because the moderates wanted a fix for the separations and the hardliners wanted the wall and nobody wanted to vote for the other side’s priority. Here in North Carolina we have a couple of congressional districts that are closer than they were two years ago, and I would bet that every Democratic challenger in those districts has already cut an ad with that audio in it. Whether it works in November I do not know. I do know the Republicans are not going to run on it.
On international standing I will keep it short, because I read a lot of foreign coverage in the course of a night and I think my colleagues overestimate how much of the world was surprised. The European press, the Latin American press, the British press all ran the story at the top, and the tone was less shock than confirmation. They had already decided what this administration was. The separations fit the story they were telling. The condemnations from the United Nations and the Vatican and the Canadian prime minister were real but they were also the kind of thing that gets condemned and then everyone goes to lunch. The thing that will actually stick abroad is the same thing that stuck here: the government’s own admission that it could not match the parents to the children. That is not an opinion a foreign editor can argue with. It is a fact from a court filing, and facts from court filings have a long shelf life.
Last thing. I have two boys in school, and the younger one asked me in the car why the government was taking kids away from their parents, and I did not have an answer that a ten-year-old would accept. That is not a policy argument and I will not pretend it is. But it is the reason the policy lasted six weeks instead of six months, and anyone trying to understand what happened in June should start there and work backward, because the public did.
Orange County, California Correspondent
I analyze commercial real estate, which is a polite way of saying I spend my days figuring out what things actually cost as opposed to what the brochure says they cost. So I want to approach this question the way I would approach an offering memorandum, by setting aside the narrative and looking at the numbers and the structure underneath it, because I think both the administration’s defenders and its critics have been arguing about the brochure.
The structure first. Zero tolerance was a prosecution policy, not a detention policy. The Justice Department decided in April to charge every adult who crossed without authorization under the misdemeanor illegal entry statute. The detention consequence followed from a 1997 consent decree, the Flores settlement, which limits how long the government can hold a minor and which a 2015 ruling extended to minors who arrive with parents. Put those two facts together and the choice was binary: release the family together, which was the old practice and the incentive the administration wanted to end, or hold the parent and send the child elsewhere. The administration chose the second option and then spent six weeks insisting it had not chosen anything. That is the equivalent of a developer telling the planning commission that the traffic is not his fault because the road was already there. The road was there. He built the project.
Now the numbers. The Department of Homeland Security put the count at roughly two thousand three hundred children separated between early May and June 9, and the figure is almost certainly higher now. The government has told Judge Sabraw’s court that it cannot confirm it has records linking every child to a parent. The cost of the policy, in the narrow fiscal sense, is actually substantial: holding a child in an Office of Refugee Resettlement shelter runs several hundred dollars a day according to HHS’s own figures, far more than family detention or supervised release, and the tent facility outside El Paso was reportedly costing on the order of seven hundred dollars per child per night. A policy that was sold as deterrence turned out to be the most expensive option on the menu. I mention this because the administration’s strongest argument on immigration has always been that the old system was fiscally irresponsible, and it has just spent two months demonstrating that its replacement was more so.
The domestic political effect flows from the collision of that structure with that cost. In California we are watching it play out in real time, because we have something like seven Republican-held House seats that Hillary Clinton carried, and four of them are in or near Orange County. Those districts are full of voters who want the border controlled, who are tired of Sacramento’s sanctuary posture, and who nonetheless could not stomach what they saw in June. Every one of those incumbents put out a statement distancing themselves from the separations within days, and every one of them voted for the leadership’s compromise bill on June 27 knowing it would fail. The executive order of June 20 gave them cover, but cover is not the same as a fixed position, and the court-ordered reunification that is now under way will produce a steady drip of stories through the summer about children who were not reunited on time. For a Republican in a swing district, that is the worst possible issue environment, because it keeps the subject alive without giving them anything to vote for.
The lasting consequence, in my view, is that the administration has forfeited the chance to make its strongest case. There was a legitimate argument that the asylum system had become a de facto admissions program, that the Flores settlement needed to be revisited by Congress, and that family detention capacity needed to be funded if the law was going to be enforced. All of that is now politically radioactive, because the phrase family detention cannot be separated from the phrase family separation in the public mind for at least this election cycle. The administration tried to solve a capacity problem with a prosecution policy, and in the process it made the capacity problem unsolvable for the foreseeable future.
On international standing I will be more measured than some. I follow technology companies and their investors, and the thing I noticed was not the diplomatic condemnations, which were predictable, but the reaction of capital. Microsoft employees demanded the company drop its contract with ICE. Airlines asked the government not to use their planes to transport separated children. The chief executives of several large companies issued statements, which they do not do lightly because it costs them customers. That is not foreign governments; that is the domestic private sector concluding that association with the policy was a reputational liability. When American companies start treating a federal policy as a brand risk, foreign observers notice, because it tells them the policy does not have the country behind it. The United Nations commissioner can be dismissed. Microsoft is harder to dismiss.
My bottom line is that the separations were a costly, poorly structured, and ultimately self-defeating instrument in service of a goal that had real support. The administration had the public with it on the premise and lost the public on the execution, and in politics as in real estate, execution is where the money is. The order from Judge Sabraw will govern the next thirty days. The midterms will govern the next two years. Neither will restore the administration’s credibility on this subject, and the people who paid the price for that lost credibility are not in Washington.
Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent
I move containers for a living, and the thing you learn moving containers is that a box without a tracking number is not a box, it is a problem, and it stays a problem until somebody finds it. So when the government told a federal judge this month that it could not reliably match several thousand children to the parents they were taken from, I did not hear a political scandal. I heard an operational failure of a kind I would fire a dispatcher for, and I have fired dispatchers for less.
I want to start there because I think it is the part of this story that will outlast everything else, and because I am not inclined to get drawn into the moral argument, which has been conducted in this country at a volume that does not help anyone. I will give my view and then I will leave it. I think the border should be enforced. I think the old practice of releasing families with a court date three years out was an open invitation, and I think the people who pretended otherwise were not being honest. I also think that if you are going to prosecute every adult who crosses, which is a defensible choice, you have an absolute obligation to know where their children are at every minute, and the administration did not, and that is not a matter of opinion. It is in the government’s own court filings.
On the domestic politics, I will tell you what I saw in Duval County, which went for the President by a point and a half and is not a place that gets emotional about immigration. The port here employs a lot of people who did not grow up in this country and a lot of people who think the country has too many of them, and they work the same shifts and they mostly get along. In the second week of June the conversation on the docks was about the audio of the children. Not about the policy, not about the asylum rules, about the audio. My son is nine and he heard it on the car radio and asked me why, and I have spent a fair amount of time in a state office that measured success in press releases, so I know what it sounds like when an explanation is not going to work. There was no explanation that was going to work. The President signed the executive order on June 20 because his own people, including his wife and his daughter by most accounts, told him the same thing.
The lasting political effect is, I think, two things. The first is that the Republican Party in Congress has now shown it will break with the White House on immigration when the pictures get bad enough, which the White House did not know before and now does. The leadership’s compromise bill went down on June 27 with more than a hundred Republicans against it, and it went down because the moderates had no faith that the administration would administer whatever they passed with any competence. The second is that the Democrats have an issue they can run on in places they could not previously compete, including some of the suburban districts in this state. Whether they are smart enough to run on the competence failure rather than the open-borders position is an open question, and if they are not, the issue will not help them as much as they think.
On international standing, I will say something that may run against the grain here. I deal with foreign carriers and foreign terminal operators every week, and not one of them has raised this with me, and not one of them is going to change how they do business with American ports because of it. The trade does not care. The alliances do not care in any way that shows up in a budget line. What does care is the thing I would call the lecture account, the standing the United States has to tell other countries that they are treating people badly. We draw on that account every time we criticize a government for its prisons or its refugee camps, and for the next several years every withdrawal from it will be met with a photograph from a Border Patrol facility in Texas. That is a real cost. It is just not the kind of cost that shows up fast, and the people who say America’s reputation has been destroyed are overdoing it the same way the people who say nobody abroad cares are underdoing it.
The practical question now is whether the reunification order from Judge Sabraw gets met, and I will tell you from experience that a thirty-day deadline on an inventory you did not track at intake is not going to be met in full. Some of those parents have already been deported. Some of the children were too young to give a name. Some of the records were kept on paper by agencies that did not share a database. I have watched a container yard try to reconcile a season’s worth of bad entries, and it takes months, and that is with barcodes. The administration is going to spend the summer explaining, week by week, why a given number of children have not been returned, and that drip is going to do more damage than the original policy did, because it will keep the story alive long after the executive order was supposed to end it.
Here is where I land. The problem the administration identified was real. The solution it chose was one that any operations manager would have rejected on the first page, because it created an inventory it could not track and then stood on the dock insisting the boxes were fine. They were not fine. The country noticed. The question now is whether anyone in Washington learns the right lesson, which is not that enforcement is wrong but that enforcement without a system is just a press release with consequences, and I have seen enough of both to know the difference.
