This archive report was first published on 18 July 2019.
On December 6, 2017, Kirstjen Nielsen was sworn in as the homeland security secretary, marking a significant shift in the department's leadership. Unlike her predecessors, Nielsen had a relatively thin résumé, having worked as a staffer in Washington. Her appointment raised eyebrows, as staff members rarely ascend to cabinet positions, especially at such a young age.
Not long after Nielsen's inauguration, Kevin McAleenan, the then-acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), alerted her to a surge in illegal border crossings. If the trend continued, he warned, the immigration system would be overwhelmed by the spring, rendering it unable to process new arrivals. McAleenan, along with Thomas Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and L. Francis Cissna, the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, urged Nielsen to take drastic action.
One option presented to Nielsen was instituting a policy of separating migrant children from their families. Due to the Flores settlement, CBP is prohibited from holding immigrant children with their guardians for more than 20 days. This meant that adult immigrants, if they crossed the border with their children, would be released when their children were required to be released. Separating the children from their parents would allow CBP to detain the adults longer.
According to former senior administration officials, John Kelly, the former homeland security secretary, had been urged to institute a family-separation policy. Publicly, Kelly stated that he was considering such a move, citing the need to deter Central American migrants from crossing the border. However, he privately rejected the idea, and it was tabled.
Now, Nielsen rejected the policy as well. But as the border numbers kept rising, the pressure on Nielsen to act grew, and it was no longer coming from just her deputies. Gene Hamilton, Miller's ally at D.H.S., moved to the Department of Justice, where he was reunited with Sessions, his old Senate boss. Sessions began to assert himself more aggressively on immigration matters, announcing a 'zero-tolerance' policy in early April 2018. Under this policy, all undocumented immigrants would be prosecuted, and parents would be separated from their children while awaiting prosecution.
Later that April, McAleenan, Homan, and Cissna wrote Nielsen a memo recommending that D.H.S. start separating parents from their children while the parents awaited prosecution. According to The Washington Post, they noted that a previous pilot program had shown a 64% decrease in families trying to cross illegally, only to rise again when the program was paused. After receiving the memo, Nielsen met with McAleenan, Homan, and Cissna and agreed to their recommendation.
