A new government report has found that the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy overwhelmed the country's unprepared immigration infrastructure. Among other failures, the report found that under-resourced border authorities broke the law and detained children for illegal amounts of time at facilities meant for short-term holding.
The newly released internal report from the Department of Homeland Security begins its timeline with Attorney General Jeff Sessions' announcement of the zero-tolerance policy in April. In a speech that day, Sessions announced that the United States would prosecute all adults traveling with children as criminals. Because federal guidelines limit how long children can be held in criminal detention, the prosecute-all policy forced border officials to separate children from their parents as the parents were detained in anticipation of criminal proceedings. Before the policy imploded in June, thousands of children were separated from their parents at the border.
In the new report, the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security wrote that the DHS "was not fully prepared to implement the Administration's Zero Tolerance Policy or to deal with some of its after-effects."
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