I heard an interesting piece on NPR this morning, and followed up on it.
In January 2016, ICE started a program known as the “Family Case Management Program” which was an alternative to detention, dealing with people who are supposed to go to immigration court and lived in a handful of cities that were part of a pilot program. One of the top criteria for entering the program was whether the person had young children, and they were seeking asylum. Basically, the same population that is embroiled in the controversy today.
Now get this, you people who look kindly on locking up children in cages because “we just have to” – the program, before the Trump Administration shut it down, resulted in 99 percent of its enrollees showing up for immigration court, including families who were ultimately deported. This program also cost about nine times less than the daily cost of a detention center bed.
And furthermore, I just learned there was another alternative to detention that according to an IG review appears to have been about 95% successful in keeping asylum seekers from absconding.
So when people like Trump, Sessions, Neilsen, and other depraved individuals claim that they have no choice under the law, they are lying. They STOPPED a legal program that appears to have been extremely successful, in order to abuse children.