JD Vance’s faulty comparison of Trump, Harris on child separation at the border

Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, defended former President Donald Trump’s immigration record during an appearance on NBC and pointed instead at the Biden-Harris administration’s record.

NBC’s "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker asked Vance whether families would be separated under a mass deportation program if Trump were reelected. Vance said, "You start with the most violent criminals in our country," and then claimed Harris' policies have led to thousands of migrant children living with sex traffickers and drug cartels instead of their families.

"There was a zero-tolerance policy during the Trump administration, and that led to less family separation than under Kamala Harris' border policies," Vance said Aug. 25. "That's what's so striking about this. Actually enforcing our border is the most humane thing, for children and certainly for American citizens."

"Family separation" and "child separation" are not legal terms. They have generally been used to refer to the Trump administration practice of having immigration officials systematically separate children from their parents at the U.S. border to deter illegal border crossings. 

When contacted for evidence to support Vance’s statement, the Trump campaign pointed us to data and information about children who crossed the border alone during the Biden-Harris administration. 

These examples are not equivalent. The Trump administration zero-tolerance policy meant that U.S. immigration officials separated children and parents who arrived at the border together. The children the Trump campaign is referring to did not come with parents or other relatives. 

Children separated from their parents are "a completely different situation," said Peter Margulies, an immigration law professor at Roger Williams University School of Law. Unaccompanied children have "nothing to do with kids who arrive with their parents. It's like apples and oranges."

Typically, a child and adult who arrive together at the U.S. border can be separated when:

• Border officials cannot establish the custodial relationship.

• Officials believe the custodian may threaten the child.

• The custodian is being detained for prosecution.

Immigration experts told us in 2019 that family separations were rare during the Obama administration and preceding administrations and did not happen at the same scale as under the Trump administration.

The controversial family separations during Trump’s tenure happened because of an April 2018 policy introduced by Trump’s then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions said an "escalated effort" was necessary at the southwest border and directed the application of the "zero-tolerance" policy, to prosecute all adults illegally entering the United States. 

That meant that the Trump administration referred for prosecution all adult immigrants who illegally entered the country, even if they arrived with their children. When border officials referred parents for prosecution, their children were taken from them and placed in U.S. Health and Human Services Department custody. 

Amid growing criticism of family separations in public opinion surveys and by some Republicans, Trump issued a June 2018 executive order to detain families together when they arrived at the border if the parents faced prosecution. The executive order said the administration’s policy would be to "maintain family unity."

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Trump administration over the zero-tolerance policy. In December 2023, as part of a settlement, a federal judge prohibited the separation of families at the border for deterrence. 

Lee Gelernt, lead ACLU counsel, told PolitiFact that more than 5,500 children were separated from their parents at the border during the Trump administration. President Joe Biden rescinded the Trump era policy and issued a February 2021 executive order to establish a task force to reunite separated children and their families. The ACLU told us in August that up to 1,000 children have not yet been reunited with their parents. 

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To support Vance’s claim, the Trump campaign pointed us to monthly data about unaccompanied children border officials encountered during the Biden administration, including more than 6,000 encounters in July. 

The Trump campaign also pointed to an Aug. 19 Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report about unaccompanied minors released from federal government custody. The report led Republican lawmakers and conservative news outlets to say that Immigration and Customs Enforcement "lost" the children or that they are "missing." 

But the report does not mention children "separated" from their families at the border.

The inspector general found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied children to Health and Human Services’ custody from fiscal years 2019 to 2023 (which includes about two years of Trump’s administration). The inspector general report said ICE reported there were more than 32,000 unaccompanied minors who did not appear for their immigration court hearings during this period and that children "who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor."

But immigration experts told us that the Trump-Vance campaign is conflating unaccompanied minors with children separated at the border.

The inspector general’s report "is entirely about unaccompanied children, which by definition means they arrived at the border unaccompanied by a parent or other legal guardian," Theo Liebmann, a Hofstra University law professor who has represented immigrants, said. "So it is not possible for the report to be speaking to any ‘separation’ of children from their parents by border personnel."

Immigration experts said the Trump policy was one of a kind. 

"To our knowledge, zero tolerance is the only policy that affirmatively resulted in the separation of children from their parents," said Michelle Mittelstadt, a spokesperson at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan organization focused on immigration. 

When parents in other countries send their children to cross the U.S. border alone, they are choosing to separate themselves in their home country. That’s different from family separation by U.S. border enforcement.

"The former is a problem of U.S. law generally, while the latter was a problem caused by Trump administration policies, such as prosecuting adult border crossers and placing their children with other adults," Margulies said.

Policymakers from both political parties argue that federal laws that provide legal rights for unaccompanied children encourage parents to permit their children to travel alone to the U.S. 

Poverty, violence and climate change have led some children to leave their home countries in search of jobs in the U.S. 

"But that's family separation ‘at the source,’ not at the border," Margulies said.

Vance said, "There was a zero-tolerance policy during the Trump administration, and that led to less family separation than under Kamala Harris' border policies."

The terms "family separation" or "child separation" have generally described the Trump administration practice of having immigration officials separate children from their parents at the U.S. border to deter illegal crossings.

Immigration experts said Trump’s policy was an outlier in recent decades among Republican and Democratic administrations. The policy caused the separation of 5,500 children from their parents at the U.S. border, according to the ACLU. 

The Trump-Vance campaign did not point to a Biden-Harris policy that lets border officials separate children from their families. The campaign referred us to data about children who arrived in the U.S. alone. 

But these examples are not equivalent. Unaccompanied children arrive at the border without a parent — a choice they or their families make before proceeding to the U.S. alone.

We rate this statement False.

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