Much of this time line comes from here.

2017: In El Paso, adults who crossed the border without permission – a misdemeanor for a first-time offender – are detained and criminally charged. No exceptions are made for parents arriving with young children. The children were taken from them, and parents were unable to track or reunite with their children because the government failed to create a system to facilitate reunification. By late 2017, the government was separating families along the length of the U.S.-Mexico border, including families arriving through official ports of entry.

May 7, 2018: the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announces it had implemented a “zero tolerance” policy, dictating that all migrants who cross the border without permission, including those seeking asylum, be referred to the DOJ for prosecution. Undocumented asylum seekers were imprisoned, and any accompanying children under the age of 18 were handed over to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which scattered them among 100 Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters and other care arrangements across the country.

June 15, 2018: For the first time, DHS publicly acknowledges that it separated nearly 2,000 children from their parents or legal guardians between April 19 and May 31. The government’s protocol for reunifying families has yet to be made clear.

June 17, 2018: Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tweets, falsely: “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”

June 18 2018: Tweet by Stephen Miller: “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry.” 

June 20, 2018: Reacting to mounting public pressure, President Trump signs an executive order directing DHS to stop separating families except in cases where there is concern that the parent represents a risk to the child. Trump falsely blames Congress, the courts and previous administrations for his family separation policy.

June 26, 2018: U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw issues a preliminary injunction requiring U.S. immigration authorities to reunite most separated families within 30 days and to reunite children younger than 5 within two weeks.

Oct. 15, 2018: The government reports to a court that a total of 2,654 children have been separated from their parents, and of that number, 2,363 have been discharged from custody. 125 children made the decision to pursue asylum in the U.S. without their parent.

Jan. 17, 2019: The list of families to be reunified is “still being revised” nearly six months after reunification is ordered by a federal court,

April 6, 2019: The government says in court documents that it may take two years to identify potentially thousands of children who’ve been separated from their families at the southern border.

Aug. 21, 2019: DHS and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announce a new rule that would end the Flores settlement, a consent decree in place for more than two decades that limits the length of time migrant children can be detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to 20 days, requires the government to comply with certain standards of care, and states that children must be placed in the “least restrictive” setting appropriate for their age and needs. The Trump administration’s rule would allow it to indefinitely detain migrant families who crossed the border without authorization.

Sept. 27, 2019: U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee of the Central District of California rejects the administration’s plan to end the Flores settlement.

October 3, 2019: The American Civil Liberties Union and partners file a federal lawsuit (A.I.I.L. v. Sessions) seeking damages on behalf of thousands of traumatized children and parents who were forcibly torn from each other under the Trump administration’s practice of separating families at the border.

February 2, 2021: President Biden signs executive order 14011 to establish the interagency task force on the reunification of families.

June 8, 2021: The task forces counts 3,913 children of having been separated. Of the 3,913 children, 1,786 have been reunified with a parent, mostly during Trump’s tenure, parents of another 1,965 have been contacted and the whereabouts of 391 have not been established. Many who have been contacted were released to other family members.

Sept 30, 2021: The task force issues an interim report: As of September 23, the task force has identified 3948 children who were separated from their parents by the department of Homeland Security at the United States Mexican border between July 1, 2017 and January 20, 2021. The task force is aware of 410 children who were returned to the home country, some with in some without their parents, and 1,707 parents who were returned to their home country, some with and some without their children. The task force confirm that 2171 children have been reunified with the parents in the United States; in addition, the task force has reunified 50 children. There are 1,727 children who have not been reunified to the task force’s knowledge and 50 children who are in the process of being unified by the task force.

December 16, 2021: The Biden administration abandons negotiations over compensation for plaintiffs in ACLU class action suit filed October 3, 2019.

Naturalizations of eligible persons rose upwards towards one million a year during the Trump administration, out of fear that he would block naturalization. The Pandemic drove the numbers down to under 700,000. (Go here and here).

Consistent with his anti-immigration policy, President Trump even made it more difficult for Green Card holders to become citizens, by doubling fees, eliminating most fee waivers for low-income applicants, and impose a more difficult and time-consuming civics test. The fee proposal was blocked by a U.S. district court judge, and the Biden administration reinstated the earlier civics test shortly after taking office in early 2021.

There were 23.2 million naturalized U.S. citizens in the United States in 2019, the most recent reporting available, making up 52 percent of the overall immigrant population, which stood at 44.9 million. 

Many immigrants who are here on permanent visas (green cards) don’t take out citizenship, but most do, and the rate has gone up. According to Pew Research, naturalization rates rose from 62% in 2005 to 67% in 2015. An estimated 9 million are eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship. The 11 million illegal immigrants are of course not eligible.

Eligible immigrants from Vietnam, 86%, and Iran, 85%, had the highest naturalization rates of any group in 2015. Above 80% rates are seen for India, South Korea and a few other countries. The rate among Chinese is 76%. Mexican immigrants have long had among the lowest U.S. naturalization rates (42%) of any origin group.

To be eligible for U.S. citizenship, immigrants must be age 18 or older, have resided in the U.S. for at least five years as lawful permanent residents (or three years for those married to a U.S. citizen), and be in good standing with the law, among other requirements. The multi-step process to obtain U.S. citizenship begins with submitting an application and paying a $725 fee.

The U.S. government denied naturalization applications from 2005 to 2015 to 11% of the 8.5 million applications filed during this time. The standards are here. Ability to speak English is one of them but there are exemptions.

The East Bay Jewish Family and Community Service organization is up in arms about the way that the administration is effectively abandoning many Afghans who deserve to get out of that country, It issued a press release on December 7, containing these excerpts:

This week, the U.S. government began denying humanitarian parole applications and dashing the hopes of thousands of Afghans awaiting rescue. After months of inaction on these urgent petitions, this week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began denying them and extinguishing any chance of rescue.

In just four months, JFCS East Bay has resettled almost 300 Afghan evacuees and anticipates welcoming many more. Our Immigration Legal Services team has assisted in the filing of nearly 100 humanitarian parole applications and covered thousands of dollars in USCIS filing fees since August.

The wave of denial letters received by immigration advocates across the U.S. this week articulate—for the first time—a set of stringent new criteria that will exclude the vast majority of Afghan humanitarian parole applicants from eligibility. (For definition of “parole,” go here.)

Among other things, USCIS rejection letters are asking applicants to provide “documentation from a credible third-party source specifically naming the beneficiary and outlining the serious harm they face and the imminence of the harm in the location where the beneficiary is located.”

USCIS reports that it has received more than 30,000 such applications. At $575 per person, USCIS has likely taken in about $17,250,000 in application fees from these filings, making this process look like a classic “bait and switch” scam.

“Not only has USCIS created a very high evidentiary standard, it’s announcing these new stringent criteria after the fact, and applying them retroactively to pending applications,” says JFCS East Bay Director of Immigration Legal Services, Kyra S. Lilien. “We have clients who have been waiting for an answer for months. While they wait, their family members have been kidnapped by the Taliban. Afghans are in hiding, freezing, without enough food, while being hunted by the Taliban. Turning the tables on them now is fundamentally unfair.”

Yahoo estimates the current volumes of cases. The problem above deals with Afghans still in Afghanistan: Those already been from Afghanistan and brought to the U.S.: nearly 5,000  American citizens. More than 3,000 are green card holders. 75,000 Afghans of which more than 2-in-5 are eligible for SIVs due to their or their family member’s aid to the U.S. government in Afghanistan. Others are family members of U.S. citizens and green card holders, journalists, human rights activists or other at-risk humanitarian workers. Roughly 35,000 evacuees are waiting at military bases in the U.S., while another 36,000 are home in the states or resettling into new U.S. communities.

Continued disgraceful response by the United States to Afghan refugees, including those to whom we have a special obligation due to their affiliation with the U.S.

Great reporting by the Washington Post: Many Afghans rushed out of the country and largely now in military bases in the U.S. (such as Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico) came as “paroles,” with two year status and no assurance of a green card, little practical access to applying for asylum given as Homeland Security’ asylum processing is tied up on the Mexican border.

They have a legal right of limited assistance for up to 90 days, including a one-time $1,250 stipend. They do not have the full range of medical, counseling and resettlement services available to immigrants who arrive through the U.S. refugee program.

Many of those who arrived are separated from nuclear family members still in Afghanistan or other countries such as Turkey, thanks to the chaotic departure of Americans.

A resettlement expert says that “The refugee resettlement system has been decimated [by the Trump administration], so our local offices are unable to accept parolees right now without an assurance of our ability to cover costs like medical expenses immediately.”

Biden administration drafted the Afghan Adjustment Act, to allow those paroled into the country to apply for green cards after a year, making it easier for them to become permanent residents and bring relatives left behind.

43,000 Afghan evacuees are waiting at transit sites in Europe and the Middle East.

Special Immigration Visa holders and applicants: it’s not clear how many of the roughly 80,000 Afghans admitted since the Summer either hold this visa are eligible for it. The U.S. military advertised this visas as a means to attract translators and other assistance. The screwed up nature of the SIV program was reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Here are maps of where Afghan immigrants concentrate in the U.S.

Washington Post articles here and here.

The pending immigration court case inventory on the Mexican border rose massively during the Trump Administration, and continues to rise.

From The Economist:

The new president’s apparently softer stance on immigration, as well as the pressures of the pandemic, have encouraged ever more people to try to cross the border illegally. Their number is now the highest in 21 years. In the past seven weeks alone, border agents have sent nearly 50,000 cases to the courts. That is increasing pressure on the country’s already overstretched courts. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research centre founded at Syracuse University, immigration courts have nearly 1.5m pending cases in their dockets—the most on record and nearly triple the number in 2016.

The job of deciding whether or not a migrant can stay in America, either as an asylum seeker or on other grounds, falls to 535 judges across 68 immigration courts—on average almost 2,800 cases per judge. Were the judges to rule on three to four cases every business day, it would take at least two-and-a-half years to clear the docket. Scheduling interruptions caused by the pandemic, and the multiple hearings and appeals for each case exacerbate the problem.

The Migration Policy Institute issued in 2018 a study of the asylum process which is still valid today. Extremely long delays were undermining the system of asylum. The MPI’s recommendations are entirely focused to getting asylee petitions addressed by knowledgeable officers as quickly as possible.

This report underscores my observation that a breakdown in the legal process of immigration applications is at the core of the Mexican border crisis, though by no means the only factor. Judicial systems have a knack for getting screwed up over surges in demand.

Today’s asylum laws were enacted in Refugee Act of 1980. A breakdown in processing petitions occurred due to influx of Cuban and Central American applicants, and reforms were made in the 1990s. Applications soared again in the 2010s, rising from 28,000 in 2010 t0 143,000 in 2017. The Trump Administration’s main response was to narrow the scope of permitted asylum criteria. The MPI rejected this study this strategy.

An indepth analysis of border apprehension cycles over decades is here.

Despite the rhetoric of the Trump Administration, arrests of unauthorized persons in the interior (as opposed to at or near the borders) were much lower in the four Trump years compared to most of the Obama years.

From the Center for Immigration Studies, here.

The American Immigration Council has a concise overview of our immigration system. I recommend it.

The short document reflects how complicated and un-directed our system is. For instance, it says that there is a legal maximum of 675,000 green cards issued a year, yet for most years some one million or more green cards have been issued.

The overview does not refer to any planning or assessment function of the system, because no such function exists or is mandated by Congress. Nor does the overview discuss legal enforcement, despite the reality that a quarter of foreign born persons in the country are unauthorized to be here.