Debate Check: The Myth of Families Broken Up by Immigration Enforcement

Democrat Hillary Clinton on Wednesday repeated a favorite line of advocates for liberalized immigration laws — that aggressive enforcement of immigration laws will break up families.

Clinton cited a Nevada girl who was born in the United States but was scared her illegal immigrant parents would be deported.

“It’s not the immigration system that’s breaking up the family … That’s the choice the immigrant made by coming here illegally.”

“I don’t want to rip families apart,” she said. “I don’t want to be sending parents away from children. I don’t want to see the deportation force that Donald has talked about in action in our country.”

The truth is that if anyone is breaking up families — it is the illegal immigrants, themselves. Men from Mexico and Central America commonly come by themselves to the United States in search of work to support their families back home. By doing so, they are separating themselves from their wives and children.

If an illegal immigrant living apart from his family in the United States gets deported, the federal government actually reunites the family.

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The breaking-up-families allegation usually centers on illegal immigrants who have children born in the United States, automatically making them American citizens. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics, tens of thousands of deported immigrants each year fall into this category.

Some of those children end up staying in the United States with another parent or family member. A study by the Applied Research Center in 2011 found 5,100 who wound up in the U.S. foster care system.

But Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, told LifeZette that she knows of no country that forbids returning citizens from bringing their immediate family members with them.

“The responsible response would be to bring the child with you … It’s not the immigration system that’s breaking up the family,” she said. “That’s the choice the immigrant made by coming here illegally.”

And even if that were not the case, critics argue that flouting U.S. immigration laws exposes illegal immigrants to negative consequences down the road.

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“A family voluntarily elects to put itself in the position of possibly being broken up through deportation when one or more of its members voluntarily chooses to come to and live in the U.S. illegally,” Californians for Population Stabilization spokesman Joseph Guzzardi wrote on the group’s website earlier this year.

Guzzardi noted that a variation of the argument has crept into the public discourse following the surge in unaccompanied youths to the border that started in 2014. Advocates have called for them to be reunited with their families, some of whom also came to the United States without authorization. He wrote that reunification may be a worthwhile goal.

“But families insist that any unification or re-unification must occur in the U.S., a nation that’s neither their ancestral nor legal home,” he wrote. “Advocates illogically demand that every family unification or reunification take place north of the border, and in America. Reunification could just as easily occur in an immigrant’s native country.”