house chief of staff and convened a series of meetings in the situation room to go through their options migrants were increasingly exploiting existing immigration laws and court rulings and using children as a way to get adults into the country on the theory that families were being treated differently from single peoplethe agencies were surfacing every possible idea cecilia muoz mr obamas top domestic policy adviser recalled including whether to separate parents from their children i do remember looking at each other like were not going to do this are we we spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea the morality of it was clear thats not who we arethey did however decide to vastly expand the detention of immigrant families opening new facilities along the border where women and young children were held for long periods while they awaited a chance to have their cases processedmr johnson wrote an open letter to appear in spanishlanguage news outlets warning parents that their children would be deported if they entered the united states illegally he traveled to guatemala to deliver the message in person opening a large family immigration detention facility in dilley tex he held a news conference to showcase what he called an effective deterrentthe steps led to just the kind of brutal images that mr obamas advisers feared hundreds of young children many dirty and some in tears who were being held with their families in makeshift detention facilitiesimmigrant advocacy groups denounced the policy berating senior administration officials some of whom were reduced to rueful apologies for a policy they said they could not justify and telling mr obama to his face during a meeting at the white house in late 2014 that he was turning his back on the most vulnerable people seeking refuge in the united statesi was pissed and still am said ben johnson the executive director of the american immigration lawyers association i thought that he had a shocking disregard for due processbefore long the obama administration would face legal challenges and be forced to stop detaining families indefinitely a federal judge in washington ordered the administration in 2015 to stop detaining asylumseeking central american mothers and children in order to deter others from their region from coming into the united statesimagecreditjennifer whitney for the new york timesunder a 1997 consent decree known as the flores settlement unaccompanied children could be held in immigration detention for only a short period of time in 2016 a federal judge ruled that the settlement applied to families as well effectively requiring that they be released within 20 days many were released some with gps ankle bracelets to track their movements and asked to return for a court date sometime in the futureit was mr bush who had firsthand experience with the border as governor of texas and ran for president as a compassionate conservative who initiated the zero tolerance approach for illegal immigration on which mr trumps policy is