ACLU Points Blame at Administration on Eve of Deadline

Here's a c l you lawyer league learned speaking outside the courthouse yesterday after a hearing in front of the judge overseeing the reunifications. There are many other people that will ultimately need to be reunified, So when they say they're going to meet the deadline, it's only for those individuals they've declared to be eligible for reunification by the deadline. There are still many many people who were deported. Joining me is Kevin Appleby, Senior d Ector of International Migration

Policy at the Center for Migration Studies. Kevin explain what the a c LU attorney was referring to their So there are about three thousand close to three thousand family separations under the Family Separation Policy, and the administration has only reunited um a little over eight hundred fifty uh families. They've approved reunifications for about five fifty and and they've deported, believe it or not, four hundred and sixty nine parents

without their children. So wouldn't the attorney says they haven't finished the job. It's because they certainly have not meet met that three thousand family separation threshold which they are responsible for. Not to mention that there are several hundreds that they've said say are ineligible for reunifications because of

certain criminal penalties that they've accrued. So when the administration says mission accomplished, uh I would disagree as with uh h LU, because they certainly haven't reunited the three thousand families that they should be reuniting. So apparently the number is four hundred sixty three parents that are under review according to the Trump administration, and the judge or the government to provide a list of those four and sixty three parents. He said, what would be the explanation of

not knowing where the parents are? Is it that they don't know where the parents are or that they're not giving that information out. Well, let's let's not get confused as to groups. The four sixty three I misspoke, I said four sixty nine. They're about four and sixty three parents that have been deported to Central America. That's one group. They certainly don't know where they are in Central America and the prospect of being reunified with their children at

this point it's not high. There are other smaller groups that may of parents that may not be be able to be located within the country, but that's a much smaller number. But the four three you referred to her parents that had been deported, and many say there's evidence that they were they were compelled to find waivers to be deported because they were told that was the only way that they would be reunited with their children, So

that needs to be investigated as well. It's it's very confusing because you're one thing from one side and one thing from the other, and then the judge questioning everything. The Trump administration said that once immigrant families are reunited, any parents that are targeted for deportation shouldn't be allowed to leave their children behind to apply for political asylum, but that contradicts with what Homeland Security Secretary Kristen Nielsen

said on Fox News. She said that she said, the way the process works is the parents always have the choice to take the children with them. So referring to those those foreign secret parents, these are parents that made the choice not to bring the children with them. So what's the real story. Well, the real story is that when these parents signed these waivers, the children were not

with them. They had already been separated. So if if the case, if the federal government and the hs UH, we're serious about reunited and they would have brought those kids to their parents before they would have been deported, But they didn't, so the children remain in the country. And and the other aspect you got to think about here is some of the parents might have thought that they were going to be reunited with their children, but some might have said, it's okay if my child stays

with a relative here. That might have been part of the purpose of them coming so that their children could remain, and they might have signed knowing that. So you can't get into mind of the parents because they've been deported. But there's been evidence that there's been you know, that they coerced to sign these these waivers um on the pretense that they would be reunited with their children, and that hasn't happened. So what does the A C. L.

You want to happen going forward? Well, they want accounting for all the three thousand families that you know, parents that lost their that were separated from their children, and the administrations really hasn't met that task in terms of all the numbers have been separated. And in this case, there can't be room for error. I mean, you know, you can't have separate you know, you can't reunite you know hundred and then have two hundreds that you just

don't reunite for because you can't find them. I mean, this is a mess created by the administration which they didn't have to do. They weren't forced to do, despite what they say. So they haven't the ultimate responsibility to really make whole all of these families, and they're falling short of It. Will be interesting to see what the court and what the judge says tomorrow, which is the deadline for that reunification, what he will say to that, if they'll give them more time or if he'll want

a more full accounting of what they've done. About a minute here. Does it look as if they're going to meet any part of the deadline? Are they reuniting more families today? Well, they have a plan to reunite families at several locations. They haven't really disclosed where those locations are, so they could, you know, present to the judge tomorrow a more full list. Thanks Kevin. Kevin Appleby, Senior director of International Migration Policy at the Center for Migration Study.

A new report released today about a Center for Strategic and International Studies found that law enforcement agencies are increasingly asking tech companies for access to digital evidence on mobile phones and apps, and about of the requests are granted. Joining me is Jennifer Daxel dasco professor at American University Washington College of Law and a senior associate at the

Center for Strategic and International Studies. Jennifer, you were a co author of the report and it says that the number of law enforce and requests at least as directed at the major US based tech and telecom companies has significantly increased over time. What does that increase, sure, and

thanks for having us on. The increase is the number of requests that law enforcement is making to the major six major tech companies UM obvious ones Google, Facebook, Microsoft, UM, Apple, And what we're seeing is an increase in request for digital evidence. Now this isn't surprising if you think about how much information UM has been increasingly digitalized over the last UM several years. UM law enforcement is finding increasingly that information it needs to solve criminal cases is both

digital and in the hands of these service providers. What I'm looking for is how much is that increase? You say it's increased, but how much should you have a number? Yes over the last in two thousand and seventeen or about and requests UM compared that to two thousand and fourteen where the numbers were about eighty thousand or so, so so that's a pretty significant jump. You also write that the response rates have been consistent, So does that

mean that tech companies are complying more often? Well, the the rates have been consistent over time, But if you if you take the rates in the absolute numbers, then there's more cases in which law enforcement is having UM difficulty and accessing evidence even if the rates are the same. And importantly, these numbers only capture those cases in which

law enforcement has in fact made the request. So our report, which drew on a survey of state, local, and federal law enforcement entities and also a number of qualitative interviews, UM found that law enforcement was facing significant problems in just identifying which service providers had the kinds of information that they need in order to UM for their investigates. There there the criminal activity that they were investigating, and

that was one of it. That was really the biggest problem that they were facing in terms of dealing with digital evidence. So service providers meeting whether it's UM, you know, Verizon or a T and T, Yeah, anybody, So those so those are are the easier ones. But we're talking about, you know, the the law enforcements investing in crime. They don't know whether Facebook holds the data or Google are more importantly, which of the you know, gazillion apps that

are on our phones might have the relevant information. And so law enforcement is facing challenges and figuring out where to go UM and determining how to ask for for the data that they that they seek in investigating activity.

These interesting, These are problems that can be solved. This is not an insurmountable problem, and in our report we call for a new national Digital Evidence of says that can that can consolidate resources and provide training and UM kind of a one stop shop for law enforcement to go to get some of these answers to their questions. So what would that cost to have a National Digital Evidence Office and to have it staffed, so you know,

this can probably done it relatively low cost. Obviously, the more money, the more there can be done in terms of training, in terms of providing brands to the programs that already do exist at the state and local level that are quite good into rationalizing those UM. But a lot of this can be done simply by you know, reallocating UM certain grant programs UM detailing individuals in the

federal government to specifically focus on these issues. I think the biggest cost comes from the need to really staff up UM a team of experts who can help distribute the technical tools that can help interpret data once it's been disclosed and can stand top of UM of changes that tech companies make to their own products, which than law enforcement has to also be on top of in order to be able to determine where to go and

to interpret data that's being turned over. Currently, there is such an entity of federal entity it's within the FBI. UM it is expected to service all state and local law enforcement across the country. There's about eighteen thousand different offices across the country, and this center has a budget of just eleven million dollars, which is nowhere near adequate

to the need. So we call for adequate resourcing of that entity, UM, giving it it's kind of its own platform, its own authorization, and obviously the more money the better, But we think that there can be a lot done at relatively UM low cost. So is it different in each case where to go to find the information? For example, someone may have a Facebook account, someone else may not. Exactly I mean, so in each case, um, I mean, obviously,

the the investigating agent needs to understand the case. They need to know what they're looking for. But um where to go depends on the specific facts of the case. And different providers have different protocols for per requesting data, all of which law enforcement needs to be able to know and to utilize effectively. Well, well, could some of this information that the agencies are looking for be protected? Um?

So so certainly, and so we're talking about law enforcement making requests UM via a warrant so approved by a judge pursuance of probable cause, making requests pursuant to legal processes UM that have been laid out in statute UM, often involving court authorization. So so, certainly, just because law enforcement wants it doesn't mean that it's either available or

necessarily appropriate for law enforcement to get UM. But we also have found that there are cases a number of cases in which just about everybody would agree that there is a lawful basis UM and and consistent with rules on privacy and norms on privacy and civil liberties UM to access certain information, and they're being stymied not because of a lack of legal authority, but because of much

more practical problems in terms of knowledge and expertise. And it seems to us that this is something that can be solved, and that's given that's been given not enough attention to date, because there's been so much focus on problems associated with encryption and the debates about whether or not companies should be forced to decrypt data, and that there's other what we call low hanging fruit that's out there that could significantly improve law enforcement access while those

other debates kind of continue to um to to rerady e on so less than a minute. Here is there any one kind of information that law enforcement agencies are looking for more than others? Um? You know unclear, you know, I don't know into that. I mean, obviously, you know, often location information is often quite quite important to the

Supreme Court. Just to shoot a big case on that, um that that law enforcement, at least for historical information that's longer than a certain location, information over a certain time period has to be acquired by a warrant signed off by a judge pursuance of probable cause. Um. So that's a legal standard. But here we're talking about the practical problems. All right, question up where to go to get it? Thanks so much, Jennifer's the Carpenter case the

Supreme Court decided last term. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple podcast, SoundCloud, and on Bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brolso. This is Bloomberg