A government task force is facing immense challenges in reuniting more than 1,000 children who were separated from their families by the Trump administration.
The administration is also in the process of reunifying nearly 400 additional children with their parents and expects to complete their reunifications in the coming months, the official said.
It's not surprising the government's grasp of the issue is still evolving now, nearly five years after the Trump administration started separating families, said Mariana Blanco, the assistant director of the Guatemalan-Maya Center, an immigrant rights group in Florida. On June 20, 2018, then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at putting an end to the practice of separating migrant families at the border.In its initial report last June, the task force identified 3,913 children as having been separated by the previous administration's zero-tolerance policy or other initiatives. Of those, 1,786 were reunified through a court order while Trump was in office.
Some parents were contacted by groups working with the ACLU during the Trump administration after the lawsuit to end family separation was filed in 2018. The organization Kids in Need of Defense, or KIND, is leading the effort under Biden to reestablish contact with those parents. Central American asylum seekers wait for transport while being detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas.Sanchez Ralda recalled a recent trip she made with colleagues to a small community in western Guatemala in search of a separated father with no phone number and a common last name that she said was"equivalent to Smith or Johnson in the U.S.
But the criminal complaint filed against the woman in federal court in Texas made no mention of the fact that she was with her daughter at the time of her arrest or that they had been separated afterwards, according to a copy of the complaint that was reviewed by Newsweek. It stated only that the defendant was part of a group of"seven individuals" arrested entering the U.S. illegally.
The terse response from an ICE official was typical, according to the person who was assigned to reunify the child, and who asked to remain anonymous to discuss details of the case. The Trump administration held separated children in shelters across the country run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency that is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. A majority of the children who were released from custody under Trump were handed over to their parents.
As a result, hundreds of children remain unaccounted for, though the task force has said it's possible some have reunited with their parents and the government is unaware of the reunifications.
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