Despite orders from a federal judge for the government to reunite families who were “no-tolerance” segregated on the United States-Mexico border under the Trump administration’s migration policy, the parents of 545 children have still not been found.
According to a court document filed Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the children were separated between July 1, 2017 and June 26, 2018, when a federal judge in San Diego decreed entry of children ruled Government custody will be reunited with their parents.
Children from this period are difficult to find because the government had inadequate tracking systems. Rights group representatives looked for parents by going door to door.
A rally on Capitol Hill calls for action to end family segregation, inhuman imprisonment and deportation on July 25, 2019 in Washington, USA [File: Mary F. Calvert/Reuters]Justice in Motion, a New York-based nonprofit that helped the ACLU find parents, said it suspended the search in March at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Currently, 21 local team members have been physically looking for the separated parents in Mexico and Central America.
“The Justice in Motion team is taking the often inaccurate and inadequate information provided by the government and performing personal physical searches to find the parents in their local communities,” said Nan Schivone, Justice in Motion’s legal director , across from Al Jazeera.
More than 2,700 children were separated from their parents in June 2018 when U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw ordered an end to the practice under a zero-tolerance policy to prosecute any adult who illegally entered the country from Mexico follow. The government sparked an international outcry when parents couldn’t find their children.
While these families were being reunited by court order, authorities later found that up to 1,556 children had been separated under the policy by the summer of 2017, including hundreds during an initial run at the family separation run in El Paso, Texas from July to July November 2017, that was not publicly known at the time.
The ACLU, which was sued for the practice, said a court-appointed steering committee had tracked the parents of 485 children, 47 since August. That leaves 545 out of the 1,030 children for whom the Steering Committee had phone numbers from US authorities.
Esvin Fernando Arredondo of Guatemala is reunited with his daughters Andrea (left), Keyli (right) and Alison (second from left) at Los Angeles International Airport after he was separated during the widespread separation of immigrant families by the Trump administration [File: AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chi]It is assumed that around two thirds of the parents of these 545 children are in their country of origin. According to Schivone, many parents have a “blatant lack of confidence” when someone claims to help them find their children.
“The US government treated them terribly and then deported them without their children,” said Schivone. “Many of the deported parents, who are still separated once we have found them to explain our role in reunification, find it difficult to believe that anyone in the US is ready to help.”
The Steering Committee has also advertised toll-free numbers in Spanish to reach families.
The judge has scheduled a hearing on Thursday to consider the state of the reunification efforts.
“We are determined to keep this up and continue the search as we have in the past,” said Schivone. “And we’re angry that we’re in this situation three years later.”
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