Hundreds of children not reunited by Trump administration as deadline passes

Government says it was reuniting 1,800 children it considers eligible but 700 remain in custody without their families

Hundreds of migrant children the Trump administration separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border were not reunited with their families by the court-ordered Thursday midnight deadline.

The Trump administration claimed Thursday that more than 1,800 children five years and older had been reunited with parents or sponsors hours before the deadline set in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in California’s southern district court. US government attorneys said in court documents that these were children they considered eligible for reunification.

But the ACLU, immigration advocates and attorneys have challenged the government’s determination of which of the 2,500-plus separated children in the lawsuit are eligible for reunification.

“We will be asking for information about all of these individuals,” said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney leading the lawsuit against the Trump administration.

Before the Thursday deadline, advocates and attorneys working with separated children and adults said they were concerned about a group of 711 children who the government said were not eligible to be reunited.

This group includes parents the government deported while their children remained in the US, who waived their reunification right, and who the government said were a “red flag” because of criminal history. Of the group that remain separated, 431 were children whose parents had been deported.

In a joint status report filed with the government, the ACLU urged the Trump administration to provide more details on this group. The ACLU also said there were “troubling” cases in a list of children provided by the government, which included 40 children with no parental information.

Advocates and attorneys said this week that they have spoken to parents who they believe were coerced into being deported without their children.

Michelle Brané, director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, has been visiting detention centers and children’s shelters in recent weeks and said advocates “had no idea” what information deported parents had been given. “It’s clear from early on in this process parents were being deported with no reference and no attempt or no choice to be reunified with their children,” Brané said.

DHS said in court documents that it complied with orders to provide immigrants with notices of their rights in Spanish and English.

One document, prepared by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), includes three checkboxes depicting the stark reality parents immediately face if they lose their immigration case: “I would like to take my child with me”; “I do NOT want to take my child with me”, and “I do not have a lawyer and I want to talk with a lawyer”.

The ACLU’s Gelernt said tracking the deported parents down would be “an enormous task”.

“At the moment they [the government] have not laid out anything close to a plan for how they are going to do it,” Gelernt said.

Attorneys are also worried about what happens to reunited families, who are either held in family detention or released as they wait for their immigration case to be tried.

Lisa Frydman, vice-president of regional policies and initiatives for advocacy group Kids in Need of Defense (Kind), said: “Kids are really confused, had major trust violations, and some of them are angry at their parents because they think it was their fault. There is a lot of confusion and a lot of harm that these children experienced.”

Kind is handling the cases of more than 100 children and, like other groups, said it was not getting consistent advanced notice about what was happening to the children it represents, who are often transported in the middle of the night.

Maria Odom, Kind’s vice-president of legal services, said two children the group was particularly concerned about were a nine-year-old and 14-year-old who were discharged from a shelter but their mother was deported before they could be reunited with her. “We have not been able to locate the children and we are mentioning them as an example of how there are children who have been placed in this black hole of reunification,” Odom said.

Advocates are encountering the same problems with adults, who they said were also being reunited and released at night with little or no warning to their lawyers. Volunteers wait in bus shelters, detention center parking lots and at churches with food, bus tickets and legal assistance for the families.