U.S. tries to meet deadline to reunite families

EL PASO, TEXAS — With only hours left before a court-ordered deadline, the Trump administration on Thursday reunited at least two dozen more migrant families whose separation on the Mexico border drew worldwide condemnation and forced the government to ease its “zerotolerance” immigration policy.

Some children who had not seen their parents in weeks or months seemed slow to accept that they would not be abandoned again.

“I think that some of the children very quickly attach. Others, there’s a distance. There’s this caution, this lack of certitude, and part of it is not understanding what happened,” said Ruben Garcia, director of the Annunciation House, an immigrant-assistance centre in El Paso.

Authorities have identified 2,551 children 5 and older who may be covered by a court order that required them to be reunited with their parents by the end of Thursday. The effort was expected to fall short, partly because hundreds of parents may have already been deported without their children. But by focusing only those deemed by the government to be “eligible” for reunification, federal officials were expected to claim success.

Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who represents the separated families, said the government should not be congratulating itself for meeting its “selfdefined” deadline.

“The government shouldn’t be proud of the work they’re doing on reunification,” he said. “It should just be, ‘We created this cruel, inhumane policy ... now we’re trying to fix it in every way we can and make these families whole.”

As of Tuesday, 1,012 parents had been reunited with children in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Hundreds more were just waiting on transportation.

Meanwhile, the Homeland Security Department’s internal watchdog said it would review the separation of families, along with the conditions at Border Protection facilities where migrant children are held.

For the last two weeks, children have been arriving steadily at ICE locations in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico to be reunited with parents.

But confusion and fear linger. Jose Dolores Munoz, 36, from El Salvador, was reunited with his 7-year-old daughter last Friday, nearly two months after they were separated. His daughter cries when he leaves the house.

“She is afraid,” Munoz. “Yesterday I left her crying, she is telling me, ‘You are not coming back. You are lying. You are leaving me.’ ”