For immigrants, still no word on when they will be reunited

MCALLEN, Texas — Two days after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered an end to the separation of families at the border, federal authorities Friday were still working on a plan to reunite an estimated 1,800 children with their parents and keep immigrant households together.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a notice saying it is looking into creating 15,000 beds for use in detaining immigrant families.

A day earlier, the Pentagon agreed to provide space for as many as 20,000 migrants on U.S. military bases.

Beyond that, however, there was nothing but frustration and worry for many of the parents separated from their children and placed in detention centres for illegally entering the U.S. over the past several weeks.

Some parents struggled to get in touch with youngsters being held in many cases hundreds of kilometres away.

Some said they didn’t even know where their children were.

More than 2,300 children were taken from their families at the border in recent weeks. A senior Trump administration official said that about 500 of them have been reunited since May.

Trump’s decision to stop separating families, announced Wednesday after a fierce international outcry, has led to confusion and uncertainty along the border.

Federal agencies are working to set up a centralized reunification process for all remaining children at a detention centre in Texas, said the senior administration official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

An ICE official said it is unclear how families will be reunified.

“It’s a big question. There have not been a lot of answers,” Henry Lucero, a director of field operations, confessed at a forum in Weslaco, Texas.

Meanwhile, federal authorities appear to be easing up on the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting all adults caught illegally entering the U.S. — though the Justice Department denied there has been any change.

The federal public defender’s office for the region that covers El Paso to San Antonio said in an email that prosecutors will no longer charge parents with illegally entering the U.S. if they have children with them.

Outside the federal courthouse in McAllen, immigration lawyer Efren Olivares said 67 people were charged Friday morning with illegal entry, but none were parents with children. He said it was the first time since May 24 that this had happened in McAllen.

“It appears that this is a consequence of a change in policy by the government,” he said.

ICE has only three facilities nationwide — two in Texas, one in Pennsylvania — that can be used to detain immigrant families, and they have a combined 3,300 beds.

The one in Dilley, Texas, opened in 2015 on a remote site that was once an encampment for oil workers. It contains collections of cottages built around playgrounds and common areas, but also has high security.

Finding space is not the only hurdle: Under a 1997 court settlement that the Trump administration is trying to overturn, children can be held with their parents in detention centres for no more than 20 days.

Zenen Jaimes Perez of the Texas Civil Rights Project said immigrant families are still awaiting details from the administration on how parents and children are to be reunited.

“It could take a couple of months, a couple of days ... but we don’t have timelines,” Jaimes Perez said.

“What we need to hear is what the administration says this process is going to look like, because we don’t know.”