Hundreds of families may have been split up by US deportations

THE US government may have deported 463 parents without their children, it has emerged, as the authorities scramble to meet today’s court-imposed deadline for reunifying separated families.

A federal judge has criticised the Trump administration’s accounting of hundreds of parents who may have been deported after being separated from their children at the Us-mexico border, calling it “a deeply troubling reality”.

Among the problems raised by law- yers is that the US government cannot be sure how many of the parents were deported or how many left voluntarily because of confusion over how their identity codes were recorded.

Judge Dana Sabraw, a San Diego judge who set today’s deadline, said on Tuesday that the authorities had not paid enough attention to tracking children and their parents. “It’s the reality of a policy that was in place that resulted in large numbers of families being separated without forethought as to reunification and keeping track of people, and that’s the fallout we’re seeing,” he said in a court. Eve Stotland, the director of legal services at The Door, a New York charity which helps migrants and refugees, said the chaos on the border meant some children would never find their parents.

“I’m absolutely certain they have lost some babies,” Ms Stotland told The Daily Telegraph. “And they will never be reunited. It’s inexcusable.” Ms Stotland said that the process of reuniting children with their parents had been made infinitely harder by the border authorities not noting a parent’s Anumber – an eight or nine digit code – on the same file as their child’s, and vice versa.

“It was the most obvious way of keeping track of family groups,” she said. “But the step was not taken.”

As many as 2,551 children aged five and older are being considered for family reunification. There have been 1,187 children reunified with their parents or “other appropriate discharges,” which include guardians and sponsors, according to a government filing.

More than 900 are deemed “either not eligible, or not yet known to be eligible, for reunification.” That figure includes parents lost or deported.

Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrants’ rights project, agreed with Ms Stotland that the government was likely to have “misplaced” some parents.