Parents of 545 kids separated at border not found

Radio spots are airing throughout Mexico and Central America. Court-appointed researchers are motorbiking through rural communities and showing up at courthouses to conduct public record searches.

Their efforts are part of a wide-ranging campaign to track down parents separated from their children at the U.S. border beginning in 2017 under the Trump administration’s most controversial immigration policy

It is now clear that the parents of 545 of the migrant children still have not been found, according to court documents filed this week in a case challenging the practice.

About 60 of the children were under the age of 5 when they were separated, the documents show.

Though attempts to find the separated parents have been going on for years, the number of parents who have been deemed “unreachable” is much larger than was previously known.

Under court order, the government first provided an accounting of separated families in June 2018, reporting that about 2,700 children had been taken from their parents after crossing into the United States.

After months of searching by a court-appointed steering committee, which includes a private law firm and several immigrant advocacy organizations, all of those families were eventually tracked down and offered the opportunity to be reunited.

But in January 2019, a report by the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of the Inspector General confirmed that many more children had been separated, including under a previously undisclosed pilot program conducted in El Paso, Texas, between June and November 2017, before the administration’s widely publicized “zero tolerance” policy officially went into effect.

Under that policy, the Trump administration directed prosecutors to file criminal charges against those who crossed the border without authorization, including parents, who were then separated from their children when they were taken into custody.

The Trump administration fought for months against providing documentation on the additional families, arguing that it was not necessary because the children had already been released from federal custody into the care of sponsors, who are typically relatives or family friends.

The parents of the children had already been deported without them.

THE NEW YORK TIMES FILE A new report shows hundreds of cases in which migrant children were taken from their families at the U.S. border, and their parents, who were deported, cannot be located.