3,000 migrant children await reunification
Feds use DNA tests to hasten effort ordered by judge to end separations
As many as 3,000 immigrant children still are living without their parents in federal shelters, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services disclosed Thursday.
The agency said, though, that it’s prepared to begin reunifying them next week using DNA tests to expedite the process.
A federal court last month ordered the government to reunite parents with their children under age 5 by Tuesday. Older children must be reunited with their parents by July 26.
Among those who could be reunited next week are Tania Perez of Guatemala, who is being held at a detention center in Pearsall, and her 4-year-old daughter, Madelin.
Perez said her daughter is being cared for in San Antonio. They’ve been separated more than two months.
“The only thing I want is to see my baby again,” Perez said by phone from the South Texas Detention
Facility. “This is the most difficult time I’ve ever lived through.”
HHS Secretary Alex Azar told reporters in a conference call that the agency now believes up to 3,000 children were separated from their parents, almost 1,000 more than he disclosed in a Senate hearing.
He said the new number takes into account those who were separated before the practice was announced May 6, and was determined after officials examined the case files of all 11,800 children in HHS care.
So far, federal agencies have not reunited children with parents who are in detention centers, which are run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They’ve managed only to reunite children with family members in the community, or parents who are being deported.
Azar confirmed HHS was racing to meet the Tuesday deadline, blaming any confusion on the process of reuniting families on “years of congressional failure” and “courts stepping in to apply their own interpretations that are in conflict with one another.”
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said the administration’s “attempt to shift the blame to the court is incomprehensible given how much time the court gave the government to fix its own mess.”
Azar doubled down on the importance of prosecuting immigrants who enter the country illegally — regardless if they have children in tow.
“If you break our laws, you come into our country at an illegal border crossing and you are arrested, you don’t get to stay with your children,” Azar said.
President Donald Trump reversed his policy last month of separated immigrant families who crossed the border illegally after it led to protests and numerous congressional visits to detention shelters.
The administration also has asked a federal court to let it detain immigrant parents and their children together indefinitely, contrary to a longstanding decree allowing the government to hold children no longer than 20 days.
Earlier Thursday, Trump condemned the immigration system on Twitter.
“When people, with or without children, enter our country, they must be told to leave without our … country being forced to endure a long and costly trail. Tell the people ‘OUT’ and they must leave, just as they would if they were standing on your front lawn,” he tweeted.
To expedite reunifications, HHS is conducting DNA tests via cheek swabs to match children with their parents, said Jonathan White, assistant secretary for preparedness and response.
To further speed the process, Azar said Homeland Security has relocated parents of children under 5 to facilities that are closer to their children who are in shelters.
The Homeland Security Department said last month that 522 children had been reunited, but those were children who never had been in HHS custody.
“Those children were destined to be turned over to ORR,” the HHS federal shelter system, said Ruben Garcia, director of the El Paso-based Annunciation House, which received 42 parents who had been separated from their children.
He said both cases — the 522 children and the 42 parents — were a “pre-emptive” reunification of sorts of parents and children who had been released by the Border Patrol into the community instead of being detained.
Josefina Ortiz Corrales, 51, said she fled Honduras and crossed the Rio Grande in December with her 4-year-old adopted son because of violent threats against her family, and incidents of domestic violence from her partner.
“I came here happy because I thought I was saving his life,” Corrales said from the South Texas Detention Center.
Soon after she presented herself legally at an international bridge, Customs and Border Patrol separated them.
“It was the worst thing that could have ever happened in my life,” she said, sobbing. “He cried and they told me to take his clothes from the suitcase because I’d be separated from him, and I said no, screaming.”
It’s been six months since she’s seen her son, who she adopted informally at birth.
Sara Ramey, her lawyer and executive director of the San Antonio-based Migrant Center for Human Rights, said she and Corrales put together a packet with photos of her and her son as a baby, her son’s birth certificate and letters from relatives ensuring that she was taking good care of her son.
But Ramey said she worries about the health — and fate — of Corrales and her son.
“The hurt of being separated from my child has made me sick,” Corrales said. “I’m dying little by little in this place.”