First wave of kids reunited with parents
Feds miss deadline for bringing youngest children to guardians
Facing a legal deadline to return young migrant children separated from their parents at the border, federal officials begin the task of reuniting families.
Facing a legal deadline to return young migrant children separated from their parents at the border, federal officials on Tuesday said they had reunited four families, with an additional 34 reunions scheduled before the end of the day.
The relatively slow pace of unwinding the Trump administration’s family separation policy fell short of an original court order, which had directed that all children under age 5 — a total of 102, by the government’s latest count — be returned to their families by Tuesday.
Chris Meekins, a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services, pointed to safety concerns to explain the delay and insisted that the reunifications could not be rushed.
“Our process may not be as quick as some might like, but there is no question that it is protecting children,” said Meekins, the chief of staff of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.
In some cases, he said, “If we had just reunited kids with the adults, we would be putting them in the care of a rapist, a kidnapper, a child abuser, and someone who was charged with murder in their home nation.”
Last-minute checks
In all cases, the authorities said, reunited families were being released from custody and equipped with ankle monitors to make sure they appeared at scheduled court hearings on their immigration cases.
The scheduled reunions were taking place at various sites around the country. Children have been detained in shelters far from their parents, many of whom were also detained as part of President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance border enforcement policy.
The final number of children who would be returned was still in flux. Meekins said 14 adults were disqualified from reunification during the vetting process, including eight with serious criminal backgrounds including histories of child cruelty and drug crimes, five who were determined not to be the actual parent of the child, and one who was being treated for a communicable disease that would have made reunification unsafe.
There were logistical challenges to the reunifications, too, according to officials close to the operation who were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The federal agency that oversees the care of migrant children, the Department of Health and Human Services, was still conducting background checks on parents until the very last moment on Tuesday morning. The final number to be reunited changed as recently as 8 a.m. Tuesday.
Even after the parents were granted approval to take custody of their children, the operation faced other challenges. It required coordination between multiple federal agencies and government contractors — groups that have struggled to work together smoothly since the family separations began weeks ago, to the frustration of immigrant advocates and the federal judge overseeing the court case challenging the Trump administration’s handling of migrant families.
On Monday, the plan had been for the shelters where the children are housed to transport the children to undisclosed locations in various states and to hand the children over to the Department of Homeland Security. But Tuesday morning, a person familiar with the reunifications said the plan had changed: Officials with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency were now preparing to pick up the children at the various shelters.
As the reunions began, there were new mix-ups.
At one shelter, the plainclothed ICE personnel who pulled up in vans ran out of child-safety seats, and were preparing to make a second trip to the site to pick up all the children eligible for reunifications, causing a delay.
Judge Dana M. Sabraw of the U.S. District Court in San Diego had set a deadline of Tuesday for the youngest children to be returned, but government lawyers said Monday that of the 102 such children now in government custody, the authorities had been able to identify, locate and vet the parents of only 54. The court order requires family reunifications for all 3,000 children in federal custody before the end of the month.
At a status conference Tuesday, Sabraw was largely satisfied with the government’s progress but urged it to move more quickly in some cases.
“These are firm deadlines; they are not aspirational goals,” Sabraw said.
‘Come legally’
The children involved in Tuesday’s reunions are some of the youngest immigrants caught up in the Trump administration’s family separation policy. They had been apprehended with their relatives at the border, separated from their families and detained in so-called tender-age shelters for children under the age of 12. They have been separated from their loved ones, in many cases, for weeks.
On Tuesday, Trump weighed in on the pending reunions, claimed Democrats want “open borders” and defended ICE, which has been the focus of protests, with widespread calls for abolishing the agency. He was asked by reporters for his reaction to officials missing the court-ordered deadline for reunions.
“Well, I have a solution,” Trump replied. “Tell people not to come to our country illegally. That’s the solution. Don’t come to our country illegally. Come like other people do. Come legally.”
A reporter asked him if he was suggesting that the children be punished.
“I’m saying this, very simply: We have laws,” Trump said. “We have borders. Don’t come to our country illegally. It’s not a good thing. And as far as ICE is concerned, the people that are fighting ICE, it’s a disgrace. These people go into harm’s way. There is nobody under greater danger than the people from ICE.”