Parents of 545 kids separated at border have yet to be found

THE NUMBER OF PARENTS WHO HAVE BEEN DEEMED ‘UNREACHABLE’ IS MUCH LARGER THAN WAS PREVIOUSLY KNOWN.

Radio spots are airing throughout Mexico and Central America. Courtappointed researchers are motorbiking through rural hillside communities in Guatemala and showing up at courthouses in Honduras to conduct public-record searches.

The 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.

Although 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.

The new findings highlight the lasting effect of a policy that first came to light with wrenching images of crying children being carried away from their parents at the border and detained hundreds or thousands of miles away. Hundreds of these families, the new filing makes clear, have now endured years of separation.

The Trump administration first provided a court-ordered accounting of separated families in June 2018, stating at the time 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 Inspector General confirmed that many more children had been separated.

Once the existence of a larger group was revealed, the Trump administration fought for months against providing data on the additional families.

But the court intervened in June 2019, and the government was ordered to acknowledge the extent of the additional separations.

New data provided then brought the total known number of separated children to more than 5,500, including cases in which the government said the separations were justified because of a parent’s criminal record.

Researchers are presuming that about two-thirds of the parents now being sought are back in their home countries.