Biden’s biggest challenge: reuniting split families
AUSTIN, Texas – President Joe Biden unveiled a slew of immigration policy reversals and sweeping legislative proposals in his first days in office that were widely applauded by immigrant advocates.
But his efforts to undo one of the more controversial policies of former President Donald Trump’s administration – family separations at the border – might be the thorniest, advocates and attorneys said. On his website, Biden called Trump’s policy of separating children – some who were infants – from parents and other relatives who crossed into the U.S. without permission a “moral failing” and promised an immediate end to prosecutions of parents for minor immigration violations that led to the separations.
Biden also has vowed to form a task force to help reunite the more than 600 parents who remain separated from their children and whose whereabouts are unknown. Executive orders specific to this policy were expected soon.
The Trump administration included family separations in April 2018 in its “zero-tolerance” policy to prosecute all undocumented border crossers. Altthough family separations occurred under previous administrations, they became widespread practice under the policy.
Televised images of children locked in federal detention facility cages sparked widespread blowback and Trump rescinded the order in June 2018. Family separations continued for those children deemed to be in the custody of a harmful adult. Thousands of families were split during the Trump administration, but most have been reunited.
Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union sued the government and a federal judge ordered all the families to be reunited. But 21⁄2 years after the policy was banned, about 611 families remain separated and the parents’ whereabouts unknown, according to court filings. Of those, more than 300 were deported and have been difficult to locate.
Biden officials should allow the deported parents back into the U.S. to reunite with their children and focus less on helping agencies find the missing parents, said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, which filed the federal lawsuit to stop the policy and force the Trump administration to reunite families. That litigation is ongoing.
The new administration also should consider offering a pathway to citizenship to the thousands of families who endured the trauma of being separated, he said.
Gelernt said he also hopes the Biden administration investigates how the Trump administration policy emerged in the first place. A report from the Department of Justice Inspector General’s Office released earlier this month detailed how top-ranking Trump officials, including then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, knew of the policy’s potential downside but implemented it anyway.
The task of finding parents who were deported without their children has fallen mostly to advocacy groups, such as Justice in Motion, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that has used its contacts in Mexico and Central America to find parents.
The efforts, which include enlisting local human rights attorneys to venture to remote villages and track down parents using scant information, were halted for months as the coronavirus pandemic roiled through the hemisphere and have only recently picked back up, said Jeremy McLean, policy and advocacy manager with Justice in Motion.
“You’re talking about very young kids separated from the parents for years now,” McLean said. “That’s an incredible amount of trauma.”