NEW LEADS MAY AID SEARCH FOR PARENTS OF 628 KIDS

Volunteers obtain databases that may have information

The intensive effort to locate the parents of 628 children who remain apart from their parents after being separated at the border under Trump administration policies has been bolstered by new leads, attorneys reported this week.

A group of volunteers dedicated to the search have recently gained access to two additional databases — including one belonging to the federal government — that hold potentially new contact information for parents who up to this point have been unreachable.

While the development is promising, it is also drawing ire from attorneys who question why the government didn’t hand over its information sooner, despite repeated requests for help with leads.

“The fact they’ve been sitting on these phone numbers and addresses to us seems really outrageous,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt said in a hearing in San Diego federal court Friday.

This is the second massive search for parents who were separated from their children under the current presidential administration, and the fact that hundreds remain missing continues to attract national attention, even surfacing as a question in the second presidential debate.

The first search occurred the summer of 2018 following a court order as part of litigation filed by the ACLU.

Some 2,000 families — most of whom were still in U.S. detention centers or shelters at the time — were reunited under that effort.

It was only after that effort was winding down that attorneys were notified of another group of families who had been separated as early as 2017, as part of a pilot program in Texas.

The government, under a court order to also account for those separations, found 1,134 children, as well as an additional 64 that should have been part of the first count.

But the search for that second set of parents has proven to be more complicated. The children are no longer in government care and have been placed with sponsors — often extended family — throughout the U.S. to proceed with their own immigration cases. The parents are also out of immigration detention.

The search has been stymied by several other factors over the past year, including mistrust in the government, poor record-keeping when the parents and children were in custody, deportations, unstable living conditions, the global pandemic and now hurricanes that have ravaged parts of Central America.

A steering committee of pro-bono attorneys and nonprofits in the U.S., Mexico and Central America have reached the parents of 570 children — 41 more than reported at the last hearing in October. The circumstances under which those families might reunite remain unclear.

Now, the focus is on 333 children whose parents are believed to have been removed from the United

States by immigration authorities, and 295 whose parents are believed to be in the U.S.

On the day before Thanksgiving, the government handed over a database of migrant contact information from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is responsible for immigration court proceedings. The information, at first glance, appears to fill in a lot of gaps, the ACLU said.

“We hope we will f ind many families from these phone numbers now,” Gelernt said, noting he hoped the information wasn’t stale by this point.

Department of Justice attorney Sarah Fabian told the judge that EOIR has not been part of the ongoing litigation and that it was only recently that federal officials, including herself, thought of the agency’s database during a brainstorming session.

“It’s something all of us wish we had thought of sooner,” said Fabian, who pushed back on characterizations that the government had knowingly withheld the information.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said he found the situation “disturbing ” but that he’d hold off further comment until he got a more complete explanation from the government in writing.

The other database that volunteers will also be sifting through comes from Seneca Family of Agencies, a nonprofit that has contracted with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide mental health support to some class members in the litigation.