Parents anxiously await word about being reunited with kids
McALLEN, Texas — Two days after President Trump ordered an end to the separation of families at the border, federal authorities Friday were still working on a plan to reunite an estimated 1,800 children with their parents and keep immigrant households together.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a notice saying it is looking into creating 15,000 beds for use in detaining immigrant families. A day earlier, the Pentagon said it was drawing up plans to house as many as 20,000 migrants on U. S. military bases.
Beyond that, however, there were few signs of any relief for parents separated from their children and placed in detention centers for illegally entering the country over the past several weeks.
Some locked- up parents struggled to get in touch with children being held in many cases hundreds of miles away, in places like New York and the Chicago area. Some said they didn’t even know where their children were.
Trump himself took a hard line on the crisis, accusing the Democrats of telling “phony stories of sadness and grief.”
More than 2,300 children were taken from their families at the border in recent weeks. A senior Trump administration official said that about 500 of them have been reunited since May.
Trump’s decision to stop separating families, announced Wednesday after a fierce international outcry, has led to confusion and uncertainty along the border.
Federal agencies are working to set up a centralized reunification process for all remaining children at a detention center on the Texas side of the border, said the senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Meantime, federal authorities appear to be easing up on the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting all adults caught illegally entering the U. S. — though the Justice Department flatly denied there has been any change.
The federal public defender’s office for the region that covers El Paso to San Antonio said in an email made public Thursday that federal prosecutors will no longer charge parents with illegally entering the U. S. if they have children with them.
Outside the federal courthouse in McAllen, immigration attorney Efren Olivares said 67 people were charged Friday morning with illegal entry, but none were parents with children.
He said it was the first time since May 24 that no parents separated from their children had been charged in McAllen.
“It appears that this is a consequence of a change in policy by the government,” he said.
ICE has only three facilities nationwide — two main ones in Texas — that can be used to detain immigrant families, and they have a combined 3,300 beds.
Under a 1997 court settlement that the Trump administration is trying to overturn, children can be held with their parents in detention centers for no more than 20 days.
Zenen Jaimes Perez of the Texas Civil Rights Project said immigrant families are still awaiting details from the Trump administration on how parents and children are to be reunited.