Trump administration promises to reunite immigrant families.
Trump administration officials say the U.S. government knows the location of all children in its custody after separating them from their families at the border and is working to reunite them.
A fact sheet on “zerotolerance prosecution and family reunification” released late Saturday by the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies involved in the separations also says a parent must request that their child be deported with them. In the past, the agency says, many parents elected to be deported without their children. That may be a reflection of persecution they face in their home countries.
The fact sheet doesn’t state how long it might take to reunite families. The Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Texas has been set up as the staging ground for the families to be reunited before deportation.
The latest actions come
after President Trump’s order last week to stop separating migrant children from their parents. The executive order signed Wednesday immediately spread confusion along the border, with officials sending conflicting signals about the state of the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.
How the government would reunite families has been unclear because the families are first stopped by Customs and Border Patrol, with children taken into custody by the Department of Health and Human Services and adults detained through Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is under the Department of Homeland Security. Children have been sent to far-flung shelters around the country, raising alarm that parents might never know where their children can be found.
As of Wednesday, 2,053 minors who were separated at the border were being cared for in Health and Human Servicesfunded facilities, the fact sheet said.
The chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee hedged Sunday when pressed on whether he was confident the Trump administration knows where all the children are and will be able to reunite them with their parents.
“That is what they’re claiming,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told CNN.
Since Trump’s order, protests have erupted around the country over the separations and the future of families arriving in the U.S. illegally.
The fact sheet states that ICE has implemented an identification mechanism to ensure tracking of linked family members throughout the detention and removal process.
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said it had reunited 522 children and that some were never taken into custody by Health and Human Services because their parents’ criminal cases were processed too quickly.