Government still must reunite about 3,000 immigrant families

The Trump administration official in charge of caring for undocumented minors separated from their parents at the border said Thursday that his agency must reunite nearly 3,000 families, a sharp increase from the roughly 2,000 his agency contemplated last week.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the work has been further complicated by the nation’s “disjointed” immigration laws, the broad scope of the judge’s “unprecedented” order, requests from members of Congress to tour HHS facilities, delays verifying familial relationships, and “unreliable” information provided by minors who are held in detention.

Azar insisted that his agency will comply with a ruling from District Judge Dana Sabraw to reunite all children separated from their parents under President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy by the end of this month. The judge ordered the department to reunite children under 5 by Tuesday and all minors by July 26.

“We will use every minute of time we have to confirm the parentage of those individuals … and to confirm that those parents are actually suitable for reunification, and then we will comply with the court’s order and reunify them,” Azar said. “We will comply with the artificial deadlines established by the courts.”

Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who led the lawsuit that prompted Sabraw to issue the nationwide injunction, said the government needs to stop casting blame and start focusing on reuniting the families.

“The Trump administration’s attempt to shift the blame to the court is incomprehensible, given how much time the court gave the government to fix its own mess,” Gelernt said. “When the government wants to marshal its resources to separate families, it has shown that it can do it quickly and efficiently, but when told to reunite families, it somehow finds it too difficult and cumbersome to accomplish.”

The number of children in question has changed significantly.

In early June, U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimated that 2,342 children had been separated from their parents under the zero tolerance policy carried out by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. On June 20, Azar testified before Congress that they had reunited several hundred families, leaving 2,053 children in HHS custody. On June 26, he testified that the number had fallen to 2,047.

Thursday, Azar said his department was forced to examine the cases of all 11,800 minors in its custody because the judge ordered all children to be reunited with their parents, even those separated before the zero tolerance policy went into full effect in May.

Most of the cases, he said, were minors who crossed the border on their own, but almost 3,000 may have been separated, leading to the higher estimate. About 100 of them are under 5, Azar said.

His department works case-by-case to ensure that each minor is indeed related to his or her purported parent. Azar said that can usually be accomplished by checking paperwork, such as birth certificates and consular documents. He said that process can be slow.