Immigrant parents face many obstacles

HOUSTON — The U.S. government’s improvised system to reunite immigrant families it separated at the border has left hundreds of parents in limbo after they were deemed “ineligible” to get their children back.

They include a man who had his 2-year-old daughter taken because agents didn’t believe he was the father, forcing him to submit DNA evidence to prove he was the parent.

Hundreds of parents were deported, including a family in Honduras losing patience each day their 11-year-old child remains in the U.S. A father in Guatemala prefers that his teenager remain in the U.S. because it’s safer. A woman had her son given to her aunt and now remains in immigration detention due to a prior deportation.

The government and American Civil Liberties Union are waging a court fight over how to best reunify the families, but the process has been bogged down. The government on Thursday went so far as to ask the ACLU to its “considerable resources” to assist with reunifications. The ACLU thinks the Trump administration needs to do more to fix the problem.

Friday, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw agreed, saying the Trump administration is solely responsible for reuniting children separated from their parents.

“The reality is that for every parent that is not located, there will be a permanently orphaned child and that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration,” Sabraw said.

The Associated Press interviewed immigrants who remain separated from their children in multiple countries as well as their lawyers to capture the variety of ways the government has been unable to meet court-ordered deadlines to