Migrant girls reunited with parents

Two migrant g i rl s housed in a Contra Costa County shelter for several weeks after being separated from their families at the U. S.- Mexico border were reunited with them this week, according to the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The agency told Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D- Concord, on Thursday that the two girls, who are not related, each reunited with their parents within the past five days. One of the girls is 17 and from Honduras, and the other is 13 and from Guatemala.

The reunion came just days before the government’s 6 p. m. deadline Thursday to reunite all of the parents separated from their children under President Donald Trump’s controversial “zero- tolerance” policy, which criminally prosecuted anyone who illegally crossed the border.

But the government revealed this week that more than 900 of those parents won’t be eligible for reunification because they either can’t be found or have serious criminal records. And about half — an estimated 460 undocumented immigrants — may have already been deported without their children, officials said.

“Many with a chance of never seeing their children again,” DeSaulnier said in a statement Thursday.

The congressman, who recently returned from a trip to the border, toured the shelter earlier this month and brief ly spoke with the girls.

“This is not the America I know that strives to live by the motto inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: ‘ give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,'” he said.

Southwest Key — a nonprof it network of shelters that houses unaccompanied chi ldren across three states under contracts with the federal Of fice of Refu- gee Resettlement — said it can’t comment on specific cases due to government restrictions.

The agency confirmed to the city of Pleasant Hill in an email last month — obtained exclusively by this news organization — that its local facility was housing two adolescent girls who were separated from their parents.

The emails confirmed for the first time that at least two migrant children ended up at shelters in the Bay Area.

The Of fice of Refu- gee Resettlement, which did not immediately reply to a request for comment Thursday, has previously declined to provide any details on its network of more than 100 shelters and the children they house.

The vast majority of parents who were separated from their children are asylum- seekers from Central America f leeing violence and poverty in their home countries.