US says 3,000 children need to be reunited with parents

HHS chief vows agency will meet judge’s deadline

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 children with their parents, 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 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 fully 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 age 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 the nationwide injunction, said the government needs to start focusing on 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 children with their parents, leaving 2,053 children in custody. On June 26, he said 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 on their own, but almost 3,000 may have been separated.

He said some minors are labeled as separated from their parents, but when their cases are inspected more closely, they reveal the parents separated from the children before crossing the border, meaning the U.S. government has no responsibility to reunite them.

Azar said his officials do DNA checks of all relationships. A private contractor does a cheek swab of each person, then compares the DNA to verify the relationship. Jonathan White, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, said those tests are necessary to ensure that human traffickers posing as parents don’t get children.

“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.”

Lee Gelernt

American Civil Liberties Union attorney