Biden to start reuniting families separated under Trump

LOS AngELES: The United States this week will reunite four migrant families separated at the US-Mexico border during the Trump administration, US officials said, a small step toward fulfilling a campaign promise by President Joe Biden.

The families will be allowed to enter the United States through an emergency process known as “humanitarian parole,” Michelle Brane, who heads a Biden-created task force that aims to reunite separated families, told a call with reporters on Sunday.

“In these cases that we’re talking about this week, the children are in the United States and the parents are coming to join them,” she said.

Lee Gelernt, lead attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued former President Donald Trump’s administration over the separations policy, said his organisation did not know how many children remain separated from parents but that the number was likely more than 1,000.

Two of the four families include mothers who were separated from their children in late 2017, one Honduran and another Mexican, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said yesterday, declining to detail their identities.

He described them as children who were three years old at the time and “teenagers who have had to live without their parent during their most formative years”

Parents will return to the United States on humanitarian parole while authorities consider other longer-term forms of legal status, said Michelle Brane, executive director of the administration’s Family Reunification Task Force.

Exactly how many families will reunite in the United States and in what order is linked to negotiations with the American Civil Liberties Union to settle a federal lawsuit in San Diego, but Mayorkas said there were more to come.

“We continue to work tirelessly to reunite many more children with their parents in the weeks and months ahead,” Mayorkas said.

“We have a lot of work still to do, but I am proud of the progress we have made and the reunifications that we have helped to achieve this week.”

More than 5,000 children were separated from their parents during the Trump administration, many of them under a “zerotolerance” policy to criminally prosecute any adult who entered the country illegally, according to court filings.