463 parents may have been deported without their children
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration told a federal court Tuesday that more than 450 migrant parents whose children were separated from them are no longer in the United States, raising questions about whether the parents fully understood that they were being deported without their children.
The parents — nearly onefifth of the 2,551 migrants whose children were taken from them after crossing the southwest border — were either swiftly deported or somehow left the country without their children, government lawyers said.
The exact number, 463, is still “under review,” the lawyers added, and could change. However, the disclosure was the first time the government has acknowledged that hundreds of migrant families face formidable barriers of bureaucracy and distance that were unforeseen in the early stages of the government’s “zero- tolerance” policy on border enforcement.
The government’s previous estimate of the number of such cases was just 12, though that applied only to parents of the youngest children.
“We are extremely worried that a large percentage of parents may already have been removed without their children,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging the government’s handling of migrant children in a lawsuit. He said further clarification was needed to understand just what has happened.
Facing a court- ordered deadline of Thursday, federal agencies must reunite more than 1,500 migrant parents with their children within about 48 hours. Those parents are just a portion of the total number who were separated: those who have been deemed eligible after a background check and a confirmation of where they are in the United States or abroad.
Returning children even to eligible parents has been messy and has revealed challenges facing the government as it complies with the judicial order. For example, reunifications at the Port Isabel detention center in South Texas screeched to a halt on Sunday after it was locked down for five hours, according to Carlos Garcia, an immigration lawyer who was prevented from entering the building to meet with his clients. The lockdown resulted from an accidental miscounting of detainees there, Mr. Garcia said.
It was only the latest hiccup at Port Isabel, where parents, children and their advocates have had to wait for hours, or even days, for reunification. “It’s a mess,” a person familiar with the reunification process said on Tuesday, adding that “the wait times have been enormous.”
The person said that the children’s escorts have had to request hotel rooms, which have been approved by the Health and Human Services Department, the agency that oversees care of the separated children.
The hurdles that remain were discussed at a status hearing Tuesday, where little more was explained about the number of parents who appear to have left or have been sent out of the country without their children.
The judge who ordered the reunifications, Dana M. Sabraw of Federal District Court in San Diego, called the situation the “unfortunate” result of a policy that was introduced “without forethought to reunification or keeping track of people.”
Some immigrant advocates said many of the migrant parents had agreed to be deported quickly, believing that doing so would speed up reunification — and perhaps not understanding that they would be leaving their children behind.
“Our attorney volunteers working with detained separated parents are seeing lots of people who signed forms that they didn’t understand,” said Taylor Levy, a legal coordinator at Annunciation House in El Paso, which assists migrants. “They thought the only way they would see their child again is by agreeing to deportation.”
Border authorities are pressuring people to accept speedy deportation, immigration lawyers and advocates say.