San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Separated migrant families put hopes on Biden
Task force examining ways to let parents, children settle in U.S.
For the thousands of migrant families who were separated at the border by the Trump administration, the remedy that has eluded them thus far may soon be in sight: a pathway to legal status in the United States, with their loved ones at their sides.
That possibility is just beginning to be explored by a task force created last month by President Joe Biden, who has called the separations a “moral and national shame.”
The task force’s primary focus is to reunite the more than 1,000 families who remain apart, most of them separated by international borders. The new Department of Homeland Security secretary has promised to allow deported parents to reunite with their children in the United States — a concession that the Trump administration had refused.
“And if, in fact, they seek to reunite here in the United States,” Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Monday, “we will explore lawful pathways for them to remain in the United States and to address
the family needs so we are acting as restoratively as possible.”
But what those pathways might look like — and how lasting they would be — remain entirely unclear.
The task force will likely examine a playbook of presidential powers that allows the executive branch to parole certain immigrants back into the country and provide sanctuary. But such relief, likely achieved through a mix-and-match approach, would be temporary and could be complicated by standing immigration court orders.
Inserting families back into the overburdened and capricious immigration court system to restate their asylum claims is another option — one that immigrant advocates are adamantly discouraging.
“In the end they could be no better off. We are just kicking the can down the road,” said Jeremy Mclean, policy advocacy manager for Justice in Motion, a New York-based nonprofit that has helped search for parents. “It’s also retraumatizing. If possible, we would like to have these families not go through that again.”
While the affected families have received a collective wave of publicity for the brutality they endured, their numbers are relatively small considering the roughly 1.3 million immigration cases pending as of January, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
The task force has also so far been silent on how wide a net it will be casting in its effort to make amends.
In all, some 5,400 children were separated by the Trump administration — many who were reunited with their parents under a San Diego court order and are now back in their home countries, as well as others who were barred from reuniting due to their parents’ criminal records. Will the task force afford these families the same opportunities for legal status?
“I really want this task force to not be centered on each individual case, whether or not they fit certain criteria,” said Carol Anne Donohoe, a managing attorney for Al Otro Lado, a nonprofit providing legal and humanitarian support to immigrants. “The only criteria they need to fit is ‘Were they or were they not separated from their child?’ and ‘Did we or did we not torture them?’”
Unraveling chaos
When the Trump administration decided to separate migrant families under a “zero-tolerance policy” in an attempt to clamp down on asylum seekers at the border, it did so without any making any provision to reunite them.
Children were sent to government shelters while their parents were placed in federal criminal custody or civil immigration detention, or both. There was no central database tracking their movements. Parents often had no clue where their children, some just months old, had been taken, and visa versa.
Their immigration cases also branched, sending parent and child through different processes.
The zero-tolerance policy had been widely in effect across the southwestern border for about two months when U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, in a June 26, 2018, preliminary injunction, ordered families to be reunited within 30 days. His order, stemming from a lawsuit filed in San Diego federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union, focused on a known entity — a group of some 2,800 children who were in government shelters at the time.
Matching the children with their parents was an enormous undertaking, made somewhat simpler in that many of the adults were still in U.S. immigration detention. Some 2,000 families were reunited.
However, the effort revealed about 400 parents had already been deported. The Trump administration refused to allow the parents to reunite in the U.S. — a decision that the court upheld.
“The Trump administration gave families only two brutal choices: to remain separated from their child or bring their child back to the very danger from which they fled,” the ACLU’S lead attorney on the case, Lee Gelernt, told the Union-tribune.
Most parents chose to leave their children safely in the U.S. with sponsors to pursue asylum.
Just as the reunification effort was wrapping up, another revelation dropped: Potentially hundreds if not thousands more families had been separated as part of an undisclosed pilot program in Texas a year earlier.
Sabraw ordered a fullthrottle effort to identify and locate this new group, a tally that came to about 1,500 children. The endeavor was significantly more challenging due to the passage of time and lack of centralized records. By then, the children had been placed with sponsors, and the vast majority of parents had been deported.
Volunteers began the painstaking process of making contact, often equipped with nothing more than old addresses or phone numbers.
On-the-ground outreach by nonprofits in Central America resumed, with volunteers navigating difficult conditions and a deepseated mistrust in government. Then it was sidelined by the unthinkable: a deadly pandemic.
As of Feb. 26, the parents of 499 children have yet to be located, while contact has been made with the parents of another 699 children. None have been officially reunited, although attorneys believe some parents have secretly rejoined their children in the U.S.
An additional 1,000 children have been separated since the June 2018 order. The Trump administration defended those cases, citing parental criminal records or doubts as to parentage.
Making amends
The entrance of Biden’s Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families into the situation at this point has re-energized the marathon effort to untangle the chaos of the previous administration. The task force is overseen by Michelle Brané, a noted immigration expert and longtime advocate for human rights, and includes DHS, the State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice.
Offering legal status in the U.S. would go a long way toward repairing the trauma of separation, said attorneys working with the families.
“For the most part, the reasons that families left their homes — none of that’s changed,” said Mclean of Justice in Motion. “Given the opportunity to come to a safe place with their family, most would probably jump at that.”
Attorneys had tried to