WASHINGTON – Attorneys working to reunite immigrant parents and children separated by the Trump administration reported Wednesday that they found the parents of 105 children in the past month.
The steering committee of pro-bono attorneys and advocates working on reunification said it had yet to find the parents of 506 children, compared to 611 on January 14, 2021, the last time it reported data to a federal judge that oversees the process.
Of those 506 children, lawyers said the parents of about 322 were believed to have been deported from the United States, making it difficult to find them.
The judge does not require the lawyers to say how many parents and children have actually been reunited.
The Biden administration recently formed a task force that will place the responsibility of finding and reuniting families separated by the Trump administration, primarily under the 2018 “zero tolerance policy,” in the hands of the federal government.
In their court filing on Wednesday, attorneys representing the separated families and working to reunite them said they would work with the task force in the future.
Lawyers for the Justice Department said they hope the task force “will resolve many, if not all, outstanding issues” related to the Southern District of California lawsuit that resulted in the judge-supervised reunification process.
One of the reasons it has been so difficult to find parents who were separated from their children is that many agreed to be deported without their children to allow their children to remain in the United States to apply for asylum, their lawyers say.
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project and an attorney representing separated families in the lawsuit, has said the task force must commit to bringing deported parents back to the United States under special protections. to be able to reunite with their children.
This story was first written by NBC News.
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