The federal judge who ordered the Trump administration to return children stolen from families under the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy said in court this week that reunification was essentially completed, KQED reports. “Is it fair to say that we’re done, that everyone has been accounted for?” federal judge Dana Sabraw asked the American Civil Liberties Union. “That’s basically right,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt responded.
But while the majority of the more than 2,800 kids stolen at the southern border have been reunited with their parents, dozens remain in custody. “54 children are still awaiting release to relatives or foster homes,” KQED continued. “Of them, 21 children were denied reunification with parents immigration officials deemed ‘unfit’ or ‘ineligible’ and 33 were not reunified with parents who waived that right.”
Yes, 54 separated kids is a far cry from more than 2,800 separated children, and there’s been important work by advocates to reunite these families, but this isn’t over. It’s still 54 living, breathing, thinking, hurting human beings, and declaring mission accomplished while dozens are still in custody could make it all the more likely that they’ll simply be forgotten by an administration that has shown it just doesn’t care. This isn’t over.
It’s also not over because of the kids we don’t even know about yet. Earlier this month, Sabraw said the administration couldn’t wash its hands of the potentially thousands of kids who may have been separated before the official policy was established. While he hasn’t yet ruled if they should be included in the lawsuit, he did order “the government to submit by April 5 a detailed plan of how it would go about identifying those separated children and who would lead the effort.”
Remember that separations at the border continue, with the Texas Civil Rights Project saying in a recent report that officials accused one dad of being a gang member and took his two kids, but provided no evidence to back up their claim. Untrained agents have also separated kids with no input from child welfare experts. "How do you determine whether the child is afraid of the parent,” a former border official asked, “or afraid of the Border Patrol agent in the green uniform?" Family separation remains a crisis.