During the final presidential debate Thursday night, impeached president Donald Trump claimed in response to a question on his family separation policy that he was "working very hard" to reunite children and parents he cruelly ripped apart. According to a recent NBC News report, hundreds of children separated from their parents before the policy officially began still haven’t been reunited with their deported parents, three years later.
But during a court hearing earlier that same day, the federal judge who in 2018 ordered the reunification of separated families called on officials “to do more” to help family reunification efforts, Associated Press reports. In fact, advocacy groups that have been tasked by the court with reunification efforts say that officials are “only now offering assistance because of the ‘backlash’ from media reports about the number of kids still awaiting reunification with their parents,” NBC News reports.
The court hearing came just days after documents in the case revealed that hundreds of children who were kidnapped from their parents in 2017 still haven’t been reunited with their deported parents. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), one of the court-appointed groups, said that of those 545 children, the parents of 283 haven’t been found at all, even after “time-consuming and arduous on-the-ground searches,” documents said.
“Unlike the 2,800 families separated under zero tolerance in 2018, most of whom remained in custody when the policy was ended by executive order, many of the more than 1,000 parents separated from their children under the pilot program had already been deported before a federal judge in California ordered that they be found,” Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff reported for NBC News.
But the AP reports that during Thursday’s hearing, Judge Dana Sabraw “refrained from issuing an order during a hearing in San Diego and instead asked Justice Department attorneys to explore ways the administration can make it easier to find the parents.” According to the report, the ACLU said the administration could do more to help groups by funding reunification efforts, but nevertheless criticized officials for mostly being hands off in repairing the damage they created.
ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told NBC News that "[t]here have never been serious specific offers to help in concrete ways in the past” from the administration, referring to a claim from government attorneys in court that they "could certainly be of some assistance"—oh, how generous of them!—as a “PR move in response to the public’s backlash.” From Melania Trump’s stunt at the border to Donald Trump’s executive order supposedly ending the policy he created, this wouldn’t be the first family separation PR move.
As Michelle Wiley and Adriana Morga have previously reported for KQED, organizations that are actually trying to reunite families have seen their grueling on-the-ground efforts to locate deported parents in Central America largely put on hold because of the novel coronavirus pandemic. “While defenders were able to connect with some people online,” they reported, “it’s much harder to build trust with traumatized parents digitally than it is in person.”
“We do not use the online research method as much because people do not trust us when we first meet,” Justice in Motion defender Dora Melara told KQED. “They can't believe there are organizations like ours. So, in person is better, because we introduce ourselves and they can see us eye to eye.” That’s the kind of good faith effort advocates put into the painstaking work of trying to correct the humanitarian disaster the administration created and is responsible for. And it’s the kind of good faith effort that continues to be lacking from the administration, no matter what they’re now claiming three years later.
"When the administration started separating families at the southern U.S. border ... there was no plan to track the families or even reunite them, even though their own experts warned these separations were causing harm,” Justice in Motion Legal Director Nan Schivone told KQED. "And here we are three years later, still dealing with the fallout."
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