WASHINGTON — The lawyers working to reunite immigrant parents and children separated by the Trump administration reported on Wednesday that they have 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, down from 611 on Jan. 14, 2021, the last time it reported data to a federal judge overseeing the process.
Of those 506 children, the lawyers said the parents of about 322 are believed to have been deported from the U.S., making it more difficult to find them.
The lawyers are not required by the judge to say how many of the parents and children have actually been reunified.
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The Biden administration recently formed a task force that will place the responsibility of finding and reuniting the families separated by the Trump administration, primarily under the “zero tolerance policy” of 2018, in the hands of the federal government. In their court filing on Wednesday, lawyers representing the separated families and working to reunite them said they would work with the task force going forward.
Lawyers for the Justice Department said they expect the task force will “resolve many — if not all — outstanding issues” related to the lawsuit out of the Southern District of California that resulted in the reunification process overseen by the judge.
One reason it has been so hard to find parents who were separated from their children is that many agreed to be deported without their children in order to allow their children to remain in the U.S. to claim asylum, their lawyers say.
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and a lawyer representing the separated families in the lawsuit, has said the task force should commit to bringing back those deported parents to the U.S. under special protections in order to reunite with their children.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
