The Trump administration announced a series of steps late Saturday to reunite families that had been separated at the border under a now-abandoned policy as it reported 522 children so far have been returned to their families.
The statement set out a process for divided family members to locate one another following days of confusion about how the administration would reunite children taken from caregivers under President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach toward border crossings.
It wasn’t clear how many of the 522 children had been reunited with parents or guardians since Trump announced on Wednesday that the government would no longer separate families. Nor was it clear whether any immigrant children who had been transferred to the U.S. Health and Human Services Department for longer-term custody had yet rejoined their families.
The border patrol took 2,342 children from their parents from May 5 to June 9, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
The 522 children were reunited with their parents by the border patrol, the statement said. Some children were still in the border patrol’s custody when their parents finished criminal proceedings for crossing into the U.S., the statement said, and those families were then transferred together to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to face deportation proceedings. Children caught by the border patrol are supposed to be sent to HHS within 72 hours.
HHS had in custody 2,053 immigrant children taken from their parents as of Wednesday, when Trump signed an executive order reversing the family separation policy, according to the statement, jointly issued by the health department and DHS.
The administration has not designated a single point-person to oversee the reunification process, as some members of Congress have
suggested. But it has settled on a location for much of the activity: Port Isabel Service Processing Center, 20 miles northeast of Brownsville.
ICE has posted information in all its facilities to help parents locate and communicate with children in HHS custody by calling a help line that is staffed by live operators for 12 hours a day Monday through Friday, according to the statement. Any details provided to parents in these calls will be sent to HHS, which along with ICE will review its data to locate children and verify the parent-child relationship.
When children are transferred into custody, HHS receives information from DHS about how they entered the country and “to the extent possible” information about parents or guardians, according to the statement. There is a central database that HHS and DHS can both access and update if the location of a parent or child changes, the agencies said.
In all, about 17 percent of the 12,000 or so minors held in HHS-funded facilities were separated from their parents or guardians at the border. The rest entered the U.S. unaccompanied by a caregiver.
