Wall Street Journal
By Ian Lovett and Louise Radnofsky
June 25, 2018
WASHINGTON—The Trump administration sought to establish processes to reunify families separated under its controversial “zero tolerance” policy on illegal immigration, though the weekend moves did little to allay confusion over how roughly 2,000 children spread across the country would be reconnected with their parents.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said that a separate group of more than 500 children had been reunited with adults, as federal agencies worked to enact President Donald Trump’s executive order ending the policy of separating children from adults who have crossed into the U.S. illegally and detain families together instead.
The officials said the agency will operate its main center for family “reunification and removal” at Port Isabel, in Los Fresnos, Texas. The specific location of the families that had already been reunited wasn’t immediately clear.
“Things are really crazy right now,” said Jodi Goodwin, a lawyer representing migrants detained at Port Isabel, many of whom have been held for weeks without being able to contact their children. Ms. Goodwin said Port Isabel wasn’t set up for family detention and she didn’t know how parents and children could be held together there.
Despite some progress, a range of unanswered questions hung over the effort to straighten out the bureaucratic turmoil, including the locations of some of the children—leaving local officials around the country to compile their own tallies of who was placed in their jurisdictions.
Meanwhile, disagreements among top administration officials about how to weigh competing demands to continue to prosecute adults crossing the border, and simultaneously comply with the president’s directive to detain adults together with their children while their asylum claims are adjudicated, produced little firm guidance about how the system would work as more immigrants arrive. Agency officials were set to meet again Monday.
“When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order,” he wrote.
It is unclear whether he has any policy proposals to support that suggestion or the authority to enforce it. He also described the immigrants as people who “invade our Country.”
Under his executive order last week, the administration will seek to detain families together while their asylum claims are adjudicated, although it faces significant logistical and legal hurdles in doing so. Mr. Trump has committed to maintain the policy of prosecuting all adults for illegal entry. Federal agencies may soon run out of space, money or both.
The efforts have been complicated by federal bureaucracy, which has sent children to the custody of one department and parents to another. In addition, when separations began last month, no system was in place for tracking them, leaving government officials, immigration lawyers and refugee agencies scrambling to figure out which children are in their custody and where their parents are being held.
“We at a minimum have to deal with the family separation,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas) told Fox on Sunday. “I’m a father of five—I think this is inhumane.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Mr. Trump to appoint a czar to oversee family reunifications. “There are thousands of kids lost in limbo,” the New York Democrat said. “Someone from the White House who can whip things into shape and coordinate among the various agencies is very much needed.”
While parents have been held at ICE detention centers near the border, the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for the children, many of whom have been sent to shelters and foster homes around the country. In addition to the 2,053 children who were turned into unaccompanied minors by the policy, HHS has approximately 10,000 more children in its care who arrived alone.
Officials in Los Angeles said at least 100 children were in their area; around 700 are in New York, according to state officials there; 66 are at a shelter in Chicago, which said it had identified a family member for “most of them.” More than a dozen more are at multiple sites in south Florida and 22 at a shelter in San Antonio.
Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, said he was working to help figure out who the children in Los Angeles are and where their parents were held.
Some immigrant advocates expressed concerns that some children may never be reunified with their parents. Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.), however, said the government hadn’t lost track of the location of children.
“We know where every single child is,” Mr. Lankford told NBC on Sunday. The issue, he said, is that it wasn’t clear whether children had arrived with a parent or with another adult.
Federal officials said they were working to develop a database for tracking where the children were, and had established a call center for parents trying to locate their children.
HHS said that when it took over care for unaccompanied minors, it had information from the Department of Homeland Security about how the children entered the U.S. and “to the extent possible” information about the location of a parent or guardian, with access to a central database it could update as location of the child changed. ICE said that it had implemented an “identification mechanism” to track linked family members through detention and removal proceedings.
Meanwhile, at the shelters where children are being held, case workers are struggling even to figure out which children had been separated from their parents and which ones arrived alone.
“We do not have access to information about whether the child has been separated, and there have been inaccuracies in some of the information” coming from the government, said Ashley Feasley, director of policy for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops office of migration, which runs several small-scale shelters where migrant children are being housed.
“If you have children who have just experienced a traumatizing separation from their parents,” she said, “the likelihood of them giving a coherent narrative about their biographical information will go down.”
At a political rally Saturday in Nevada, Mr. Trump defended his immigration policy, accusing Democrats of backing “weak, weak borders,” saying at one point: “I think I got elected largely because we are strong on the border.”
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