Wall Street Journal
By Arian Campo-Flores and Biography @acampoflores Arian.Campo-Flores@dowjones.com Louise Radnofsky
June 27, 2018
A week after President Donald Trump halted the separation of families who crossed into the U.S. illegally, the process of reuniting the more than 2,000 children in custody with their parents has proved challenging.
The Department of Health and Human Services has the whereabouts of all the children in its care, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has the information about the parents, but the two government departments are still trying to link the two, according to Jonathan White, from the office of the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS.
“We are working to get all these kids ready to be placed back with their parents, get that all cleared up,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said Tuesday. HHS officials said 2,047 children are currently in its care, down slightly from 2,053 separated children as of June 20.
Officials couldn’t immediately say where in the U.S. the children are, citing a “dynamic” situation. But they said they have always known the “whereabouts, status and well-being” of every child in the department’s custody.
A federal judge late Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to temporarily stop separating migrant families and reunite all children with their parents, ruling that the “situation has reached a crisis level.”
The nationwide preliminary injunction requires the federal government to reunite all children within 30 days and those younger than 5 years old within two weeks. U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said parents can no longer be detained or deported without their children unless the minors are found to be in danger or the parents have consented.
The ruling follows a week in which many parents and immigration advocates expressed frustration over the infrastructure set up to facilitate communication between parents and children. A toll-free hotline set up to provide information about the children is frequently busy and often leads to a dead end, they said. Other difficulties have arisen from a lack of coordination among federal agencies.
“Everyone is trying to work backwards to piece things together,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, which works with unaccompanied immigrant children. “That’s proving to be very painfully slow.”
Ms. Young said HHS may know the names and locations of the children and ICE may have the same information for the parents, but connecting those two troves has been challenging.
Natalia Cornelio, the criminal justice reform program director at nonprofit Texas Civil Rights Project, said the process is tedious, involving multiple calls to get confirmation that a child is in government care and to locate a case manager. “Very few case managers have called us back,” said Ms. Cornelio, whose group has helped reunite four sets of parents with their children.
The problem is that after separation, the children entered a different bureaucratic and legal process than their parents. The children are in the care of HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. The agency has a process through which it deals with unaccompanied children: They get placed in foster care or with a partner agency. And then a process is initiated to locate a parent or guardian who can take the child from their care.
After that, a multistep process begins that includes background checks, fingerprints and documentation to prove relationships. All of this is needed to ensure the children are safe, Mr. White said.
The administration said over the weekend that 522 children had been reunited with adults after border separations, raising hopes that HHS was moving children transferred to its care back to their parents.
But on Tuesday, HHS said the 522 children had never been in its care. Instead, it said, they were still in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security, which allowed Customs and Border Protection to reunite them more easily with adults who recently returned from court proceedings. Those families had been transferred together for detention by ICE, the administration said.
For separated families, the administration said Tuesday it wouldn’t seek to reunite children with adults who remain in detention because children can’t be held with parents in federal immigration jails for more than 20 days, due to a court settlement.
As a result, parents can only be reunited with their children if they have been released from detention. Otherwise, children will remain under HHS’s care until they can be released to close family members, such as siblings and grandparents, or family friends in the U.S.—a process that can take time.
At an El Paso, Texas, facility run by Annunciation House, which works with immigrants, 32 parents released from ICE detention have been trying since Sunday to reunite with their children.
Mario, a Honduran immigrant who was separated from his 10-year-old daughter at the border, said he has tried calling the number officials gave him to find out where she is. He said he repeatedly calls, only to be placed on hold for long stretches of time. He said he has never reached a person who can tell him where his daughter is.
“I haven’t known anything about my daughter since they took her,” said Mario, who provided only his first name.
Mario Russell, director of immigrant and refugee services for Catholic Charities of New York, said some children have been repatriated and “reunited with their parents abroad, because their parents were deported.” He said he hadn’t seen children reunited with parents who are still in the U.S.
Arnovis Guido said he was deported back to El Salvador last week without his 6-year-old daughter, who remains at a shelter in Arizona. He said he was separated from her soon after they were detained by authorities at the border and didn’t make contact with her while in custody for nearly a month. He eventually agreed to leave without her, and is working with Raices, a nonprofit legal group, to have her either sent home or to his brother in Kansas.
Now in phone contact with his daughter, Mr. Guido said she asked during a recent call: “Papi, why didn’t you take me with you?”
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