New York Times
By Miriam Jordan
July 09, 2018
LOS ANGELES — About half of the migrant children under the age of 5 who were forcibly separated from their parents at the border are set to be reunited on Tuesday under a court-imposed deadline, a Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge on Monday.
The government has compiled a list of 102 of the youngest children now in custody around the country in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which last month won a preliminary injunction ordering speedy reunification of migrant families broken up under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy on border enforcement.
Judge Dana M. Sabraw of the Federal District Court in San Diego had set a deadline of Tuesday for reuniting these children with their parents, and in a conference with lawyers on Friday, he did not grant the government’s request to extend that deadline.
On Monday, Sarah B. Fabian, a Justice Department lawyer, reported that 54 of the 102 children under age 5 were scheduled to be returned to their parents on Tuesday.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they would ask the judge to at least streamline the time-consuming bureaucratic process required for reuniting additional families.
“These kids have already suffered so much because of this policy, and every extra day apart just adds to that pain,” said Lee Gelernt, an A.C.L.U. lawyer, before Monday’s court hearing.
Mr. Gelernt said that the government had not agreed to alter its “cumbersome, lengthy” reunification process, which immigration authorities say is necessary to ensure that children go to the right families. He said it was also unclear how much effort the government had made to locate parents already released from immigration custody or deported back to their home countries whose children were still in custody.
The Justice Department said Monday that the administration had “worked tirelessly” since the latest court conference on Friday “toward the shared goal of promptly reunifying families while ensuring the safety of the children.”
“The results of that work have been highly encouraging, and the Department of Justice is eager to present its progress to the court on Monday and to chart a path forward to safely reunifying other families expeditiously,” the department said in a statement.
Under the administration policy implemented in May, adults who otherwise might have been directed into civil deportation proceedings were instead criminally prosecuted for entering the country illegally. Children were removed from these parents and placed in shelters across the country, sometimes thousands of miles from where the parent was detained.
President Trump issued an executive order ending the separations amid mounting political pressure and public outrage. The administration has committed to reuniting migrant children and their families, but stringent vetting, including home visits and the fingerprinting of every member of a household where a child will be residing, have slowed the process down.
The A.C.L.U. and immigrant advocates say the exhaustive screening is meant for unaccompanied minors, typically teenagers, who enter the country alone — not for children who were brought into the country by their parents and then taken away by immigration authorities — who presumably should already be aware of their family connections.
A lawyer for the Justice Department told the court Friday that 19 parents of children who are under the age of 5 have been deported. In the case of 19 others, the parents have been released and their whereabouts is unknown, she said. She indicated that the government needed more time to reunify all the families.
Judge Sabraw said that only after the government provides a list naming the children “can we have an intelligent conversation Monday morning about which child can be reunited by July 10, which will not — and then the court can determine whether it makes sense to relax the deadline. But I need more information.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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