Biden to begin efforts to reunite migrant families separated by Trump administration

The Biden administration will announce on Tuesday plans to identify and reunite hundreds of families who were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration and remain apart years later.

President Joe Biden will create a new task force to reunite families through an executive order, following through on a campaign promise to undo some of the damage inflicted by the Trump administration’s most controversial immigration policy. Biden officials did not yet have details on the scale or timing of the reunification effort, but said that the task force would make recommendations on how separated parents and children could be brought back together.

The task force, according to a senior administration official, will “work across the U.S. government, with key stakeholders and representatives of impacted families, and with partners across the hemisphere to find parents and children separated by the Trump Administration.”

Between July 2017 and June 2018, the Trump administration separated at least 5,500 children from their parents along the border in an attempt to deter migration. The American Civil Liberties Union says that at least 1,000 of those families are likely to remain separated - parents scattered mostly across Central America and children living with relatives in the United States.

“The first order of the task force will be to get a better handle on these numbers and start reuniting children with their parents,” said the senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a matter before it is formally announced.

Because of poor government record keeping, it remains unclear how many parents were deported without their children and where they are currently living, a major challenge facing any reunion effort. Attorneys and advocates have been unable to find hundreds of separated families, in some cases sending search parties into remote parts of Central America in attempts to locate them.

Many of those parents have spent the past two or three years trying to raise their children over video calls, unsure if or when they would ever be together again. Some returned to the U.S. border in hopes of finding their children but were once again apprehended by immigration agents and deported a second time.

“It’s a daily horror for us who are living without our children. It’s an endless sadness,” said Maria, a Guatemalan mother of a 10-year-old girl who was separated on the Arizona-Mexico border in July 2017. “All we want is the opportunity to see our kids, to be with them again.”

“I tell my daughter to have patience. ‘Very soon we’ll see each other,’ I say,” said Maria, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used due to threats she has faced in her home country.

Like many separated parents, she watched the U.S. election closely, knowing that a Biden victory would improve her chances of seeing her daughter again. But she has since struggled to discern what the Biden administration’s plan is for parents like her, or any timeline for her possible family reunification.

Advocates have emphasized the need not only to reunite families, but also to provide them with protection from deportation and a path to citizenship. When a court ordered the Trump administration to reunite families in 2018, many reunited parents were not given any legal status, making them immediately deportable and raising the prospect of re-separation.

“We have entrusted Joe Biden to keep his word to bring these families together and help make them whole,” said Carol Anne Donohoe, a managing attorney at Al Otro Lado, who is working with 32 separated families. “That means resettling these families in the United States, giving them legal status, and resources to help them heal. We also demand accountability so that Family Separation doesn’t go down as yet another stain on this nation’s history that is never redressed.”

Government officials said they had not settled on a single legal status that would be given to returning parents, adding that families could receive different visas or legal protections depending on their cases.

Attorneys and advocates have also raised concerns that minor charges - such as illegally reentering the United States - could be held against separated parents and stand in the way of them possibly being reunited with their children.

The executive order will allow the task force to evaluate family separation cases “on an individual basis, taking into account the preferences of the family and the well-being of the children,” the senior administration official said.

“The creation of a task force was expected but what we need now is an immediate commitment to specific remedies, including reunification in the U.S., permanent legal status, and restitution for all of the 5,500-plus families separated by the Trump administration,” said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, the lead lawyer in the family separation lawsuit. “Anything short of that will be extremely troubling given that the U.S. government engaged in deliberate child abuse.”

It remains unclear whether the U.S. government will conduct its own searches for separated families and arrange their return to the United States, or if that work will be outsourced to nongovernmental organizations that did it independently during the Trump administration.

The task force will consist of government officials across agencies and will be chaired by the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. It also remains unclear how the task force - or the Biden administration more broadly - will pursue demands for reparations among separated families, or how it will respond to calls to investigate former officials who were responsible for crafting the policy.

Under Biden, according to the senior official, the federal government “will not repeat the policies and practices that led to the separation of these families.”