US ‘still working’ to reunite 2,053 children with families

WASHINGTON: The US government said it still had 2,053 children in its custody who were separated from their parents under Presi­dent Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, and set out its most detailed plans yet on how it would reunite families.

The Department of Home­land Security (DHS) said late on Saturday it had a “well coordinated” process in place — in the face of criticism from lawyers for parents and children who have said they have seen little evidence of an organised system.

A total of 522 children had already been reunited with parents, the agency added in a factsheet published three days after Trump ended his policy of separating families on the US-Mexico border, after images of youngsters in cages triggered outrage at home and abroad.

“The United States government knows the location of all children in its custody and is working to reunite them with their families,” the DHS said.

The factsheet said the Trump administration has a process for how parents would be reunited with their children “for the purposes of removal,” or deportation.

Deportation proceedings could take months to complete, and the factsheet did not say whether parents and children would be reunited in the intervening time.

The factsheet said children are given the chance to speak with a “vetted parent, guardian or relative” within 24 hours of arriving at a facility run by Department of Health and Human Serv­ices (HHS) — the agency that has custody of the children.

Sirine Shebaya, a senior staff attorney with Muslim Advocates, said she and two other lawyers met about 70 detained Central American migrants at Port Isabel on Friday and Saturday. All but one had been separated from their children, she added in an interview before the factsheet was published.

Several of the migrants had been given a number to call to try to locate their children, but found their calls wouldn’t go through or no one picked up, she said. If they did manage to get someone on the line, they were often told they would get a call back useless to them while in a detention center.