The Trump administration’s controversial family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border may have ended in 2018, but its effects are still being felt by families and children in the U.S., Mexico and Central America years later.
NBC News, more than 1,000 households affected by policy not yet unified report this week.
In 185 cases, parents separated from their children and potentially deported were not even found, atlantic organization Report.
When Joe Biden took office, the president signed an executive order creating a task force to find and unite the more than 5,000 families separated under the Trump White House.
previous government no record kept Where families are divided and where various members are sent, so the process often requires painstaking search for any trace of a divided family. Many parents are deported before they can be reunited with their children.
As of early August, Mr. Biden’s family reunification task force announced it had reconnected 400 children with their parents, a milestone that advocates celebrated.
“We’re excited that hundreds of children are finally reunited with their parents after so many years, but we haven’t even reunited half of all the families separated by the Trump administration,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney representing the American Civil Liberties Union. Separated Families , told NBC. “In fact, we still haven’t found nearly 200 families. I think a Biden administration would agree that there is still a lot of work to be done.”
independent Border Patrol has been contacted for comment.
Four parents separated from their families in Arizona in July sue the federal governmentarguing that they “were not informed, there was no information, and there was no unified plan.
According to the lawsuit, a Guatemalan parent (identified as an MSE in the complaint) came to the United States via Yuma to seek asylum. They turned themselves into Border Patrol agents who forcibly separated her from her 14-year-old son for weeks.
The boy said the incident hurt him deeply.
“I’m older now, so I try to be strong. But I still feel broken inside,” the teen, identified as JM in the lawsuit, said in court documents.
“We are taking the Biden administration to court to ensure these families receive the compensation they deserve for the trauma the federal government has inflicted on them,” Tammy Goodlett, director of litigation at RAICES, said in a statement. to Arizona Republic. “Zero tolerance is a deliberate act of abuse and it is the responsibility of the current government to redress the ongoing harm done to these families.”
In 2021, the Biden administration dropped talks on financial solutions for separated families and has Defense of Legal Family Separation in court earlier this year.
