Lawyers for the U.S. government told a judge today to reject a plan to reunite all migrant children who were separated from their families within one month, arguing that a “hasty” action would “cause confusion, rather than speed the process of reunifying families in a safe and efficient manner.”
The government attorneys said a 30-day timeline is unrealistic to reunify all families and defended the government’s current process. The government argued that the court should give the Trump administration time to implement the president’s executive order, which the government said would end family separations last week, before imposing new guidelines.
“Orderly implementation of that executive order will, of course, take time to be undertaken properly,” the lawyers told the court in a brief. “A hasty injunctive ruling by this Court on issues of this level of complexity would be as likely to slow and complicate reunification efforts as to speed them.”
More than 2,300 migrant children have been separated from their parents since the Trump administration launched its “zero tolerance” policy in April, which called for criminally charging all adults caught crossing the border without authorization.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit in March on behalf of a Congolese woman seeking asylum in the U.S. who was separated from her 7-year-old daughter for months and a Brazilian asylum seeker who was separated from her 14-year-old son.
This week, the ACLU asked U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California to order the government to immediately reunite all migrant children who were separated from their parents within 30 days and within 10 days for children younger than 5. ACLU lawyers also asked that parents be given a way to contact their children within a week of being separated and to stop future separations of children from their parents unless the child is in danger.
The Trump administration does not have a solid plan to reunite the thousands of children who have been forcibly removed from their parents, according to the ACLU. The Office of Refugee Resettlement has no system in place to flag a child who has been separated from a parent or to identify and track where that parent is being detained. Parents are supposed to use a resettlement agency hotline number to find their children, but the hotline regularly puts people on hold for up to half an hour, making it nearly impossible for most parents to get information on their children’s whereabouts, according to court documents.
In a court declaration today, Jallyn Sualog, acting deputy director for children’s programs for the resettlement agency, said the agency has strict guidelines on how to release minors to parents and legal guardians to ensure children aren’t trafficked or placed in dangerous home environments. One “operational challenge” in reunifying migrant parents and children, Sualog said, is that the resettlement agency often doesn’t know where the parents or legal guardians are or how to contact them.
Sabraw, the federal judge, said he would rule on a whether to issue an injunction to reunite migrant children separated from their parents soon after receiving the government’s briefings.
Amy Julia Harris can be reached at aharris@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @amyjharris.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Republish Our Content
Thanks for your interest in republishing a story from Reveal. As a nonprofit newsroom, we want to share our work with as many people as possible. You are free to embed our audio and video content and republish any written story for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license and will indemnify our content as long as you strictly follow these guidelines:
-
Do not change the story. Do not edit our material, except only to reflect changes in time and location. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
-
Please credit us early in the coverage. Our reporter(s) must be bylined. We prefer the following format: By Will Evans, Reveal.
-
If republishing our stories, please also include this language at the end of the story: “This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.”
-
Include all links from the story, and please link to us at https://www.revealnews.org.
PHOTOS
-
You can republish Reveal photos only if you run them in or alongside the stories with which they originally appeared and do not change them.
-
If you want to run a photo apart from that story, please request specific permission to license by contacting Digital Engagement Producer Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org. Reveal often uses photos we purchase from Getty and The Associated Press; those are not available for republication.
DATA
-
If you want to republish Reveal graphics or data, please contact Data Editor Soo Oh, soh@revealnews.org.
IN GENERAL
-
We do not compensate anyone who republishes our work. You also cannot sell our material separately or syndicate it.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. To inquire about syndication or licensing opportunities, please contact Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If you plan to republish our content, you must notify us republish@revealnews.org or email Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If we send you a request to remove our content from your website, you must agree to do so immediately.
-
Please note, we will not provide indemnification if you are located or publishing outside the United States, but you may contact us to obtain a license and indemnification on a case-by-case basis.
If you have any other questions, please contact us at republish@revealnews.org.