Biden admin to begin reuniting families separated at border

Four families separated during the administration of Donald Trump will be reunited this week, officials said.

In this file photo, people protest against the Trump administration's 'zero-tolerance' policy that separated migrant children from their families [File: Monica Lozano/Reuters]

The administration of United States President Joe Biden has said that four families that were separated at the Mexico border during Donald Trump’s presidency will be reunited this week.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called Monday’s announcement “just the beginning” of a broader effort by the administration to reunite separated family members in the US.

Two of the four families include mothers who were separated from their children in late 2017, one Honduran and another Mexican, Mayorkas said, declining to detail their identities.

He described them as children who were three years old at the time and “teenagers who have had to live without their parent during their most formative years”.

The parents will return to the US on humanitarian parole while authorities consider other longer-term forms of legal status, said Michelle Brane, executive director of the administration’s Family Reunification Task Force. The children are already in the US.

Exactly how many families will reunite in the US and in what order is linked to negotiations with the American Civil Liberties Union to settle a federal lawsuit in San Diego, but Mayorkas said there were more to come.

“We continue to work tirelessly to reunite many more children with their parents in the weeks and months ahead,” Mayorkas told reporters ahead of the announcement.

“We have a lot of work still to do, but I am proud of the progress we have made and the reunifications that we have helped to achieve this week.”

The ACLU, in a tweet, called on the Biden administration to reunite “every last family and ensure that this can never happen again”.

‘Zero-tolerance’ policy

More than 5,000 children were separated from their parents during the Trump administration going back to July 1, 2017, many of them under a “zero-tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute any adult who entered the country without documentation, according to court filings.

The Biden administration is doing its own count going back to Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and, according to Brane, believes more than 1,000 families remain separated.

While family separation under “zero-tolerance” ended in June 2018 under court order and shortly after Trump reversed course, Biden has repeatedly assailed the practice as an act of cruelty.

A Justice Department inspector general’s report released in January detailed how the Trump administration’s poor planning and coordination during the policy’s rollout further exacerbated the toll on families while making future reunification more difficult.

An executive order signed by Biden on his first day in office pledged to reunite families that were still separated “to the greatest extent possible”.

The reunifications begin as the Biden administration confronts the third major increase in unaccompanied children arriving at the border in seven years.

It has made strides moving children from grossly overcrowded Border Patrol facilities to US Department of Health and Human Services shelters, which are more suited to longer-term stays until children are placed with sponsors in the US, typically parents or close relatives.

The average stay for an unaccompanied child in Border Patrol custody has plummeted to about 20 hours, below the legal limit of 72 hours and down from 133 hours in late March, Mayorkas said.

There are currently 677 unaccompanied children in Border Patrol custody, down from more than 5,700 in late March.

Health and Human Services opened 14 emergency intake centres, raising capacity to nearly 20,000 beds from 952 when the Federal Emergency Management Agency was dispatched on March 13, Mayorkas said.

About 400 asylum officers from US Citizenship and Immigration Services have been assigned as case managers to speed the release of children to sponsors.

As of Thursday, Health and Human Services had 22,557 children in its care.

Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies