President Joe Biden has prioritized creating a special task force to reunify the families. (File)
Washington:
In May 2018 a six-year-old Honduran boy named Andres was wrested kicking and screaming from his father by US border guards implementing Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy toward undocumented immigrants.
It took another 10 months for the pair to be reunited — but they were among the lucky ones.
Hundreds of migrant children like Andres are still waiting to rejoin parents after being taken away by the Trump administration.
President Joe Biden has prioritized creating a special task force to reunify the families as part of his sweeping redo of Trump’s immigration policies, which focused on deterring migration from Central America.
“It was a moral failure and a national shame that the prior administration used family separation as a weapon against desperate families and children,” an administration official told journalists, briefing on Biden’s plans.
“The Biden administration is committed to remedy this awful harm the Trump administration inflicted on families,” said the official.
Merciless crackdown
Trump came to power in 2017 promising to halt the mass movement of undocumented migrants over the southern border.
But an initial crackdown only slowed the flow, with tens of thousands of individuals and families — especially from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — crossing each month, and little mechanism in place to send them back.
A year later he announced the zero tolerance program, declaring that any undocumented border crossers would be arrested and charged with a crime.
As part of the new regime children were separated from their parents, on a promise that families would be reunited within weeks. But this did not happen in thousands of cases.
The policy was applied with little mercy, court filings showed.
After being taken from his father Jacinto, Andres went into the custody of US officials, while his father was deported to Honduras.
While their separation lasted less than a year, it took a full 16 months to reunite 13-year-old Karin from the mother she was torn from as she was placed in handcuffs.
Another youngster, seven-year-old Diana, went to sleep with her father in an immigration facility and woke up to find he was gone, taken away by US authorities.
A public outcry and lawsuits forced the Trump administration to halt the separations, but for as many as 5,000 children, the damage had been done.
Trump’s immigration officials kept poor records and did little to cooperate with groups seeking to help the children, forcing more lawsuits.
According to a document in one of those cases dated January, 611 children had still not been reconnected with their parents.
Underscoring the issue of poor documentation, the court filing says that for 392 migrant children, their parents “are believed” to have been deported.
For another 201, the parents “are believed” to be in the United States. And for 18, there are no known contacts.
No one really knows how many children remain without their families but the figure is estimated to be “as high as 1,000,” said the Biden official.
The new task force will have to come up with policies to deal with reunifications. A key question: will the children who are reunited be permitted to stay in the United States legally with their parents?
And migrant advocate groups want the children to be able to benefit from counseling for the trauma of separation.
On these questions Biden’s immigration advisors remain cautious, saying they have to act within US law, but adding that each family’s situation can be different.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)