The Trump administration has released 97 percent of immigrant children that a federal judge had ordered be reunited with their parents last year, according to new court documents.
“As of February 13, 2019, Defendants have discharged 2,735 of 2,816 possible children of potential class members,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in documents submitted ahead of a court appearance Thursday.
Of the 81 who remain in the custody of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, five are about to be released in the coming days, according to the ACLU. Those released may go to a family members already in the U.S. or an adult the family has approved if the parent was deported or deemed unfit to take custody.
The children were taken away from the adults they arrived at the southern border with from last April through half of June as a result of a Justice Department directive for Customs and Border Protection to refer all adults for prosecution. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the White House had “zero tolerance” for trespassers and split the families in order to prosecute the adults.
Illegal entry is a misdemeanor on the first offense and a felony thereafter.
The ACLU sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is where families who have been taken into CBP custody would be taken. ICE can legally hold families for up to 20 days before they must release people into the country, at which point they are told to appear for their asylum hearing sometimes months or years later.
Last summer, the ACLU expanded a court case involving a woman, referred to as Ms. L, who had been separated from her daughter years earlier to a class-action lawsuit. Dana Sabraw, a judge for the Southern District of California, had ordered all children be reunited with guardians.
A recent HHS inspector general report stated thousands more children were separated from their parents during the two-month-long policy implementation last year.
In the eight months since the “zero tolerance” policy discontinued June 20, 2018, and family separations were supposed to be stopped, 245 minors have been taken from their parents custody.
However, the separations took place because of “criminality, prosecution, gang affiliation or other law enforcement purpose,” the administration told ACLU.
