A group of legal advocates working to reunite migrant families said the Trump administration handed over data that could be instrumental to its mission.
The Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review gave the group access to phone numbers and addresses of parents and children, information that will be vital to its searches, lawyers said in a court filing on Wednesday, according to NBC News.
In June 2018, U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw of San Diego ordered the administration to return to their parents all migrant children in custody as the result of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. In March 2019, the judge added that the order applied to all families that were separated at the border on or after July 1, 2017.
Since then, pro bono lawyers have been working on behalf of those families to get them in touch.
When the order originally came down in 2018, the timeline was short, requiring that all those children in custody be reunited within 30 days, but due to a lack of proper infrastructure, the government required more time to get the job done.
In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general released a report stating, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) adopted various ad hoc methods to record and track family separations, but these methods led to widespread errors.” The report continued, “These conditions persisted because CBP did not address its known IT deficiencies adequately before implementing Zero Tolerance in May 2018.”
The filing claimed that 628 parents’ whereabouts are still unknown, NBC News reported.
“We have been repeatedly asking the Trump administration for any additional data they might have to help locate the families and are only finally getting these new phone numbers and addresses,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, told ABC News. “Unfortunately, it took the issue reaching the level of a presidential debate to move them to give us this data.”
In October, DHS press secretary Chase Jennings said, “DHS has taken every step to facilitate the reunification of these families where the parents wanted such reunification to occur. The simple fact is this: after contact has been made with the parents to reunite them with their children, many parents have refused. In the current litigation, for example, out of the parents of 485 children whom Plaintiffs’ council has been able to contact, they have yet to identify a single family that wants their child reunited with them in their country of origin.”
Full statement: pic.twitter.com/cpiQkUPVDt
— Chase Jennings (@SpoxDHS) October 21, 2020
In a response to the statement, NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff tweeted, “Wrong, Chase. I literally talked to one of those families on Monday — 8 year old in CA (taken from his dad when he was 6) and father in Honduras trying to reunite — and will have audio of that interview on @NicolleDWallace’s show momentarily.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the DHS and the DOJ’s Executive Office of Immigration Review for comment.
