If Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden wins the White House, he plans to create a federal task force dedicated to unifying the families separated at the border.
Biden will issue the executive order on his first day in office in order to bring together the 545 children who remain separated from their families, potentially permanently, according to a campaign announcement made Thursday morning. The task force is the subject of a new Biden ad, which will air in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.
The ad includes the moment from the second presidential debate in which Biden called the situation “criminal,” to which President Trump noted that the children are “so well taken care of.”
The former vice president’s policy announcement came about a week after a report alleged that the administration was unable to locate the families of the missing children, which was first reported by the New York Times. The families were separated beginning in 2017 under one of the Trump administration’s most controversial immigration policies. Under the president’s “zero tolerance” policy, prosecutors sought to file criminal charges against people who crossed the border illegally, including parents who were ultimately separated from their children upon being taken into custody.
Chase Jennings, an assistant press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, has pushed back on the “narrative” that the administration has been searching for their children but not finding them. He 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,” he added that DHS has “yet to identify a single family that wants their child reunited with them in their country of origin” out of the 485 parents of children who have been contacted.
