The federal judge who had ordered in June that separated migrant families be reunited said on Friday the Trump administration is to blame for the more than 400 cases where parents were deported and their unaccompanied children were left in federal custody.
“Many of these parents were removed from the country without their child,” U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California said during a status conference Friday afternoon.
“All of this is the result of the government’s separation and then inability and failure to track and reunite. And the reality is that for every parent who is not located there will be a permanently orphaned child. And that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration,” she added.
Sabraw has been handling the case since the American Civil Liberties Union sued the administration in June over the zero tolerance policy, which mandated all first-time illegal entrants, including adults in families, be referred for prosecution.
As a result of
the policy
, 2,551 children were taken away from the adults they arrived between ports of entry with because the kids could not go to jail or through legal proceedings, which could take months, with their parents.
Exactly 35 were later found not to have been separated from their parents after being apprehended by Border Patrol and 1,969 have been released from HHS custody, according to documents HHS released late Thursday.
ICE has maintained in media briefing calls that every parent who was deported was given a choice to be removed with his or her child, or to go alone, and that the parent chose to go alone in those cases because the objective of illegally entering the country was to get the child here permanently, not the adult.
However, court documents show
fewer
than 40
of the children
still in custody were the
re because
a parent chos
e
not to be deported with their child.
Sabraw is not content with ICE’s reasoning and said the fact that the administration has only been able to provide the whereabouts of 13 of the 410 deported parents as the ACLU tries to get in contact with them is “unacceptable.”
The administration argued the separations are similar to how children are put into protective care when a U.S. citizen adult commits a crime.
Sabraw had ordered all
children
under the age of five be reunited with the parent they arrived at the border with by July 10 and
those
older than
five be placed back with
a
guardian by July 26.
The administration placed the majority of children in
both of those groups
and argued it had hit both deadlines because it was placing all of the children Health and Human Services had deemed “eligible” for reunification.
However, the ACLU said the judge ordered all
children
be placed, not just those the government deemed eligible for placement.
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said Sabraw’s comments in court Friday were an indication
he is “refusing to let the government off the hook for the mess it made.”
“Every day the government has sat on this information has been another day of suffering for these families,” Gelernt said in a statement.
Sabraw said he will issue an order in the coming days mandating the government to disclose information about released parents. He will also ask the ACLU to create a steering committee tasked with tracking down the more than 400 adults.
