The Trump administration separated thousands of migrant families under an overall “zero tolerance” policy that called for the prosecution of all unauthorized border crossers in the spring of 2018.
(Omar Martínez Noyola/Cuartoscuro)
Watchdogs and government advocates have found that the separations began before and continued after the official start of the policy.
DHS said the painstaking work of reviewing the “fragmentary” information the Trump administration maintained on the policy has so far determined that 3,924 children, mostly Central Americans, were separated at the border.
Many were located and gathered before Biden took office through a court process after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit to stop the separation policy.
“The number of newly identified families continues to increase as families come forward and identify themselves,” DHS said in a fact sheet on the task force’s work released Thursday. To date, the task force has brought together 600 families.
DHS also said it has connected some reunited families with services like access to mental health resources.
Reuters in 2022 he published a profile of a Honduran mother who ended up homeless for several months in the United States after she was reunited with her young daughters, whom she hadn’t seen in years.
Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters on Thursday that there was still work to be done to fully address the wounds inflicted by the policy.
“That’s what informs our efforts to expand behavioral health services as a component of reunification,” he said.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington DC; writing by Mica Rosenberg; editing in English by Ricardo Figueroa)
