5,600 files found possibly related to immigrant children separated by Trump

Biden-appointed task force investigates whether Trump separated migrant families earlier than known

Photo: EFE

For: EFE 15 of April 2021

The task force appointed by President Joe Biden to reunify separated immigrant families announced Wednesday that is examining 5, 600 additional case files of migrant children possibly affected by the “zero tolerance” policy of the Donald Trump administration.

The announcement was made in a conference call with national media in which members of the working group reported the discovery of 5,600 files of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which had not been reviewed.

The files belong to cases ranging from the 20 of January of 2017, the day Trump took office, until July of that year.

An official from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), quoted by National Public Radio (NPR), who spoke with journalists on condition of anonymity, explained that “we have started a process to review and collate those files.”

“This is a manual process, which checks each file for clues. And it is our hope and expectation that only a few additional families will be found in this process. But it’s important to review and make sure, ”he added.

Biden signed an executive order in early February that created the working committee with the goal of reuniting with their parents the hundreds of minors who were separated after crossing the border as a result of Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, and that they are still in HHS custody.

Since the group was created, it was announced that it will work with allies in Central America to find parents, a task that will be uphill because the Trump administration did not maintain record on these families.

Since the family separations began in 2017 more than 5, 500 children were separated and, until last December, 628 children had not yet been reunited with their parents, according to court documents.

The dates of the new files of the affected minors were not included in the lawsuit of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which managed to stop the application of the policy.

A ruling of June 2018 stopped the application of that policy and a month later the HHS identified, according to a report released by a congressional committee in October last year, to “two,251 separated children covered by the court order. ”

For August of that year, two,000 of the almost 2, 600 children identified s had reunited with their parents, but not some 600 children whose reunification was complicated because their parents had been sent back to their countries of origin.