The lawyers working to reunite immigrant parents and children separated by the Trump Administration reported earlier this week that they have found the parents of 105 children within the past month.
The committee of lawyers and advocates working on reuniting the separated families said it had yet to find the parents of 506 children, which is down from 611 from last month. The lawyers also said that the parents of 322 of the 506 children are believed to have been deported, making it even more difficult to find them.
The Biden Administration recently formed a task force that will have the responsibility of finding and reuniting the families separated by the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance policy”. In their court filing earlier this week, lawyers representing the separated families and working to reunite them said they would work with the task force.
Lawyers for the Justice Department said they expect the task force to “resolve many outstanding issues” related to the lawsuit, filed in Southern California, that resulted in the reunification process. One reason it has been so hard to find the parents is that many agreed to be deported without their children to allow their children to remain in the U.S. to claim asylum. A lawyer representing the separated families in the lawsuit, Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, stated that the task force should commit to bringing the deported parents to the U.S. under special protections to reunite them with their children.
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