The Biden administration this week will begin reuniting migrant family members who were separated under the Trump administration and have been unable to find one another in the years since.
The Department of Homeland Security will start by reunifying four families. Parents returning to the United States will be given humanitarian parole so that they can travel here and be with their children. Longer-term legal protections are possible, Michelle Brane, executive director of the Biden administration’s Family Reunification Task Force, told reporters in a call.
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Two of the families were separated in late 2017 as part of the Trump administration “zero-tolerance” pilot program, well before the national rollout in spring 2018. The children were three years old at the time, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters.
“Today is just the beginning. We are reuniting the first group of families, many more will follow, and we recognize the importance of providing these families with the stability and resources they need to heal,” Mayorkas said in a statement issued Monday.
President Joe Biden in February created an interagency task force with the sole purpose of reuniting families that the Trump administration was unable to reunify. The move was in response to the American Civil Liberties Union’s federal lawsuit in San Diego.
In 2017, the Trump administration advanced a plan to prosecute all adults who illegally crossed the border, knowing that it would prompt thousands of children to be separated from their parents. The initiative was called “zero tolerance.” Department of Justice leaders wrongly assumed the courts and federal agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, would be able to accommodate the influx of people.
“The department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact that prosecution of family unit adults and family separations would have on children traveling with them and the government’s ability to later reunite the children with their parents,” a DOJ inspector general report states.
The administration rolled out the pilot program for zero-tolerance after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions pushed the policy in internal discussions in mid-2017, as the number of people encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border was beginning to rise. He argued that an “illegal alien should not get a free pass just because he or she crosses the border illegally with a child.”
Sessions, in April 2018, announced that the DHS would refer for prosecution all adults who illegally crossed the southern border. Because children cannot be held in jail, adults with children had not been prosecuted until zero-tolerance, but the influx of families prompted the government to take harsh action. Separated children were then transferred to the HHS ORR and placed with sponsors in the U.S. The initiative was stopped in June 2018 following an outcry from Democrats and Republicans.
An estimated 5,400 families were separated at the border in the three months of 2018, which does not include the pilot phase in 2017, and more than 600 children have yet to be reunited more than two years later.
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Any person arrested after illegally crossing the U.S. border from Mexico or Canada is taken into custody by Border Patrol, which is part of the DHS agency Customs and Border Protection. He or she is then transferred from a regional Border Patrol holding station to ICE for longer detention, immediately removed from the country by CBP, or, in the case of children who arrive without parents or are separated from a parent by the government, turned over to ORR, the federal agency that cares for unaccompanied children.
