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No clear plan yet on how to reunite parents with children separated at US-Mexico border

Published:Wednesday | June 20, 2018 | 10:37 AM
Protesters stand outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in El Paso, Texas, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre/The San Antonio Express-News via AP)

MCALLEN, Texas (AP) — Trump administration officials say they have no clear plan yet on how to reunite the thousands of children separated from their families at the border since the implementation of a zero-tolerance policy in which anyone caught entering the U.S. illegally is criminally prosecuted.

“This policy is relatively new,” said Steven Wagner, an acting assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services “We’re still working through the experience of reunifying kids with their parents after adjudication”.

Federal officials say there are some methods parents can use to try to find their children: hotlines to call and an email address for those seeking information.

But advocates say it’s not that simple.

In a courtroom near the Rio Grande, lawyer Efren Olivares and his team with the Texas Civil Rights Project frantically scribble down children’s names, birth dates and other details from handcuffed men and women waiting for the court to begin.

There are sometimes 80 of them in the same hearing.

The Texas Civil Rights Project works to document the separations in the hopes of helping them reunite with the children.

They have one hour to collect as much information as they can before the hearing begins.

The immigrants plead guilty to illegally entering the U.S., and they are typically sent either to jail or directly to an immigration detention center.

At this point, lawyers with the civil rights group often lose access to the detainees.

“If we don’t get that information, then there’s no way of knowing that child was separated,” Olivares said.

“No one else but the government will know that the separation happened if we don’t document it there.”

Olivares has documented more than 300 cases of adults who have been separated from a child.

Most are parents, but some are older siblings, aunts, uncles or grandparents.

Some are illiterate and don’t know how to spell the children’s names.

More than 2,000 minors have been separated from their families since early May.

The children are put into the custody of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services with the aim of keeping them as close to their parents as possible and reuniting the family after the case goes through the courts, said Wagner.

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