Judge Gives US 6 Months To Identify Children Split At Border

Speaker 1: 00:00 A federal judge moves the Trump administration a step closer to reuniting possibly thousands of children with their families who were separated at the US Mexico border. Judge Dana sub raw, set a firm time frame of six months for the government to put children back with their relatives. KPBS border reporter, Gene Guerrero has been covering these developments and joined us with the latest. Jeanne welcome. Hey Jade. So the Trump administration said they had a goal of six months to reunite children with their parents who were separated at the border. Why did judge the bras say that wasn't good enough? So the judge said that the government needed a firm deadline, that it wasn't enough to have a goal because he wanted to make sure that bureaucracy was sort of streamlined and that the government did move as quickly as possible. And the Acru had are you that if, if the judge didn't set an actual deadline that it would take much, much longer than six months. Speaker 1: 00:54 Uh, the government had originally asked for up to two years. But what was really interesting about the hearing yesterday, his commander Johnathan white of the Department of Health and Human Services was actually, they're testifying. He said that he really did think it was doable within six months and that regardless of whether there was a deadline or if it was just a goal, he would be working as fast as humanly possible. And he used the phrase by Hook or by Crook last year during a Senate hearing on family separations. He said that he warned the Trump administration about this family separation practice and how dangerous it would be for the mental health of children. He seems to be very committed to the task of reuniting these families. And the judge yesterday called him a beacon of light in the process and the Trump administration says it will develop a statistical model that will search for factors most likely for separations. Speaker 1: 01:48 Can you explain that plan? Yeah, so it wasn't until around April of last year that the agencies involved in separating these families actually started even retaining information about what they were doing. So the difficulty has been tracking these families and finding out who's been separated and where people are. And so with this new model that commander white is designing a, there'll be evaluating all of the electronic tronic databases starting with the Department of Health and Human Services, which is in charge of the children to determine which of the children are most likely to have been separated. And then to be able to prioritize which of those case files to actually review with a special team of case managers. But commander White was, was very vocal about needing this. He called it a solid foundation of statistical science. And it was, it was interesting to hear him talk in these mathematical terms when he's clearly motivated by these very human instincts. Speaker 1: 02:49 He was talking about how it would be personally devastating to him if they didn't meet the six month deadline. So this is is this is a system that they're putting in place for one that just nonexistent. Exactly. There was no, there was just no system. Hmm. And how many children are still separated from their parents? There are potentially thousands that are still separated. It's hard to tell that. And that's, that's why identifying these children is so difficult. So that there's no idea at this point exactly how many, just to remind everyone, the federal judge had expanded the class of families that are eligible for reunification after it was found that the Trump administration and started separating families in 2017 rather than in 2018 as had been said previously. So there's about 47,000 cases of minors who have been taken into government custody at the border between July of 2017 and June of 2018 and any of those may have been separated. Speaker 1: 03:50 And right now the process is, is trying to identify which of those are actual separations. So aside from there, never having been a tracking system in place, what are some of the other barriers to putting children back with their caregivers? So in many of these cases, the parents have been deported back to their home countries, mostly in Central America. So finding those parents is really difficult. It requires nonprofits going into these countries, often very rural areas trying to work with the last contact information, um, taken down by the government agencies. But often that's not accurate. There's so many barriers to reuniting these kids and, and it's actually a lot harder this time around with this expanded class because with the previous class, the reunifications were ordered for children who were still in government custody. And now because it's going back a much longer time period, a lot of these children may have already been released to foster care to sponsors. Speaker 1: 04:55 And so identifying the children as well is more of a challenge then during the previous round of reunifications, where has the government been keeping the children who haven't been reunited and how long have some of them been there? So the children are often placed in migrant shelters operated by the office of refugee resettlement. Currently those shelters are at 97% capacity according to commander white yesterday. And in the past couple of weeks they just keep receiving more children every day then are released. So there they're very much close to two capacity. We have three southwest key shelters, three of those types of shelters here in San Diego. And in many cases the kids are placed in foster care or with sponsors, distant relatives who are willing to take them in. And, and so it just, it varies depending on the case. But these children that have not yet been reunited with their parents have been separated for and in some cases more than a year. Speaker 1: 05:56 Are there any immediate concerns about their wellbeing and these facilities? Yeah, so the Center for investigative reporting reveal has been uncovering of huge problem of abuses. Yeah. Many of these shelters, including drugging of children, sexual abuse and beatings, and many of these children's have been closed for these violations. When toddler whose case I followed, um, who had been separated from his father, his Salvadoran father, after they presented at the San Ysidro port of entry, asking for asylum, was kept in one of these facilities that has since been closed for, for those types of violations. And the mother, when I spoke to her several months ago, told me that once she was reunited with the child, he had just completely changed. And was crying all the time and it was having just signs of trauma. How successful have efforts been to reunite families? So far? Most of the original 2,700 who were ordered reunited, have have been reunited at this point. Speaker 1: 06:58 So now it's just a question of finding the additional thousands of of families that had not yet been determined as as part of the class. So what's next? Commander White said he was ready to get started within the next week to start implementing this new reviewing of, of the, of the databases. And as they identify cases of likely separations, they will be handing that information over to the ACLU on a rolling basis so that the ACLU can start trying to locate the people physically and try to reunite them. I've been speaking with KPBS border reporter, Gene Guerrero. Jeanne, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.