SAN DIEGO (AP) – Court-appointed attorneys said Tuesday that they could not with the parents of 545 separated youth on the U. S. border with Mexico at the start of the Trump administration.
The youth were separated between July 1, 2017 and June 26, 2018, when a federal ruling in San Diego ordered young people in government custody to meet with their parents.
Children at this time are hard to locate because the government didn’t have good enough tracking systems. Volunteers looked for them and their parents going door-to-door in Guatemala and Honduras.
More than 2,700 young people were separated from their parents in June 2018 when federal district judge Dana Sabraw ordered an end to the practice under a “zero tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute each and every adult who entered the country illegally from Mexico. foreign protest when parents were unable to locate their children.
While families met through a court order, the government later discovered that up to 1,556 young people had been separated according to the policy dating back to the summer of 2017, adding an initial attempt to separate the family circle in El Paso, Texas, starting in July. November 2017 that was not made public at the time.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which continued the practice, said a court-appointed guidance committee had parents of 485 young people, up from August 47, leaving 545 missing among the 1,030 young people for whom the guidance committee had U. S. authorities phone numbers.
About two-thirds of the parents of the 545 young people are believed to be in their home countries, the ACLU said.
Volunteers “wrapped in a long and arduous box seek to locate relatives in their respective countries of origin,” the ACLU said in a court case, studies suspended after the coronavirus outbreak but resumed on a limited basis.
The guidance committee also promoted free phone numbers in Spanish to succeed in families.
The sentence handed down on Thursday scheduled a hearing to discuss the prestige of reunification efforts.