The Trump administration says it met a court-imposed Thursday deadline for reuniting illegal immigrant families it deemed eligible, though critics said the government fell far short of the goal.
Administration officials said they connected nearly 1,500 children with parents as of the morning and were working to reunite other children in their custody with parents they were able to track down.
But hundreds more parents remained at large in the U.S., were already deported or otherwise were unable to be reunited immediately because they were no longer under the purview of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the government said.
“We are on track to reunite all eligible parents within ICE custody,” said Chris Meekins, a top official at the Health and Human Services Department.
Mr. Meekins said the administration will wait for Judge Dana Sabraw to step in and suggest what actions he wants to reunite those other families.
Both the government and the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the parents in the case, will be back before Judge Sabraw on Friday afternoon to talk final numbers for this week’s deadline, which required children ages 5 to 17 who were separated from parents arrested at the border to be reconnected.
The government partially met a July 10 deadline to reunite the children younger than 5.
Most of the families have been released into the interior of the U.S. As of Thursday morning, just 223 families were being held at family detention centers in Texas.
All told, the government said it had reconnected 1,442 children with their parents by Thursday morning and had released up to 378 other children to viable sponsors in the U.S. other than parents.
Another 120 children had their parents waive their rights, about 200 were flagged for criminal or other issues, and the parents of 431 children were ousted from the U.S. before they could be reconnected.
Congressional Democrats and immigrant rights activists said that wasn’t enough.
They demanded the government halt deportations for the families and release them all into the community, where they can await their immigration case proceedings.
Activists also asked the government to revoke the deportations of hundreds of people who had been ousted from the country without their children, saying they deserve another chance to make their case for legal status in the U.S.
“The government’s conduct calls into question whether any of these parents understood what they were agreeing to, whether they knew what was happening to their children, and whether any were given information about the legal remedies available to protect themselves against deportation,” said Anastasia Tonello, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
The ACLU said the government is also breaking its commitment to provide information about many of the people involved.
ACLU lawyers say they have to double-check the government’s assertions that some parents have criminal records making them unfit to take back their children, or other reasons why parents aren’t part of the universe eligible for reunification.
Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s chief lawyer in the case, also said they’ll push to make the government disclose the identities of parents already deported.
“There’s going to be a lot of work going forward to find the deported parents, to see what they want,” he said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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