Reuniting Separated Families

The American Civil Liberties Union has recently disclosed that they were unable to find 545 parents of children whose families were separated due to President Trump’s zero tolerance policy. Lee Gelernt of the ACLU shared with ABC News that “We haven’t found all the families,” and that they are “still searching for approximately 545 families [since] we haven’t reached the parents”. All of these families were separated at the border. These children were forced into sponsored homes in the US away from their families. Many, if not all, of these children do not know what happened to their parents. Most likely all of these children’s parents were deported out of the United States.

President Trump immediately began to crack down on families seeking asylum in the United States since he has taken office. Most of these families are from Mexico and are attempting to escape the violence that consumes the country they call home. Originally, many of these children separated from their parents were placed in shelters. Due to the backlash, the Trump administration has placed them in sponsored homes.

The administration was later told that they must track the parents of these children. This is very difficult because so much time has passed, making parents harder to locate. It is alleged that nearly 5,500 families were separated by the Trump administration. The ACLU sued the Trump administration for their practice of separating family and for their poor parent trapping system. So far, the “steering committee” was formed with the goal of locating these children’s parents.

Spokesman for the department of Homeland Security, Chad Jennings, claims that a combination of government run organizations have taken every step to facilitate the reunification of these families where parents wanted such reunification to occur. Jennings also added that the simple fact of the matter is that “after contact has been made with the parents to reunite them with their children, many parents have refused”. Parents often feel their children are better off in America than the country of origin; which results in many families staying separated.

President Trump’s opponent in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, released a statement saying that the Trump administration’s actions are an “outrage, a moral failing, and a stain on our national character,”. Former Vice President Joe Biden also pledged to make a path to citizenship for approximately 11 million undocumented people currently living in the United states. The first hearing for the ACLU’s suit against the Trump Administration is set for this Thursday, October 22nd. For now, we will all have to wait and see how this suit unfolds.