https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/us/migrant-children-separated.html

The Trump administration first provided a court-ordered accounting of separated families in June 2018, stating at the time that about 2,700 children had been taken from their parents after crossing into the United States. After months of searching by a court-appointed steering committee, which includes a private law firm and several immigrant advocacy organizations, all of those families were eventually tracked down and offered the opportunity to be reunited.

But in January 2019, a report by the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Inspector General confirmed that many more children had been separated, including under a previously undisclosed pilot program conducted in El Paso between June and November 2017, before the administration’s widely publicized “zero tolerance” policy officially went into effect.

Under “zero tolerance,” the Trump administration directed prosecutors to file criminal charges against those who crossed the border without authorization, including parents, who were then separated from their children when they were taken into custody. But some parents and children who crossed the border at legal ports of entry were also separated from each other.

Once the existence of a larger group was revealed, the Trump administration fought for months against providing data on the additional families, arguing that it was not necessary because the children had already been released from federally overseen shelters and foster homes into the care of sponsors, who are typically relatives or family friends. The parents of the children had already been deported without them.

But the court intervened in June 2019, and the government was ordered to acknowledge the extent of the additional separations. New data provided then brought the total known number of separated children to more than 5,500, including cases where the government said the separations were justified because of a parent’s criminal record.

Researchers are presuming that about two-thirds of the parents now being sought are back in their home countries.

Some of the families who have been identified have decided their children would be safer in the United States than in their home countries, and elected for the children to stay with friends or family members who agreed to sponsor them.

The Trump administration has often pointed to this to argue that not all parents need to be identified and tracked down. Chase Jennings, an assistant press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said the “narrative” of families searching for their children but not finding them had “been dispelled” by previous reunification efforts.

“The simple fact is this,” Mr. Jennings said in a statement. “After contact has been made with the parents to reunite them with their children, many parents have refused.”

Many of those working with separated families said the federal government had put up one obstacle after another to reuniting families.

While many families did elect to leave their children with friends and family in the United States, they said, none of them made the journey to the country with the intention of giving up their children, and most were forced by the family separation policy to make impossible choices.

One such parent, Juana, a mother of four girls ages 9 to 16, burst into tears on Wednesday when asked about being separated from her children at the U.S. border after fleeing Honduras, where she said their lives had been threatened.

The girls were released by the government to their father in Virginia, with whom they were not close. Juana, who asked to be identified by her first name to avoid being tracked down by people who want to harm her, was deported back to Honduras. She moved into a shelter for victimized migrants in a different city.

When she was contacted by the U.S. government about whether she wanted her girls to be deported as well, she said, it was one of the hardest decisions she had ever had to make.

“I’m not safe,” she said. “I’m in a shelter. I don’t go out at all.”

She said the girls were struggling without her, especially her youngest, who is going through puberty. “They cry when we talk on the phone. They say they miss me, that they want us to be back together again,” she said, adding, “Girls need their mother.”

The efforts to reunify separated families have been marred by poor record-keeping since they began in the summer of 2018. That is in part because the practice of separating families as a deterrent to the thousands of migrant families arriving at the border was at first introduced covertly; even the federal agencies that became involved, such as the Department of Health and Human Services, which was responsible for housing separated children, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which took custody of the parents, were not fully informed ahead of time.

When H.H.S. case workers began their efforts to track down the families of children they encountered, as is customary for any child in federal custody, they discovered that the immigration authorities had not, in many cases, kept records of who each child’s parents were or how to reach them.

And because the computer system used by border authorities for processing incoming migrants had not been updated to accommodate family separations, the agents often inadvertently deleted identification numbers that could have been used to keep track when parents and children were sent to different places.

The initial court order to reunite separated families led to a monthslong effort by workers at multiple federal agencies who worked through long nights and weekends to track down the parents of separated children, which often required culling through records by hand for clues as to who their parents were.

When it became clear that even more children were separated than had previously been known, that effort started all over again, but was made significantly more difficult by the amount of time that had passed between when the children were released from federal custody and when volunteer researchers began trying to find them. By then, many of the parents had relocated or gone deeper into hiding.

In some cases, members of the steering committee have had access to only names and countries of origin while trying to locate separated parents. Even after conducting public record searches to identify the cities where the families were from, they faced additional hurdles. Many of the families had fled their homes to escape violence or extortion, intentionally withholding information from friends and neighbors about where they were going.

The steering committee groups established hotlines for separated parents, or people with information about them. But the effort hit another roadblock with the coronavirus pandemic, during which travel through the Central American countries where most of the families live has been severely restricted.

“The Trump administration had no plans to keep track of the families or ever reunite them and so that’s why we’re in the situation we’re in now, to try to account for each family,” said Nan Schivone, legal director of Justice in Motion, which is leading on-the-ground search efforts for separated families.

The 545 children whose parents have not been found were all initially placed in shelters or foster homes under the supervision of H.H.S. They were then released to sponsors, who are typically relatives or family friends. About 362 of the children also cannot be located because the contact information provided by their sponsors is no longer current. Many of the children are believed to be in the United States, though some may have returned to their home countries since they were released from federal custody.

The American Civil Liberties Union is leading the court challenge to the family separation policy. Lee Gelernt, the primary lawyer on the case, said essential time was lost in the effort to track the families down.

“The fact that they kept the names from the court, from us, from the public, was astounding,” Mr. Gelernt said. “We could have been searching for them this whole time.”

The latest findings were earlier reported by NBC News.

As part of the legal case over family separations in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, overseen by Judge Dana Sabraw, the search efforts will continue and the government will be required to provide information about any additional families that are separated at the border.

As of October 2019, the government had provided contact information for more than 1,100 additional parents who had been separated from their children before the official introduction of the “zero tolerance” policy. But the government argued that it would not disclose information about some 400 of the parents because those individuals had criminal records that prevented the United States government from reuniting them with their children under Homeland Security policies.

The steering committee has been able to locate the parents of 485 children belonging to those 1,100 parents. The rest have not been found.