HUNDREDS OF CHILDREN : THE WORLD

 

U.S. CAN'T FIND parents of hundreds of children : 545 migrant - youngsters separated at border still have not been reunited.

Radio spots and airing throughout Mexico and Central America, Court appointed researchers are motorbiking through rural hillside communities in Guatemala and showing up at court houses in Honduras to conduct public record searches.

The efforts are a part of a wide-ranging campaign to track down parents separated from their children at the U.S. border beginning in 2017 under the Trump administration's most controversial immigration policy.

It is now clear that the parents of 545 of the migrant children still have not been found, according to court documents filed some weeks ago challenging the practice.

About 60 of the children were under the age of 5 when they were separated the documents show.

Though attempts to find the parents have been going on for years, the number of parents who have been deemed ''unreachable'' is much larger than was previously known.

The new findings highlight the lasting impact of a policy that came first came to light with wrenching images of crying children being carried away from their parents at the border and detained hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Hundreds of these families, the new filing makes clear, have now endured years of separation.

The Trump administration first provided court- ordered accounting of separated families in June 2018, stating at the same 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 immigaration advocacy organizations, all of these 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 previous undisclosed  pilot program conducted in EI 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.

The World Students Society thanks author Caitlin Dickerson.