Childhood at risk of migrant children in Latin America 1:17
(CNN) -
The parents of 445 migrant minors separated from their families due to the Donald Trump administration's policies on the US-Mexico border between 2017 and 2018 have not yet been located.
Before they were 506, according to a court file on Wednesday.
The document from the Department of Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union is part of an ongoing effort to identify and reunite families three years after the "zero tolerance" policy was created.
Since February, the parents of 61 of those children whose whereabouts were previously unknown have been found, according to Wednesday's file.
Under then-President Donald Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, border officials separated at least 2,800 minors from their parents, according to government data.
Later, authorities discovered that at least 1,712 more children had been separated from their families before Trump's policy took effect.
Days after President Joe Biden took office, he signed an executive order creating a task force of federal agencies to identify and reunite families who had been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under the Trump administration.
They are part of the Department of Homeland Security.
In February, US District Judge Dana Sabraw, who has been overseeing the case, expressed optimism that the litigation will come to an end soon in light of the change in administrations and the newly established task force.
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"This is a unique circumstance in the sense that, with the change in administration, the defendants ... are completely aligned with the plaintiffs," Sabraw said, citing Biden's decree.
"The executive branch is by far the best positioned, among the three powers, to rectify this situation."
“This joint effort is exciting in many ways.
I am very optimistic in that regard as to finally bringing this litigation to a conclusion sooner rather than later with both parties working together and collaboratively, ”added Sabraw.
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5,600 file review
Earlier Wednesday, a senior Department of Homeland Security official told reporters that the administration is reviewing an additional 5,600 files to determine whether more children had been separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border during the Trump era than it was previously known.
The records are inconsistent and incomplete.
We have now identified, as I mentioned, more than 5,600 new files that were not reviewed at the time, ”the official said, citing ongoing litigation that requires file cleaning.
“This is a manual process, which manually checks each file for clues.
It is our hope and expectation that this process reveals only a few additional families, but it is important to review and make sure.
The files are mostly from January 20, 2017 to July 2017 and will be compared with information from other government databases to confirm if any of them included separations.
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"Our current focus is to build the system that will accommodate the safe and secure process necessary to reunite these families," the official said, adding that the task force has identified record-keeping issues along the way.
"There is also a lot of missing information in the files and incorrect dates, confusion in the names, duplicate cases, and those are just some of the problems that we are discovering," said the official.
"We want to make sure we do everything we can to make sure we have all the correct information before we embark on large-scale reunifications."
migrant children