Biden begins reuniting migrant families who were separated during the Trump administration

A Honduran girl cries as her mother is searched by a U.S. border policeman in Texas in 2019.JOHN MOORE / GETTY IMAGES

Four of the thousands of migrant parents who were deported without their children during the Donald Trump Administration's controversial family separation policy will be able to enter the United States this week to be reunited with them, according to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The four mothers who will cross the border at a point between Texas and California are from Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. Another 30 migrants will be able to enter the country in the next 30 or 60 days to be reunited with their children. Most of them have been in the care of relatives who already lived in the United States.

In an interview on CBS television, Mayorkas explained that among those four families there is a child separated from his parents when he was only three years old. "This is just the beginning," said the secretary. “We will bring together this first group of families, and then many more will follow. We recognize the importance of giving these families the stability and resources they need to recover, "he continued. "There are teenagers who have had to live without their parents during some of the most formative years of their lives," Mayorkas concluded.

During former President Donald Trump's zero-tolerance policy on immigration in the spring of 2018, around 5,000 children were separated from their parents.

Although most families have been reunited in recent years, more than 1,000 remain separated due to one or two of the parents being returned to their home countries.

In the television interview, Mayorkas explained that the task force created by the president of the United States, Joe Biden, to take care of this matter has collaborated with the Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, for its acronym in English) and other groups to "repair the damage".

ACLU expressed its satisfaction for this specific meeting, but announced that there is no reason for celebration or victory chants because "there is still much that remains to be done."

In turn, the association of aid to immigrants Al Otro Lado (AOL) told NBC that the Biden Administration was making its own a triumph that did not belong to it, since the Democrats had done very little to achieve this reunification. "Despite what Secretary Mayorkas wants public opinion to believe, National Security has done nothing to facilitate the return and regrouping of these mothers who arrive this week, beyond allowing them to enter the country." According to Al Otro Lado, if these mothers are at the border this week, it is because their organization has negotiated entry visas with the Mexican government and paid for the plane tickets, Carol Anne Donohoe, a lawyer in charge of the program, explained to NBC. Family Reunification.

Mayorkas did not give details about the families to protect their privacy, but did anticipate that two of those mothers had been separated from their children at the end of 2017, well before the Republican Administration put into place the zero tolerance doctrine. Under this premise, every undocumented immigrant was considered a criminal and was prosecuted as such, even if they had no criminal record. As minors cannot enter prison, they were separated. The vast majority of the undocumented immigrants were Central Americans.

After a few months of heavy hand, the crisis exploded in public opinion in June 2018, when it was known that in the span of just six weeks, between April 19 and June 6, the Administration had separated about 2,000 children, sometimes babies, their parents or adult relatives.

Then, Trump was forced to rectify and signed an executive order that put an end to this practice, to the astonishment of his fellow Republicans, although by then the damage had already been done because many parents had already been deported.

From the beginning of his presidency, Biden made it a priority to reunite these broken families. When he had only been in the White House for weeks, the president signed a series of executive orders that undone the Trump legacy and set up a task force, led by Mayorkas, to identify and reunite all those children who were estranged from their parents. .

The task of uniting families with their children is a huge and sometimes heartbreaking job, since the information we have about the parents is wrong, it no longer corresponds to that user and even some parents do not allow themselves to be contacted for fear that they exist retaliation.

Others have simply disappeared.

The same is true of children.

In President Biden's words last week, “We don't know where some children are.

We are trying by all means to know what the hell happened to those children ”.

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