The administration of US President Joe Biden has said that four families separated on the Mexican border during Donald Trump’s presidency will be gathered this week.
Home Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called the announcement of Monday “the start of a larger administration initiative to bring together divided families into the United States.”
Two of the four families included mothers who were split from their children by the end of 2017, one from Honduras, and one from Mexico, Mayorkas said.
He characterised them as children at the time who were three years old and ‘teenagers who had to live in their formative years without their parents.’
The parents will return to the US on humanitarian parole, while the authorities take other forms of legal status into account, said Michelle Brane, executive director of the Family Reunification Task Force of the administration. The kids are now in the United States.
How many families will meet and how the talks with the American Civil Liberties Union will settle a federal lawsuit in San Diego, but Mayorkas said more will come.
“We will continue our tireless efforts in the coming weeks and months to get even more children together with their parents,” Mayorkas told reporters prior to the announcement.
Exactly how many families will reunite in the United States and in what order is the American Civil Liberties Union negotiating the settlement of a federal suit in San Diego?
“We will continue to work hard in the weeks and months ahead to get even more children together with their parents,” Mayorkas said to reporters before the announcement.
Although the “zero-tolerance” family separation ended by court order in June 2018 and shortly after Trump reversed its course, Biden regularly attacked it as an act of cruelty.
An inspector general’s Justice Department study, published in January, outlined how the inadequate preparation and communication of the Trump administration during the implementation of the policy further compounded the family toll, thus making future reunification more difficult.
An executive order signed by Biden on the first day of his tenure committed to reuniting families that were already “as much as possible divided.”
The reunifications commence as the Biden administration faces the third big rise in seven years in unaccompanied children arriving at the frontier.
It has moved children from overcrowded border patrolling facilities to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, which may be better suited for longer-term stays before children, usually parents or near relatives, are placed with sponsors in the U.S.
The average stay in Border Patroll detention for unaccompanied children was about 20 hours, below the legal limit of 72 hours and down from 133 hours at the end of March, said Mayorkas. Mayorkas.
677 unaccompanied children are reportedly under detention by the Border Patrol, down from more than 5,700 in late March.
Health and Human Services opened 14 emergency intake centres with capacity increased from 952 to almost 20,000 beds when the Federal Emergency Management Agency was shipped on 13 March, Mayorkas said.
As case managers, about 400 asylum officers of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have been appointed to speed up the release of children to sponsors.
Health and Human Services had 22,557 children in their care as of Thursday.
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