The lawyers working to reunite immigrant parents with their children separated by the Trump administration reported on Wednesday that they had found the parents of 105 children in the past month.
The committee of pro-bono lawyers and advocates working on the reuniting of these families said that it had yet to find the parents of 506 children, down from 611 on January 14, the last time the findings were reported to a federal judge.
The parents of about 322 of the 506 children are believed to have been deported, making the search for them more challenging. The lawyers are not required to say how many of the parents and children have been reunited.
According to the lawyers, it has been difficult to find parents because many agreed to be deported without their children to allow their children to remain in the U.S. to claim asylum.
The Biden administration recently formed a task force that will place the responsibility of finding and reuniting the families, separated under the “zero-tolerance policy” of 2018, in the federal government’s hands. The lawyers have agreed to work with the task force.
Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Right Project and a lawyer representing the separated families in the lawsuit, has said the task force should commit to bringing the deported parents back to the U.S. under special protections to reunite with their children.
