Trump Administration Identifies 1,712 More Children That May Have Been Separated at Border

By David Boddiger  |  May 19, 2019 | 3:16pm
Immigration

As part of a court-ordered review of potentially thousands
of additional family separations at the border, the Trump administration has
identified over 1,700 cases that may involve migrant children being separated
from their parents at the border.

That number is in addition to the roughly 2,800 kids
previously identified by the government as having been separated from their
families as part of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. And
with officials having pored over only a partial sampling of the 47,000 cases
the government must review in coming months, the number of children separated
from their parents at the border could actually be much higher.

Not all of the 1,712 cases identified by the government may
involve separations, but those cases did show “some
preliminary indication of separation” and have been sent to U.S. Customs
and Border Protection for further review, Cmdr. Jonathan White of the U.S.
Public Health Service Commissioned Corps told a court on Friday, according
to CNN.

“What we transmit to CBP is solely those cases that have
some preliminary indication of separation,” White said. “We err on the side of
inclusion.”

The new review was ordered by the court after it was
discovered that family separations at the border were occurring long before the
Trump administration officially declared its “zero tolerance” policy had
taken effect in May 2018. Separations had been occurring since at least
July 2017.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw gave
the administration until Oct. 25 to identify all of the remaining children
who had been separated but not accounted for. Sabraw has been overseeing the
case brought by the ACLU and other groups. The 47,000 cases the government must
now review cover all unaccompanied children who were in U.S. custody from July
1, 2017 to July 25, 2018. To date, the corps has reviewed about 13,000 of those
cases.

In January, the Office of the Inspector General for the
Department of Health and Human Services released
a damning report that found that more children were separated by
immigration authorities than “commonly discussed.” HHS had identified 2,737
separated children, but that number “represented a specific subset,” meaning
potentially “thousands of other children” had been separated.

Of that initial group, about 200 children remain separated
from their families, mostly because their parents were deported while they were
detained.

Per CNN:

Once the Public Health Service team completes its
preliminary review, case files with indication of separation then go to CBP and
Immigration and Customs Enforcement for further analysis. Then a refined list
will go back to the Department of Health and Human Services. As they confirm
additional separations, officials will provide a list of parents and children
to ACLU attorneys on a rolling basis.

HHS also plans to hire a team of
data scientists to help review the cases.

Regarding the 1,700 new cases sent to CBP for review, the
ACLU’s lead
attorney in the lawsuit, Lee Gelernt, said, “If the final number turns out
to anywhere near 1700, that’s a lot of additional hardship and a lot of work
for us to do locating these families,” NBC News reported.

 
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