The Family Reunification Task Force said it identified “nearly all” children who were separated under Trump’s policy and plan to review another 1,723 cases, bringing to total closer to the American Civil Liberties Union’s numbers of more than 5,500.
Of the children identified, 1,786 were reunited with a parent, 1,965 have been contacted, and the whereabouts of 391 have not been established.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
The discrepancy appears to stem largely from a federal court ruling in San Diego that excluded 1,723 children who were separated for reasons other than Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, such as risk of child endangerment or questions about parentage.
The report provided data that hadn’t been previously released. Nearly 60% of children separated under the zero-tolerance policy were Guatemalans (2,270), followed by Hondurans (1,150), Salvadorans (281), Mexicans (75), Brazilians (74) and Romanians (23).
The Border Patrol’s Yuma, Arizona, sector recorded the highest number of separations of the agency’s nine sectors on the Mexican border with 1,114. The Rio Grande Valley in Texas, which dominated media attention as the busiest corridor for illegal crossings by far, was second with 1,025 separations. The El Paso, Texas, sector, which was site of a trial run of the policy in 2017 that was not publicly disclosed at the time, was third with 982 separated children.
The Biden administration has vowed to reunite parents who are still apart from their children, but the pace has been slow and it is unclear how high that number will go. The first four parents were returned to the United States last month, part of what the task force identified as an initial group of 62 people.
