WASHINGTON _ The calls for help started coming in to immigration lawyers across the country just before Memorial Day. Immigrant detainees, many fleeing gangs and violence and seeking legal asylum in the U.S., were flooding courtrooms along the Southwestern border.
Dozens were parents reporting that Border Patrol agents had taken away their children, and many were under the impression they would see their sons and daughters again within hours.
"We had to break the news to them that that wasn't true,'" said Efren C. Olivares, who was among the attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project to come to the aid of public defenders in McAllen. "And then the question became, 'If not today, then when?'
"We didn't have an answer to that."
Nine weeks of chaos and confusion later, many still don't.
Under an order issued by Federal District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego, Thursday is supposed to be the deadline for reuniting the more than 2,500 children who were taken from parents apprehended while crossing the border.
Government lawyers have conceded they will fail to reunite all the families by that deadline _ hundreds of parents already have been deported without their children, and the government has been unable to locate many others. Officials said in court Tuesday they expect to have reunited just over 1,600 families by the deadline.
Despite the administration's professed "zero tolerance" policy, hundreds of those families have been released on immigration parole, pending hearings on their asylum claims, typically with the adults wearing ankle monitors. Scores of other families, however, have been sent to immigration detention centers, including two in Texas where at least 80 families are being held in custody.
Why some families have been released and others detained remains unclear, as is how long those detentions may last, according to lawyers for the families. Government officials have refused to provide answers. A federal court settlement dating to the 1990s generally limits the lockup of children in immigrant detention centers to 20 days.
As of Wednesday, the government was still working to reunite more than 1,500 parents with children. Some 900 parents were fighting final deportation orders. ACLU lawyers have asked Sabraw to delay those deportations to give the parents more time to decide whether to leave the country with their children or separate from them and have the children continue to press for asylum claims of their own.
Government lawyers say that at least 130 parents who voluntarily left their children behind were deported, but immigrant advocates have questioned that number, saying many of the parents were given documents they could not read. Some of the families primarily speak indigenous languages and are not literate in Spanish or English.
More than 450 parents already have been deported without their children, government lawyers told Sabraw this week. The precise number, perhaps 463, remains "under review," they said. An additional 64 were deemed ineligible to be reunited with children because they had criminal records or other reasons that government officials said made them unfit.
At least 217 parents were released into the U.S. without their children, government lawyers said. Both the government and volunteer lawyers for the ACLU are trying to locate them in efforts to reunite the families.
The continued confusion, Sabraw said in court this week, was the "unfortunate" result of a policy adopted "without forethought to reunification or keeping track of people."
Along the Southwestern border, immigration lawyers have described a reunification process as chaotic and scurried as the separations themselves. With family reunions often taking place in the parking lots of detention centers, activist groups have flooded the Texas border to provide help to often-exhausted, traumatized parents and children.
Annunciation House in El Paso has assembled hospitality centers with beds, meals, showers and a change of clothing for families. So far, it has helped 250 families who were released from detention after being reunified, the group said in a statement. Private donations have allowed Annunciation House to purchase airline tickets to help parents travel to the homes of relatives or friends across the country.
Congressional organizations, faith groups and nonprofits with the Families Belong Together coalition, including the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, are raising money to help families with airplane and bus tickets. Lawyers groups, such as the American Immigration Council, have been taking donations to provide counsel to parents seeking asylum or other forms of immigration relief.
Hundreds more children remain in the hands of the government _ and as many as 37 have not been matched with a parent. Congressional Democrats, immigrant rights advocates and lawyers continue to clamor for answers about what's next for the separated families and other migrant children.
"We are going to continue to ask the questions," said Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. "We are going to continue to track where parents are and where children are, and we are not going to let it go until every child is reunited."
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the "zero tolerance" policy at the border in April. It took effect in early May. Under the policy, all adults who crossed into the country illegally were prosecuted for illegal entry. That offense is a misdemeanor, and in nearly all cases, the immigrants were sentenced to time served, but the fact that they were taken into custody provided legal justification for the government to take children away from their parents.
With parents moved into the custody of the U.S. Marshals, federal officials shuffled children into tent camps or more than 100 shelters nationwide. Pentagon officials said the military has been directed to build more tent camps at two bases in Texas to temporarily house migrants.
On June 20, with pictures of children behind fencing generating an international outcry, President Donald Trump suspended the separations through executive order. Sabraw subsequently required the government to reunite children younger than 5 with their parents within 14 days, and older children by this week.
At least 57 children under 5 and more than 1,185 older children have since been reunited with families under the court order. Nearly 500 more were reunited within hours by Border Patrol agents in June.
Administration officials first floated the idea of separating migrant families at the border as a form of deterrence as early as March 2017. But Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen initially denied the existence of a family separation policy, then denied that Trump ordered it as a deterrent.
She and Sessions since have defended the decision to prosecute anyone who is caught crossing the border between legal ports of entry. Asked last week whether she had been notified of the family separation policy ahead of time, she said her answer was "yes and no."
"We had always done this at DHS. In other words, we had always enforced the law. The last administration enforced the law, which means they enforced the law against families," she told an audience at the Aspen Institute. Before May, however, most families with asylum claims were released pending a hearing, and few were prosecuted for illegal entry.
Sessions, she said, made the determination "to not exempt any class that is coming here illegally."
Through letters and private briefings, members of Congress have continued to press federal officials on how the family separation policy was crafted and rolled out, including details on the coordination among agencies under the departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and Justice.
Meanwhile, in a bipartisan request, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md., and Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., have asked department officials for detailed information on where children and parents have been held and transferred. And Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., wants Health and Human Services to release the budget of its program to hold migrant children in fiscal years 2018 and 2019.
"Cost estimates for (the program) usually fluctuate," wrote DeLauro, a ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee. "Yet, in the past, HHS has been forthright and shared that information with the committees, sometimes unprompted."
The response from agencies and Trump administration officials has ranged from mixed messages to silence. In the latest briefing Wednesday, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said Nielsen had expressed confidence the government was on pace to meet the deadline.
But members said Nielsen and other federal officials' accounts often conflicted with what constituents are seeing. In some cases, they said, parents in detention are being charged for phone calls to their children or can see them for only an hour a day.
Court declarations, a scathing report from attorneys and records from at least five lawsuits against federal agencies over the zero tolerance policy and detention standards have given a glimpse into the treatment of children and families in immigration custody.
At one Customs and Border Protection facility in El Centro, Calif., families with children as young as 3 were sleeping on cold, concrete floors with no padding, according to the case filings. Detainees, including juveniles, were not given adequate access to drinking water and basic hygiene products.
Through different legal strategies, lawyers are asking judges to decide that parents and children should not be separated and should not be held in family detention while awaiting immigration proceedings. The cases have prompted support from doctors, psychiatrists and pediatricians.
Members of the American College of Physicians have called for congressional oversight on the health effects of family detention on children.
"We have two main concerns," said Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, which is representing more than 60 parents, grandparents and other relatives separated from children at the border. "Will the government meet its deadline? Are families going to be locked up or treated with dignity?"
