SAN FRANCISCO _ A federal judge ordered the Trump administration and advocates for immigrant families to each submit a plan for reuniting parents who were either already deported or whose whereabouts in the U.S. are unknown.
The order Monday by a judge in San Diego follows the government's announcement last week that it is reuniting about three-quarters of more than 2,500 children who were taken from the adults they arrived with during the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" border crossing crackdown. But that left hundreds of other children still in custody without a parent or guardian to claim them.
"The government is at fault for losing several hundred parents in the process, and that's where we go next _ identifying and finding those parents who have been removed without children or who are in the interior and not presently located so that they can be reunified," U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said at a hearing Friday.
The government was given until July 30 to provide a list of all children aged 5-17 who've been reunified. By Wednesday, the government is under orders to produce a list to the American Civil Liberties Union of the immigrant parents deemed ineligible for reunification, and must include more details about who's already been deported.
While Sabraw praised the government's efforts to reunify most families, he emphasized that the work wasn't done. Throughout the process, the government has pushed back on some of the judge's deadlines for data sharing, saying it needed to focus on reunifications instead of oversight.
