The American Civil Liberties Union has been leading an effort to contact deported parents to try to reunify them with their children.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration disclosed in a court filing Wednesday that the government deported 471 migrant parents separated from their children at the US–Mexico border without first giving them the option to reunify.
It was the first concrete number from the government about the number of parents deported without their children during the spike in family separations in 2018. In court filings last summer, the Justice Department indicated the number was upward of 400, but the numbers continued to change as new information came in and as reunifications began under a federal court order.
More than eight months after a judge in San Diego ordered the government to reunify separated families, information has continued to trickle in about the scope and aftermath of family separations. More than 2,800 children were separated from a parent crossing the border and placed in US custody, and it was clear early on that hundreds of those kids had a parent who had been deported. In Wednesday’s filing, the government offered an exact number.
View the complete March 6 article by Zoe Tillman on the BuzzFeed website here.