The following article by Maria Sacchetti was posted on the Washington Post website July 6, 2018:
Lawyers for the Trump administration on Friday asked a federal judge for more time to reunite immigrant children with their parents, the latest signal that the government is struggling to bring families back together after separating thousands as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border earlier this year.
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego ordered the government to return children younger than 5 to their parents by Tuesday, but federal lawyers said they could meet that deadline for only about half of the 101 children in that age group.
Officials say they have deployed hundreds of government employees and opened a command center usually reserved for natural disasters to match parents and children. But the massive effort is complicated by difficulty in locating some parents and, in other cases, uncertainty about the parents’ identities. Some parents have been deported and others have been freed in the United States, apparently without a system to monitor everyone’s whereabouts.