News / Society

US says it needs 2 years to identify families separated at border

Sunday, 07 April 2019 9:43 AM [ Last Update: Sunday, 07 April 2019 9:48 AM ]

A 2-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the US-Mexico border on June 12, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. (Photo by Getty Images)

The Trump administration wants up to two years to track thousands of immigrant children separated from their families at the southern US border.

According to a Justice Department court filing in San Diego, it will take at least a year to review a total of about 47,000 cases of unaccompanied children taken into government custody between July 1, 2017 and June 25, 2018.

“Defendants estimate that identifying all possible children ... would take at least 12 months, and possibly up to 24 months,” the government wrote in the filing late on Friday.

Factors that would affect the time frame include the effectiveness of the predictive statistical model, the manpower needed to be dedicated to the manual review, and any follow-up meetings required, the filing added.

In a statement on Saturday, the American Civil Liberties Union’s lead attorney for the case, Lee Gelernt, said the group strongly opposed the government’s proposed plan, adding, it does not treat the separations with the necessary urgency.

“The government was able to quickly gather resources to tear these children away from their families and now they need to gather the resources to fix the damage,” Gelernt said. “The government needs to make this a priority.”

The administration refuses to treat the family separation crisis it created with urgency. We strongly oppose any plan that gives the government up to two years to find kids.

The government swiftly gathered resources to tear families apart. It must do the same to fix the damage. https://t.co/ZkOoG9kLmX
— ACLU (@ACLU) April 6, 2019

The US government has already released the children from its custody, the vast majority to parents or close relatives. However, the department of Customs and Border Protection did not begin tracing separated families as a searchable data set before April last year, according to the filing. As a result, records are spotty.

The Trump administration’s policy of “zero tolerance” in May last year resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents at the southern border and placed into HHS custody.

The controversial policy, which called for the criminal prosecution of all adult migrants who were detained after illegally crossing the southern US border, created a massive outcry and the backlash forced Washington to walk it back just three months later.