NPR News

Task Force Investigates Whether Trump Separated Families Earlier Than Known

By Franco Ordoñez

Published April 7, 2021 at 8:38 PM EDT

Children line up on Feb. 19, 2018, to enter a tent at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Homestead, Fla. Many of these children were taken from their parents after crossing the border illegally. [Wilfredo Lee / AP] — Children line up on Feb. 19, 2018, to enter a tent at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Homestead, Fla. Many of these children were taken from their parents after crossing the border illegally.

President Biden's family separation task force is scouring through thousands of unreviewed files to determine whether the then incoming Trump administration began separating families within the first six months of the new president taking office.

The task force uncovered 5,600 until now unreviewed files from the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement from Jan. 20, 2017, the day President Trump was sworn in, to July 2017. A DHS official acknowledged the task force has yet to reunite families, but noted that the it remains committed to that goal.

"We've begun a process for reviewing and crosschecking those files," said the DHS official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity. "This is a manual process, manually going through each file, looking for clues. And it's our hope and expectation that this process will review only a few additional families. But it's important to look through them and make sure."

Concerns that the Trump administration started separating families within the first months of taking office have grown since the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General found that children had been separated from their parents during a pilot program prior to the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, which was first implemented in mid-2018.

Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, pointed to the OIG report and reports by lawyers that there may have been separations "in significant numbers" during the first few months of the Trump administration.

"Given the magnitude of the Trump administration, family separation practice, it is not going to be, I don't think anybody," said Gelernt, who is the lead attorney in the ACLU lawsuit. "So I am not going to be shocked if there were dozens or if possibly hundreds of separations in the first six months."

The Trump administration separated as many as 5,500 children from their parents. More than 1,400 parents were ultimately without their children, according to immigrant advocates.

The total number that remain separated is unclear, but immigration advocates estimate at least 500 kids still separated from their parents.

Last month, the Biden administration formed the multi-agency task force to help reunite parents and children who remain separated. The DHS official said the task force has yet to reunite any of those families, but is committed to the goal.

"We have been working every day to address the tragedy that occurred when the previous administration intentionally separated families," the official said. "Our current focus is to build the system that will accommodate the safe and secure process it's necessary to reunite these families."

Gelernt said the slow start is concerning, but notes there has been progress.

"We would hope that the task force would be up and running immediately and the families would have already been reunited," he said. "But we are pleased that there has been progress in the past week. It's going to be essential that that progress continue."