Three years after Donald Trump’s swift crackdown on undocumented immigrants coming to the United States, lawyers are still struggling to find the parents of over 500 children separated at the border under the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy. Most of the parents were deported to Central America back to their country of origin.

In 2018, the Trump administration enforced an anti-immigration policy called “zero-tolerance” that physically separated parents and their children after crossing into the United States from Mexico. In most cases, the parents and children were sent to different detention facilities under the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s supervision.

In a court filing, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated that almost two-thirds of the parents had been deported to their country of origin, forced to leave their children behind. Due to the rush to carry out Trump’s orders, the locations of hundreds of parents weren’t recorded, leaving their whereabouts unknown three years later.

In this time, it has come to light that the “zero-tolerance” policy was not the first legal action of this nature, and that it was preceded by a separate “pilot” program a year earlier in 2017. In this program, parents separated from their children were deported instead of jailed while their children remained in ICE’s custody in the United States. This came to affect around 1,000 different families, and lawyers from the ACLU have said that the parents of 545 children haven’t been located since.

Specifically, 1,030 children were removed from their parents by the Trump administration under 2017’s pilot. 485 of those 1,030 had their parents found through a scheme carried out by federal judges, tasking the ACLU and an independent team of lawyers with finding the remainder. The search for the parents has been hampered by the Coronavirus pandemic, leaving them even more unreachable than before.

The pilot didn’t come out to the public until January 2019, when a report from the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shed some light on it. It not only confirmed the existence of this program, but it went on to detail the emotional trauma that children suffered after being separated from their family members at the border.

The pilot also took quite a toll on parents, with the majority saying that they experienced emotional trauma. Multiple reports mention that some parents even attempted to commit suicide from their grief, a few sadly being successful. The HHS stated that acute grief was the largest contributing factor to these deaths.

Once the policy became common knowledge, the United Nations human rights office stated that the separation was a violation of international law. According to Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Trump’s 2018 policy “amounts to arbitrary and unlawful interference in family life, and is a serious violation of the rights of the child.”

After tremendous amounts of public outcry from activists, lawmakers, and protesters both nationally and internationally, President Trump eventually folded from the immense pressure, ending the program through an executive order in June 2018. Nevertheless, he went on defending the separation of children from their parents at the border as a way to deter immigrants from seeking asylum in the United States.

Trump failed to address the emotional toll, trauma, and human rights violations that went on under the policy and overlooked the fact that the “zero-tolerance” policy failed to deter immigrants from seeking asylum in the United States. The Trump administration’s own Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency ran numbers on the program and revealed that it had no effect on the number of migrants coming to the United States.

Even though the pilot and zero-tolerance policy both ended, immigration officials have become adept at using loopholes to separate children from their families, usually citing petty crimes and false suspicions regarding bad parenting as reasons to separate them. The Southern Poverty Law Center has stated that hundreds of family units have been separated by Border Patrol agents, even after the “zero-tolerance” policy had supposedly come to an end.

In one horrible case, a 4-year-old son was separated from his father because the father wasn’t answering CBP questions fast enough. The man suffered from a speech impediment that impaired his ability to speak at an average speed, something that made agents question whether or not the boy was actually his son. The father even had documentation proving the legitimacy of his claim, including a birth certificate, yet he was still deported.

“It is critical to find out as much as possible about who was responsible for this horrific practice while not losing sight of the fact that hundreds of families have still not been found and remain separated. There is so much more work to be done to find these families.We will not stop looking until we have found every one of the families, no matter how long it takes.”

Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU immigrants’ Rights project

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