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Trump administration says it cannot reunify families it separated by court deadline

Poor recordkeeping by DHS and HHS, and criminal histories of several parents, are slowing down the process.

The Trump administration isn’t going to make the deadline for getting migrant kids under 5 back together with their parents.

Officials with Health and Human Services in a court filing late Thursday said they need an extension to the court-imposed Tuesday deadline to reunite 101 children under the age of 5 with the parents they were taken from at the border as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. A federal court last week said the government must reunite kids under 5 with their parents by July 10, and kids over 5 by July 26. The government has separated nearly 3,000 total kids from their parents under the new policy of criminally prosecuting anyone who crosses the border illegally, which started in early May.

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HHS said its process of confirming someone is a parent with no dangerous criminal history is complicated because of inconsistent government records, lengthy background checks, and trouble tracking down parents who have already been paroled. The agencies responsible for separated kids and parents — HHS and Department of Homeland Security, respectively — do not uniformly document which child belongs to which parent.

The normal procedure to place unaccompanied child migrants with sponsors, usually family members in the U.S., can take months. HHS officials review documents to confirm the sponsor’s identity and relation to the child, check for criminal records and visit the home.

In this new situation involving child migrants who the government took away from their parents, there are new challenges.

Officials at HHS and DHS are working to DNA-test every child and parent who the government may have separated in order to quickly confirm that they are in fact related. So far officials have identified 49 parents in federal custody with children under 5 and are working to confirm more.

Then, DHS will check for criminal records associated with the parent and share them with HHS. According to HHS, two parents of kids under 5 have violent criminal histories that the agency considers will endanger the child, making them ineligible for reunification, and they are looking further into the records of 12 others.

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Lastly, if the parent has been paroled, HHS officials must visit their home to fingerprint and background-check the parent and everyone living at the home under a new Trump administration policy. The process of confirming a separated parent’s address, finding them, getting their DNA tested, and running background checks for their household is not doable within the court’s timeline, according to HHS.

“In those cases, it may be harder to reunify some families within the Court’s timeline,” the government’s Thursday court filing said.

In addition to an extension, the government is asking the judge to exclude from the order parents who have already been deported, saying reuniting those families outside the U.S. by the court’s deadline is not feasible.

Many of the parents separated from their children are in immigration detention centers and federal prisons, making them easily accessible for the necessary checks. The government moved parents in DHS custody with kids under 5 to immigration detention centers closer to the HHS facilities where their kids are being held in anticipation of the kids’ transfer from HHS custody to DHS custody before Tuesday’s deadline.

But organizations that work with HHS to shelter child migrants are in the dark about what comes next. Kay Ballor, the vice president for programs at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said many things remain unclear.

“We are concerned about exactly where reunifications will occur,” she said in an email. “Will children enter detention with their parent or will the parent be released? If/when the parent is released, what assistance will they have getting to their original destination?”

HHS did not immediately respond to questions about when and how the reunifications would take place before Tuesday.

Cover image: Demonstrators hold signs as they participate in the "Families Belong Together: Freedom for Immigrants" march on Saturday, June 30, 2018, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP)