Families separated by Trump's "zero tolerance" policy face an impossible choice

Hundreds of parents separated from their children at the border by the Trump administration have already been cleared for deportation, and now they’re facing an impossible choice: return together to the country they fled or leave the child to apply for asylum in the U.S. alone.

The ACLU asked the government Thursday to provide a list of the parents who have final removal orders so that attorneys can speak to them as soon as possible about their options. The government insists that all parents who have already been deported or who have final removal orders have agreed to be deported. But immigration attorneys worry that parents may have been so desperate to get their kids back that they agreed to be deported because they believed it was the fastest way to get them back. Some may not have known what they were agreeing to.

“These parents may only have a matter of days to make the momentous decision whether to leave their child behind in the United States,” the ACLU wrote in their request.

Nearly 30 percent of parents of kids over 5, 719 total, had been cleared for deportation as of Thursday.

Earlier this week, Southern California U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw blocked the government from deporting any separated parents for seven days after the ACLU raised concerns that the government was planning to deport parents with their kids immediately after reunification without a chance to review their legal options with an immigration attorney. Some parents may be able to reopen their cases with the help of a lawyer.

Read: The Trump administration keeps losing family separation lawsuits

Next week Judge Sabraw will decide whether to extend the halt on deportations.

After three months of systematically separating immigrant families as part of the zero tolerance immigration policy, the government is working to reunite them under a court-ordered deadline of July 26. By then, all 2,551 separated kids aged 5-17 must be reunited with their parents, but so far government officials have returned just 364 of those kids.

The government has complained reunification takes time. Before it can happen, the Department of Homeland Security, the agency holding the parents, and the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency holding the kids, must run background checks on each parent and confirm they are, in fact, parents. This process has been slow because when officials separated families at the border and put them in the custody of these two separate agencies, they didn’t track them together.

Read: Reunited immigrant families grapple with how to repair damage caused by separation

Some kids will not be reunited by the July 26 deadline because the parents have already been deported, have criminal histories, are incarcerated, or are not in fact the parents, all conditions that make them ineligible under Sabraw’s framework for expedited reunifications. The government has already determined 91 parents of kids over 5 have disqualifying criminal history.

Forty-seven of the 103 separated kids under 5 remain separated for these same reasons. The government missed the court-mandated July 10 deadline to reunite those “tender age” kids; 56 were reunited by July 12.

Sabraw will likely consider the cases of parents deemed ineligible for these deadlines individually after all eligible parents are reunited. Lawyers for the government and ACLU were due back in court Friday.

Cover image: Immigrant families leave a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility after they were reunited, Wednesday, July 11, 2018, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)