Confusion and uncertainty at border after Trump acts
WH official: 500 children now reunited
McALLEN, Texas — About 500 of the more than 2,300 children separated from their families at the border have been reunited since May, a senior Trump administration official said Thursday, as confusion mounted along the U.S.-Mexico border over the “zero-tolerance” policy that called for the prosecution of anyone caught entering the country illegally.
It was unclear how many of the roughly 500 children were still being detained with their families. Federal agencies were working to set up a centralized reunification process for the remaining separated children and their families at the Port Isabel Detention Center just north of the border in Texas, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The U.S. government was wrestling with the ramifications of President Donald Trump’s move to stop separating families at the border and Congress again failing to take action on immigration amid outcry from all corners of the world, with the images and sounds of crying children dominating the news.
The Trump administration previously had not said whether any of the hundreds
of children who were separated from their families had been reunited. The official said many of the reunited families were back together after a few days of separation. But other parents have said they don’t know where their children are and are struggling to get answers. Some mothers were deported without their kids.
Meanwhile, there were signs that the administration was dialing back its “zero-tolerance” policy, for now.
The federal public defender’s office for the region that covers cases from El Paso to San Antonio said Thursday the U.S. Attorney’s Office would be dismissing cases in which parents were charged with illegally entering or re-entering the country and were subsequently separated from their children.
“Going forward, they will no longer bring criminal charges against a parent or parents entering the United States if they have their child with them,” wrote Maureen Scott Franco, the federal public defender for the Western District of Texas, in an email shown to the AP.
In the Texas border city of McAllen, federal prosecutors unexpectedly did not pursue charges against 17 immigrants. A federal prosecutor said “there was no prosecution sought” in light of Trump’s executive order ending the practice of separating families.
But the president personally showed no sign of softening.
“We have to be very, very strong on the border. If we don’t do it, you will be inundated with people and you really won’t have a country,” Trump said.
The Trump administration began drawing up plans to house as many as 20,000 migrants on U.S. military bases, though officials gave differing accounts as to whether those beds would be for children or for entire families.
The Justice Department asked a federal judge to change the rules regarding the detention of immigrant children, seeking permission to detain them for longer than the currently permitted 20 days in an effort to keep them together with their parents.
In Washington, the House killed a hard-right immigration bill Thursday and Republican leaders delayed a planned vote on a compromise GOP package, with party members fiercely divided on the issue. Democrats oppose both measures.
The rejected bill would have curbed legal immigration and bolstered border security but would not have granted a pathway to citizenship to “Dreamers” who arrived in the country illegally as children.
The delayed vote was on a compromise bill between GOP moderates and conservatives that would offer Dreamers a pathway to citizenship and provide $25 billion for Trump’s border wall, among other provisions.
Elsewhere, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia ordered an investigation into claims by children at an immigration detention facility that they were beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left naked and shivering in concrete cells.