U.S. has reunited 100 kids taken from parents under Trump

WASHINGTON — A Biden administration effort to reunite children and parents who were separated under President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance border policy has made increasing progress as it nears the end of its first year.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday that 100 children, mostly from Central America, are back with their families and about 350 more reunifications are in process after it took steps to enhance the program.

“I would have loved to have this happen much more quickly. But we are making progress and I feel like we’re gaining momentum,” said Michelle Brané, executive director of the administration’s Family Reunification Task Force.

President Joe Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office to reunite families that were separated under the Trump administration’s widely condemned practice of forcibly separating parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border to discourage illegal immigration.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas thanked community organizations for helping to locate and contact family members as he announced the program’s milestone on Twitter. “We have a lot more work to do,” he wrote. “We are dedicated to finding every family and giving them the chance to reunite and to heal.”

The work of the task force has been complicated by a number of factors, including inadequate or missing records on the separated families, the sheer number of cases and the fact that many parents are in remote Central American communities and were unable to track down their children or get to the United States to retrieve them.

About 5,500 children were forcibly removed from their parents under Trump, mostly in 2018. His administration was seeking to stop an increase in people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border by resorting to criminal prosecutions.