Family Separation Continuation: Violating Federal Court Orders to Reunify Families

Overview

The official end of Zero Tolerance family separation in June 2018 did not reunify the families that had already been separated. It did not even stop new separations under different policy justifications. And the administration's repeated failure to comply with the federal court order to reunify families — its inability to even provide the court with a complete accounting of who had been separated — represented a profound failure of government accountability.

The court didn't ask for a policy change. It issued an injunction. The government's response was to miss deadlines, claim it lacked the records, and continue separating families under different names.

The Tracking Failure

Perhaps the most damning admission in the Ms. L. v. ICE litigation was the government's concession that it had no tracking system. When a federal court asked how many children had been separated and where their parents were, the government could not answer. Information was scattered across HHS's Office of Refugee Resettlement, ICE, and CBP — and nobody had built a system to connect them.

The Congressional Oversight Committee's investigation later found that the administration had separated more than 5,500 children between 2017 and 2021 — a number significantly higher than the 2,800 the administration had cited when defending or explaining the policy.

Deported Without Children

The gravest dimension of the tracking failure was what it meant for deported parents. Some parents were removed from the United States before their children's cases were resolved. Some did not know which facility their child was in. Some lost contact with children in U.S. government custody entirely.

The Biden family reunification task force — created as one of the first actions of the new administration — reported in October 2021 that the parents of 628 children had still not been located. These were not cases where families had been separated and lost track of each other by choice. They were cases where the U.S. government's inadequate records had made it impossible to know where to look.