Families separated by Trump administration at the border still

It’s been 35 years since Congress last passed a sweeping overhaul of the immigration system. So, president after president has careened from crisis to crisis at the border. President Biden is no different.

His administration is struggling to deal with one of the largest surges of migrants at the southern border in 20 years while, at the same time, trying to clean up another immigration mess you might think was already fixed.  

Remember the stories of migrant children being intentionally separated from their parents at the border in 2018? The practice sparked widespread, bipartisan outrage and forced President Trump to order an end to the separations. Soon after, a federal judge ordered the government to reunite the families. 

But three years later, at least a thousand children have not been returned to their parents.

We went to southern Indiana to meet two of those children from El Salvador. Jaime is 13. His brother Adonis is 9. In 2017, the boys and their mother crossed this bridge that links Mexico to the United States. The boys don’t remember much about the trip, but Jaime has a vivid memory of when U.S. border officers took his mother away.

Sharyn Alfonsi: When they took your mom away, do you remember what she said to you?

Jaime: Yeah, she told me to be a strong brother, to help my brother and everything, to never feel bad… don’t worry about what happened, worry about your brother.

Jaime and Adonis were among the first of nearly 4,000 children to be intentionally separated from their parents at the border as part of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy. A federal judge ordered the government to reunite the families within 30 days. That was in 2018.

Sharyn Alfonsi: I think a lot of people will say to themselves, like, “How can they not have reunited these families already? There’s parents and there’s a kid, and you’ve gotta get them together.” Why is it so difficult?

Michelle Brane: It’s been three-plus years for a lot of these families. They have moved to different places. So they’re no longer at the addresses we may have last had for them. They– in many cases, these children are with sponsors who they now call mommy and daddy, right? And so it’s not as simple as just saying, “Gonna put you on a plane, and reunify you, and then we’re done.”

Michelle Brane leads the family reunification task force formed by President Biden in the first weeks of his presidency. Four federal agencies are working on it, but despite their power and reach, in seven months, they’ve only reunited 52 families.

Michelle Brane: We estimate that over 1,000, somewhere between 1,000, 1,500 maybe more remain separated. It’s very hard to know because there’s no record.

Sharyn Alfonsi: How do you separate a child from their parents, and there’s no documentation?

Michelle Brane: It is shocking. And really, what happened was that…