The official tasked with reuniting families separated by a Trump-era policy talked to "60 Minutes."
Michelle Brane said 52 families had been reunited, a tiny share of the 1,000 or so still separated.
Brane blamed chaotic or nonexistent record-keeping by the Trump administration.
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A task force set up by the Biden administration has managed to reunite only 52 families who were separated by the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" border policy, "60 Minutes" reported.
Michelle Brane, the head of the Family Reunification Task Force, told the CBS program on Sunday night that bringing families back together was difficult because officials from the Trump administration kept poor records of whom they separated.
"We estimate that over 1,000, somewhere between 1,000, 1,500, maybe more remain separated," Brane said. "It's very hard to know because there's no record."
She added: "So there's nowhere to go to find out who was separated or not. It really is case-by-case detective work."
President Donald Trump's family-separation policy saw thousands of children taken from their migrant parents at the US-Mexico border.
The children were held in often-squalid detention facilities, and court records obtained by news organizations in June 2018 found that Trump officials split the families up with no clear plan to reunite them.
A 2019 report by the Department for Homeland Security inspector general described the administration's methods of recording separations as "ad hoc" and said officials and IT systems had not been equipped for the task.
In a June 2021 update, the task force said at least 3,913 children had been separated under the policy.
It said prior court orders had reunited 1,779 children with parents, leaving 2,217 — figures that appear to be separate from the estimate of 1,000 or so separated families the task force is seeking to reunite.
Brane told "60 Minutes" that some of the separated children had been gone so long that they considered their host families in the US to be their parents now.
"In many cases, these children are with sponsors who they now call mommy and daddy, right?" she said. "And so it's not as simple as just saying, 'Going to put you on a plane, and reunify you, and then we're done.'"
gmb92 on October 11st, 2021 at 15:25 UTC »
One of the reasons politicians get away with bad decisions is so much of the electorate has a short memory and believes new leaders can just reverse and fix everything quickly, taking blame if they don't. The previous administration deliberately neglected to keep track of immigrant families, released 5000 Taliban fighters as part of a bogus "peace treaty", spread misinformation on covid and discouraged Americans from taking precautions, along with McConnell flooded the courts with far right activist judges, added $7.8 trillion in debt with projected annual deficits of over a trillion over the next decade, and guess who has to take responsibility for all that now.
wubwub on October 11st, 2021 at 13:23 UTC »
I wish we could prosecute the people who implemented the policy with reckless disregard for documenting who everyone was and where they went. People should be rotting in jail for deliberately not even doing the minimum level of due diligence to track the children.
ThatDudeChrisA on October 11st, 2021 at 13:07 UTC »
Someone had to make the active decision to:
1.) NOT keep track of these children’s family members.
2.) Keep doing it, over and over.
As I said last night, fuck you r/conservative there’s no defending this bullshit just like there’s no defending blowing up children over seas. Fix your hearts.
I’m a proud American, who’s ashamed of my government.