Under former President Donald J. Trump’s time in office, thousands of families were separated at the United States-Mexico border, and many of these children have yet to be reunited with their parents. In spring of 2018, former President Trump established a “zero-tolerance” policy that demanded the prosecution of all undocumented border crossers. Government watchdogs and supporters have discovered that the separations of families started before the policy’s formal launch and persisted after it. According to research and data calculated by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), approximately 998 children remain separated from their families with around 150 currently in the process of being brought back to their guardians.
Current President Joe Biden and his administration created a task force in the early days he took office with the goal and intention of reuniting immigrant children who were taken away from their families back with their parents. Although the task force is working diligently, they have yet to be able to bring all families back together. The reason it has been extremely difficult to reunite families is due to the limited amount of information that the former Trump administration kept on the immigrants. The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been able to reunify around 3,000 people using the small amount of data they had. However, this still leaves 1,000 children separated at the border with the number continuously increasing as new families come forward and speak out about their separation.
