TOPEKA, Kansas (AP) – The Latest on the separation of immigrant children from their parents following President Donald Trump’s order allowing them to remain with…
TOPEKA, Kansas (AP) – The Latest on the separation of immigrant children from their parents following President Donald Trump’s order allowing them to remain with their parents (all times local):
5:25 p.m.
Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer ordered an immediate inspection of Topeka group homes that are housing unaccompanied immigrant children.
Colyer directed the state Department for Children and Families to inspect The Villages homes Friday after four Democratic state legislators criticized him during a Statehouse news conference. They said Colyer was not being aggressive enough in seeking information about the immigrant children there.
The Villages has a federal contract to house 50 unaccompanied immigrant children at its seven group homes in Topeka and Lawrence. But it won’t say whether any of them had been separated from their parents during recent crackdown at the border.
Colyer spokesman Kendall Marr said the state doesn’t have control over the federal contract but can ensure that the homes continue to meet state standards.
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5:15 p.m.
Ryan Patrick, the top federal prosecutor in South Texas, says he continues to file all illegal entry cases referred to him by border authorities, keeping the zero tolerance policy in effect at his office. What’s unclear is if the Border Patrol has pulled back on referring cases to him.
“Right now we’re looking at what we’re going to do. Whatever we do we are going to keep the families together,” Manuel Padilla, chief of the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector, said at news conference at the agency’s station in Weslaco.
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4:55 p.m.
A top immigration official says it’s unclear how family reunification will occur now that President Donald Trump ordered parents and children no longer be split.
“It’s a big question. There have not been a lot of answers,” said Henry Lucero, a director of field operations at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Lucero spoke at a forum at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco headlined by U. S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, Texas Republicans.
ICE, which detains the patents, says family reunification isn’t new to the agency but the numbers are larger now. Lucero said in the majority of cases he knows during his career, the parent asks to be deported and leave the child with a caretaker, typically a relative.
Sister Norma Pimentel of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley pushed back, saying parents choose to go home without their children because it takes four months to reunite.
Lucero disagreed, saying it “generally takes days” for ICE to reunite a willing parent with the child, who is monitored by the Health and Human Services Department.
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4:15 p.m.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti says there are approximately 100 migrant children separated from their families in the city, but that city officials have little information about them.
Garcetti told reporters at City Hall on Friday that he wants the children to be reunited with their parents as soon as possible, but they are under federal jurisdiction and beyond the city’s control.
The two-term Democrat says many of the children are very young, including some too young to identify their parents.
The children are with foster families or group homes contracted with the federal government, but the city did not know where. The city learned of them from activists and other groups that take in unaccompanied minors.
He says the federal government will not share any information.
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4 p.m.
Three Democratic U. S. senators say a holding facility for immigrant children on the Texas border near El Paso appears to be occupied by about 250 teenage boys mostly from Central America.
The lawmakers made the discovery Friday as they pushed for more information about the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy for immigrants crossing the border illegally.
The fenced-off cluster of tents near Tornillo on Texas’ border with Mexico and other holding facilities for immigrant children are under scrutiny amid confusion over President Donald Trump’s order to stop separating migrant children from families detained while crossing into the U. S. illegally.
A contractor that operates the shelter 30 miles (48 kilometers) southeast of El Paso briefed U. S. Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut without letting the lawmakers enter holding areas or speak with detained minors.
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3:20 p.m.
U. S. Sen. Marco Rubio has visited a Miami-area facility housing more than 1,000 teenage migrants.
After his tour Friday, the Florida Republican said he didn’t speak to any of the children inside the Homestead complex because of privacy regulations.
Officials say all the children are classified as unaccompanied minors, including fewer than 70 who were separated from adult relatives at the border.
He said splitting up families at the border was “a terrible situation,” but the U. S. doesn’t have the money or the capacity to hold families together when they are detained by immigration authorities.
Rubio said Congress would need to create those kinds of facilities. He added the desire to keep families together needed to be supported with policies that would help prevent people from making dangerous journeys to flee violence in their homelands.
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2:05 p.m.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued a notice that it may seek up to 15,000 beds to detain immigrant families.
The agency on Friday put out a request for information to help in planning for potential new family detention facilities.
The notice comes after the administration stopped separating immigrant children from their parents on the southwest border amid public outcry and officials said they intended to seek to detain families together during immigration proceedings.
The agency currently has about 3,300 beds for immigrant parents and their children in family detention facilities.
The notice comes amid a scramble by federal agencies to find space for immigrants.
The Pentagon says it’s drawing up plans to house up to 20,000 unaccompanied children on military bases.
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1:15 p.m.
U. S. Sen. Dick Durbin says that 66 of the more than 2,300 migrant children separated from their families at the border in recent weeks under President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy are in Chicago area shelters.
The Illinois Democrat said Friday two-thirds of those children are below the age of 13.
Durbin’s comments marked the first time a public official has specified how many of them are in the Chicago area.
They remain separated from their parents after Trump this week signed an order to stop separating families who cross the border illegally.
The children are being cared at shelters run by Heartland Alliance, a nonprofit human rights organization.
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1:10 p.m.
Some of the parents who were separated from their children at the U. S.-Mexico border are being held at an immigration facility in suburban Denver.
U. S. Customs and Immigration said Friday that 50 parents are being held at its detention center in Aurora.
Spokesman Carl Rusnok said he didn’t have any more details about how long those people had been held at the center, which is run by a private contractor, the GEO Group.
Immigration attorneys say they’ve been working to get parents released on bond as they try to reunite with their children.
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1:05 p.m.
Louisiana Democratic state senators have pushed legislation asking Gov. John Bel Edwards to recall Louisiana National Guard troops at the Texas border until separated families who entered illegally are reunited with their children.
A Senate committee on Friday advanced the legislation with a 3-1 vote, solely on Democratic support. Republican Sen. Neil Riser voted against the measure.
Louisiana has had a three-person National Guard team and one helicopter at the border since May. Edwards, a Democrat, announced Wednesday that the team will remain until mid-July as planned.
Edwards said the crew had no role in separating families, a policy the governor criticized as “unconscionable.”
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1 p.m.
The father of the girl who is pictured crying on the cover of this week’s Time magazine says the Honduran foreign ministry told him that his daughter is detained with her mother in McAllen, Texas, and the two have not been separated.
Denis Varela says he hasn’t heard from his wife or daughter in almost three weeks. The girl’s mother apparently took their daughter to the United States without telling him.
Varela, a dockworker who lives in Puerto Cortes, Honduras, said that the ministry had given him the girl’s detainee identification number. He was told his daughter was in McAllen with her mother, but nothing else.
The girl’s photo was apparently taken when she and her mother were first detained by Border Patrol officers and the mother was being searched.
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12:50 p.m.
A coalition of progressives in Nevada upset with the Trump administration’s immigration policy is urging a national association of school-based law enforcement officers to withdraw its invitation to U.
