About 500 children who were separated from their parents at the border have been reunited since May, officials with Department of Homeland Security said.
About 500 migrant children of the 2,300 who were separated from their parents at the U. S. border with Mexico have been reunited since May, officials with Department of Homeland Security told NBC News and the Associated Press on Friday.
It was unclear how many of the roughly 500 children were still being detained with their families. Federal agencies were working to set up a centralized reunification process for the remaining separated children and their families at the Port Isabel Detention Center just north of border in Texas, a DHS official told the AP.
Still, confusion over how migrant families would be handled continued to mount as questions swirled over the treatment of detained children in Virginia and Texas .
“Trump’s order leaves us with more questions than answers: How to ensure kids are safely returned to parents? When? Where are they being held? In what conditions? What care are they getting?” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., tweeted Thursday.
The Trump administration had not previously said how many children may have been reunited with their families, but parents have shared stories of not knowing where their children are for weeks and one former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told NBC News that some separations may be permanent .
Kaine, meanwhile, said that he will seek more information into an Associated Press report that said immigrant children at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center in Staunton, Virginia, were allegedly bound, beaten and isolated in solitary confinement. Six Latino teens made sworn statements about the abuse they say took place between 2015 and 2018, under both the Obama and Trump administrations.
The details were shared as part of a federal class-action lawsuit.
“We need to see these kids, and we need answers about what’s going on at this facility,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., tweeted in response to the report.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions first announced last month that the government would criminally prosecute anyone who crosses the U. S.-Mexico border illegally — known as a “zero-tolerance” policy.
With the outrage over the family separations, there are signs that the administration is dialing back its policy.
The federal public defender’s office for the region that covers cases from El Paso to San Antonio said Thursday that the U. S. Attorney’s Office would be dismissing cases in which parents were charged with illegally entering or re-entering the country and were subsequently separated from their children.
“Going forward, they will no longer bring criminal charges against a parent or parents entering the United States if they have their child with them,” wrote Maureen Scott Franco, the federal public defender for the Western District of Texas, in an email shown to the AP.
