SAN DIEGO -- President Donald Trump's administration told a federal judge Monday that the government will not meet today's deadline for reuniting all of the children age 4 and younger who were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border as part of a crackdown on illegal immigration in recent weeks.
Justice Department lawyer Sarah Fabian said officials had identified 102 children in that age group and would return at least 54 of them to their parents by today.
Depending on background checks, the number of young children reunited with their parents by today could rise to 59, Fabian told U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw at a hearing Monday morning. In a conference with lawyers Friday, he refused the government's request to extend the deadline.
Sabraw, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, has also ordered the government to reunite nearly 3,000 children age 5 and older with their parents by July 26.
Federal officials have been unable to provide precise numbers of separated children and parents to Sabraw, who is presiding over a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the separated families.
Lawyers for the government say federal agencies have been unable to locate some parents who were released or deported after being separated from their children. Some are in criminal custody or have criminal records that make them ineligible to immediately claim their children.
One child has not been matched with a parent, Fabian said. The ACLU identified him as a 3-year-old boy.
The Justice Department said Monday that the administration has "worked tirelessly" since the court conference Friday "toward the shared goal of promptly reunifying families while ensuring the safety of the children."
"The results of that work have been highly encouraging, and the Department of Justice is eager to present its progress to the court on Monday and to chart a path forward to safely reunifying other families expeditiously," the department said in a statement.
At the hearing, officials said they were negotiating and working together to find parents. Most will be released in the United States after being reunited with their children, Fabian said.
"I am very encouraged about the progress," Sabraw said at the hearing. "This is real progress. I'm optimistic that many of these families will be reunited tomorrow."
Sabraw had ordered the government to provide a list of the separated children's names to the ACLU over the weekend. He scheduled another hearing for this morning.
Fabian said the parents and children will be reunited at an undisclosed location administered by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and then released to await immigration proceedings.
"ICE will take custody and then release the parent and child together," she said. "They will not remain in ICE custody."
It was the first time the government indicated whether the parents and children would be released or detained together.
Fabian didn't say why they were being released, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has little space to hold families.
The agency has three family detention centers with room for about 3,000 people in all, and the places are already at or near capacity. The Trump administration is trying to line up thousands more beds at military bases.
PROCESS QUESTIONED
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they would ask the judge to at least streamline the time-consuming bureaucratic process required for reuniting additional families.
"These kids have already suffered so much because of this policy, and every extra day apart just adds to that pain," Lee Gelernt, an ACLU lawyer, said before Monday's court hearing.
"Tomorrow there will hopefully be more than 50 babies and toddlers reunited with their parents, and that is obviously an enormous victory," he said. But he said those who remain split from their parents are "in for a long process."
Gelernt said in court that the government had taken "significant steps" to reunite families but was still in violation of Sabraw's court order and should be moving more quickly.
"I believe that they can still reunite some [more] individuals by tomorrow," Gelernt said during the hearing. "We just don't know how much effort the government's made to find" the parents.
Gelernt said the government had not agreed to alter its "cumbersome, lengthy" reunification process, which immigration authorities say is necessary to ensure that children go to the right families. He said it was also unclear how much effort the government had made to locate parents who were already released from immigration custody or deported back to their home countries and whose children were still in custody.
Under the administration policy implemented in May, adults who otherwise might have been directed into civil proceedings for deportation were instead criminally charged with entering the country illegally. Children were removed from these parents and placed in shelters across the country, sometimes thousands of miles from where the parent was detained.
Trump issued an executive order ending the separations amid mounting political pressure and public anger. The administration has committed to reuniting migrant children and their families, but stringent vetting, including home visits and the fingerprinting of every member of a household where a child will be residing, has slowed the process.
The ACLU and immigrant advocates say the exhaustive screening is meant for unaccompanied minors, typically teenagers, who enter the country alone, instead of for children who were brought into the country by their parents and then taken away by immigration authorities -- who presumably should already be aware of their family connections.
Information for this article was contributed by Tony Perry and Maria Sacchetti of The Washington Post; by Miriam Jordan of The New York Times; and by Elliot Spagat and Nomaan Merchant of The Associated Press.
[U.S. immigration: Data visualization of selected immigration statistics, U.S. border map]
A Section on 07/10/2018