As many as 468 kids separated from mothers and fathers at the border have parents who were deported by the Trump administration, according to statistics made public in a San Diego court hearing, and US authorities now must figure out how to reunite them — or whether to reunite them at all.
Authorities also must find the parents of 43 children who apparently were released into the United States, but whose whereabouts the government has lost track of —more testimony to the lack of record keeping that has plagued the Trump administration’s family separation crisis from the beginning.
Those numbers were made public in court on Friday at a hearing in San Diego where the government declared that it had successfully reunited 1,820 families by the court’s July 26 deadline. Most of those were then allowed to go free in the US — an ironic conclusion to two months of chaos caused by the administration’s efforts to prevent that very outcome.
