Family Reunions: What happened to the task force created for migrant children separated from their families?

Hi. I’m a practicing immigration lawyer with a background in free market, employment-based migration. This blog is for people who want to learn about effective solutions that improve legal immigration based on empirical data. The story of immigration in America is epic, but it requires fact-checking some myths.

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Under the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy in 2017, more than 5,000 migrant children have now been counted as separated from their migrant parents during border apprehensions or detentions, including infants and kids younger than five-years-old. The policy was formally ended in 2018 by executive order after public outcry, which slowed the separations but didn’t stop them, and a federal judge ordered the government to begin tracking and reuniting the families that had been separated.

By January 2021, a total of 3,924 kids had been isolated from their families. Only 75% of those kids, about 2,176, had been reconnected with their previously detained family members before Biden took office. In February 2021, Biden created an interagency family reunification task force to identify the remaining thousands of families separated from their children and bring them back together. The task force was criticized for its slow pace, and it failed to deliver a report every 60 days as mandated by President Biden, but progress was being made.¹

By its last report in April 2024, the task force had “facilitated the reunification of 795 children with their parents in the United States” and brought the number of remaining kids down to 1,360 children left without confirmed reunifications.²

But after the 2024 election, Trump disbanded the task force by executive order on the first day of his second administration.

Trump got rid of the task force, even though the immigration lawyers representing this class of families reiterate there may be around a thousand whose reunions have not been confirmed;³ even though VP Vance and “border czar” Tom Homan (the guy largely responsible for the zero tolerance policy implementation) were pretending to be concerned about 300,000 missing unaccompanied minors they claimed were released by the government into the custody of unvetted sponsors. To the extent claims over missing unaccompanied minors were ever genuine, those concerns were overblown and based on inaccurate data.

There’s been no statement from the White House about what to do in the absence of the task force, or how to find and reunite the children still separated from their families.

What the second Trump administration has decided to do this time around, instead of trying to separate families with zero tolerance, is to #deportfamiliestogether. Deporting families is no better than dividing them. Why? Because it deprives US citizens, green card holders, and immigrants with a legitimate visa, of their legal rights. The most prominent and stinging example of this is the news from the past week that a US citizen girl recovering from brain cancer surgery, with siblings who are also US citizens, whose parents did not have valid immigration status, was removed⁴ to Mexico.

I grew up in family-focused happy valley Utah where family reunions were always the best part of my summer. I belong to a faith that emphasizes eternal families and proclaims that the family is the bedrock unit of society. In my opinion voters ought to support politicians who make it easier, not harder, for immigrants to come to America as a family and to stay together in America as a family. Trump offers none of that. He is not trying to reform immigration law, he is not supportive of Dreamers who were brought here as young children and are DACA recipients, and he is not trying to improve legal immigration. MAGA Republicans are obsessed with forcing immigrants to do things “the right way,” while also cutting corners to punish people who are in fact trying to migrate according to existing law.

The only solution Trump has offered, which we will talk about next time, is the end to birthright citizenship as enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. And taking away the right to citizenship by virtue of birth on US soil is an even worse idea than tearing kids away from their undocumented parents.

1. The Biden administration can also be criticized for arguing in court against financial compensation for the families damaged by the zero tolerance policy.

2. The exact number of children separated from their families during the zero tolerance period, and the exact number reunified with their families before and after the task force was created, and the exact number of children yet to be identified and reunited with their family varies slightly between all the reporting. What is important to keep in mind is the children behind the numbers, who undoubtedly total in the hundreds and thousands, that suffered at the hands of Trump administration officials, and who still suffer because of the unresolved separation.

3. Though the website used by the task force to solicit registrations from separated family members, together.gov, is still up on the internet.

4. The technical legal term for deportation.