The Trump administration wants up to two years to find children who were separated from their families at the border. The children, potentially numbering in the thousands, are more difficult to locate than previously expected because they are no longer in government custody. The administration would provide information on separated families on a rolling basis to the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued to reunite families. “We strongly oppose a plan that could take up to two years to locate these families,” said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney. “The government needs to make this a priority.” In a court filing late Friday the Justice Department said that it will take at least a year to review about 47,000 cases of unaccompanied children. On June 26, 2018 U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw halted the practice of splitting families. However, there may be thousands of additional children separated since the summer of 2017, the department’s inspector general said the precise number is unknown.
