News of family’s separations at the US-Mexico border made international headlines in 2018, with footage from a federal detention center showing dozens of desperate children crying for their parents.

Although world knowledge of this fact was given in 2018, a pilot program for the reunification of immigrant families had already begun in 2017 in the El Paso, Texas, area.

According to the Voice of America (VOA) reportage, “five years later, of the more than 5,000 children who, court documents say, were separated from their parents under former President Donald Trump's zero-tolerance policy for unauthorized border crossers and those who presented themselves legally at ports of entry, about 180 children have yet to be reunited with their parents. Many of those parents were expelled from the United States”.

However, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) believe that the number of children who have not yet been returned to their parents is much higher. Many of them are still in orphanages and others are with relatives they had never met before.

Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lead attorney who filed a lawsuit against the administration seeking to stop Trump's policy by representing the separated families, told to the VOA reportage that about 1,000 families are still not reunited today.

"I've been doing this work for 30 years, and this is by far the worst thing that I have ever seen. We're talking about really a historic wrong by this country because it wasn't an accident. It wasn't a few mistakes. It was a deliberate policy at the highest levels of the United States government sitting down and saying, ‘Let´s take children away from their parents so that the parents say, ‘Let's just give up our asylum claims’. And no one ever tries to come in’”. Gelernt said.

In March 2021, the Department of Homeland Security announced that some of the families could be reunited in the United States and be allowed to stay. And DHS created websites in English, Spanish and other languages where separated family members could register for help. About 1,075 families have registered on the two DHS websites, and some family members are outside the US awaiting to be reunited, according to the DHS report from March this year.

Although thousands of separated children have been able to reunite with their parents since 2017, the task force to be hampered by logistical, legal and political hurdles. “Under the Trump administration, the process of reuniting the families began after a federal judge ordered the government to stop separations and reunite families within 30 days. The government missed the court's deadline and most of the work was done by the ACLU and immigration nonprofits”, according to the VOA.

Last December, the DHS stated that significant progress had been made in the process of reuniting those families, and that in March of this year, when the task force completed one year, 147 children were reunited with their parents.

“Amid ongoing litigation, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that the Justice Department was considering paying about $450,000 to each person affected by the zero-tolerance policy. When reporters asked Biden in November 2021 about the possible $450,000 payments, he said: ‘That's not going to happen’.”

Also last December, the government walked away from settlement talks, leaving both sides to litigate in open court. So far, Congress has not voted on any bills to help families that were separated under the zero-tolerance policy.

“We are just continuing to look for them. It's been now five years, and there are some children who haven't seen their parents, in four years, four to five years. And so, we're in this horrendous situation where the children — some of them are so young — they don't even really remember their parents”, Lee Gelernt told to the publication.