Trump administration says reuniting separated migrant children with family may be impossible

A woman, identified only as Maria, is reunited with her son Franco, 4, at the El Paso International Airport on July 26, 2018 in El Paso, Texas.

(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

It may not be "within the realm of the possible" to reunite thousands of migrant children separated from their families at the southern border with their parents or guardians, the Trump administration said in court filings late Friday.

The statement from the Office of Refugee Resettlement said at this point it would "destabilize the permanency of [the children's] existing home environment, and could be traumatic to the children" to remove them from the sponsor homes where they were placed after separation.

These filings come in response to an ACLU suit that returns to court Feb. 21. "The Trump administration's response is a shocking concession that it can't easily find thousands of children it ripped from parents, and doesn't even think it's worth the time to locate each of them," said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who is leading the suit. "The administration also doesn't dispute that separations are ongoing in significant numbers."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.