Across Central America a network of civil rights lawyers are searching tirelessly for hundreds of parents who were deported after being separated from their children under Trump’s zero tolerance policy.

Three years after the family separation policy officially ended, they continue to knock on doors, track down relatives, and search incomplete government records to locate the parents of around 490 children who remain in the United States. They have already found around 500 children’s parents.

“Our goal is to make sure that the parents who were deported without their kids are found, are talked to, are heard, and gain control over the future of their families,” said Cathleen Caron, the founder and executive director of Justice in Motion, one of the the U.S.-based nonprofits tasked with finding the deported parents.

In June 2018 after nearly 5,500 children were separated from their parents at the border, a federal judge in San Diego mandated that the government reunify families within 30 days. Federal agencies failed to meet that deadline.

“The government intentionally separated these families, intentionally hurt these families and had no intention to reunite them,” said Caron. “They weren’t going to do it.”

So in August 2018, the judge created a steering committee of five nonprofits to find and reunify families and ordered the government to turn over any information they had on the children and parents. Justice in Motion is the member of that committee that deals with the “unreachable” parents, ones who have been impossible to reach from the U.S.. Contact information for these parents is often incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate, said Caron. Finding them in their country of origin is complicated.

“This has been a herculean task that we have been working on since the Summer of 2018,” said Caron.

Prior to 2018, Justice in Motion already had what they call a defender network of 45 human rights organizations and lawyers South of the border, ensuring immigrants rights were protected throughout their immigration process. This network was then ideal for locating parents who had been separated from their children and deported back to their country of origin.

“It’s a miracle that we give defender network members bad data, and they end up finding the families,” said Caron. “So that’s sleuthing work that they do using local government records, looking for birth certificates, looking for hometowns, going to those hometowns. It’s quite complex.”

Even when the parents are located, there is often a deep distrust, said Caron. Many parents are slow to trust a system that tore their child away from them or do not understand the role Justice in Motion plays in their reunification. That’s when the local defenders are so crucial.

“These are people from their own communities who they know are human rights advocates, human rights leaders,” said Caron.

Challenges such as COVID-19 and natural disasters have further complicated an already difficult search, but the defender network overcame these and other challenges.

“We are the last resort to find these parents,” said Caron. “We are going to keep on going through the list. We have found hundreds of parents so far. The list right now is down to a couple hundred, and we are making progress.

An 18-month-old craned her neck to catch the last glimpse of their wailing mother as the car drove away. A boy screamed “Daddy, Daddy, what are they doing?” as border patrol agents forced them apart without time for the child to receive an answer. Parents waved through a glass window as their children were taken away, having no idea when they would see them again.

These are the stories that Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project, has heard repeated from hundreds of immigrants separated from their children under the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policy.

“This is the worst thing I have seen in my 30 years doing this civil rights work,” said Gelernt in an interview with Frontline.

Gelernt says that more than 5,500 immigrant children were separated from their parents after crossing the border during Trump’s tenure, a markedly different approach from previous administrations who kept the majority of immigrant families together. A June report from The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said that almost 4,000 children were separated from their parents under Trump, and that the department is reviewing another 1,700 separation cases. The vast majority of the separated families emigrated from Central America, per the report.

“The numbers tell one story, and it’s devastating, the 5,500,” said Gelernt. “But each child is a story unto himself or herself.”

Gelernt is the lead attorney in Ms. L v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which was filed in February 2018. This was the first lawsuit to challenge family separation under Trump, and it came two months before Jeff Sessions sent a memo enacting a zero tolerance and family separation policy for anyone who crosses the border. In the months that followed that memo, family separations skyrocketed, per the DHS report.

Ms. L was separated from her daughter, S.S. in November 2017 after arriving in San Diego seeking asylum from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Despite entering the country legally as an asylum seeker, Ms. L was kept in San Diego while her daughter was brought halfway across the country to Chicago, where she remained for six months with limited telephone contact.

Ms. L was one of what would become 5,500 cases of family separation. After an international outcry condemning the practice, Gelerent successfully argued in June 2018 for the federal court to mandate the end of family separation and ensure family reunification within 30 days.

The Trump administration had kept haphazard and incomplete records on families who had been separated and lacked any plan to reunite families, said Gelernt. By the deadline, less than half of the children had been reunified with their parents.

Today the parents of almost 500 separated children are still missing, said Gelernt. The ACLU has been working with other nonprofits to locate parents, most of whom were deported without their children.

Even the children who have been reunified suffer from intense emotional trauma, said Gelernt. A study published in the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics called the practice “torture.”

“In the history books it needs to say flat out that the Trump administration engaged in child abuse of thousands and thousands of children,” said Gelernt.

Gelernt and his team continue to litigate the Ms. L case, arguing that families who were separated should be granted permanent status in the U.S., receive basic necessities, and get the trauma help they need.

“Will the children ever recover from what’s happened?” said Gelernt. “I suspect a lot of them will not, I think that is what the medical community is saying. But we need to try. We need to do everything we can.”