Why 2,000 Children Are Still Separated From Their Families After Trump's Executive Order

President Trump signed an executive sort on Wednesday (June 20) ending his administration's policy of separating immigrant families seeking asylum at the U.S. Border. This is, at first blush, good news; no new children will be split up from their parents and sent to overcrowded, cage-like detention centers as their parents await federal prosecution in back of bars.


Yet what about the thousands of children who are already there?


The president's executive categorize contains no plans to reunite the more than 2,000 children separated from their families because of the administration's "zero endurance policy. The precise number may be higher, as CNN points out; the government hasn't stated how several children remain in custody, nor how several have been returned to their families. As it stands right now, parents are still tasked with finding their children, who are being kept in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services — or, potentially soon, on military bases.


In some cases, as New York magazine's Daily Intelligencer blog points out, parents were instructed to call hotlines to help find their children, only to discover they had the incorrect number.


In others, parents are being deported without their children at all. This was the case with Elsa Johana Ortiz Enriquez, whose 8-year-old son, Anthony, was sent to a facility for migrant children right following the two crossed into the U.S. Elsa, meanwhile, was sent back to Guatemala. "I am fully devastated,"she told The New York Times last week.


Previously, any time once a child entered the U.S. Illegally alone, the DHHS would work with any member family or friends already in the nation to aid in sponsorship of the child. Although the president's now-stopped family member separation policy threw a wrench into this procedure, and there's currently no mechanism for dealing with the thousands of children who did not enter alone, however ended up separated from their families anyway.


First Lady Melania Trump toured a migrant detention center in Texas near the Mexican border on Thursday (June 21). "I'm here to learn about the facility to which I know you housed children on a long-term basis," she told an audience of workers there, per NBC News. "And I also like to ask you how I will assist to these children reunite with their families as rapidly as possible."


Her partner, meanwhile, questioned the point of GOP-proposed immigration legislation originally set to be voted on Thursday. Nevertheless, the Washington Post reports that Home Republican leaders have postponed the vote up until Friday.


In the meantime, there really are still thousands of children separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border — the screams of some of which have haunted social media for days — along with national demonstrations offered for June 30 to protest these conditions. Here's how you could get involved with them.


To learn more about how you could will assist immigrant families, visit familiesbelongtogether.Org.