The ACLU attorney who fights to reunite migrant families

Lee Gelernt is deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national Immigrants’ Rights Project. As the lead attorney on efforts to reunite migrant families separated by the Trump administration and in blocking the first version of the Muslim travel ban, he’s a familiar face in court.

Mr. Gelernt is based at the ACLU’s office in New York. On a visit to Boston, he talked about the ongoing efforts to track down and reunite thousands of families that were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. Under a “zero tolerance policy,” which ended last summer, adults were prosecuted for crossing the border and their children were dispersed to shelters across the country. The ACLU successfully sued to halt the practice in a U.S. District Court in San Diego.

Since Donald Trump took office, “I’ve had maybe a week of vacation,” says Mr. Gelernt, who is also an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School. Still, he adds, it’s nothing compared with the levels of stress experienced by migrants coming to the United States.

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The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You won a District Court injunction in 2018 to stop family separations. Where do we stand on that issue, and what is the treatment of families arriving now at the border who want to claim asylum?

I would say there are four big buckets. One has to do with the 3,000 people who have been reported separated to us, and whether any of the parents who were deported without their children are going to be allowed to return. We believe they were coerced or misled into giving up their own asylum rights. So these are families where the children are here in the U.S. and the parent is abroad.

The government said they would relook at these cases. They rejected all the cases we submitted. So we are likely to go to court very soon to see whether any of those parents can come back and get a chance to apply for asylum.

There is another bucket that’s backward-looking, and that’s because [the Department of Health and Human Services] revealed that there may be thousands more families that were separated.

So these separations preceded the zero tolerance announcement in the spring of 2018.

The government said, … these are separations that occurred before the court injunction. The government is saying … these are families that were separated before, but also the child was released; we got the child to a sponsor. … [Editor’s note: After Mr. Gelernt’s interview, news reports came out that the Trump administration has so far identified more than 1,700 children who might have been separated before the zero tolerance policy. These cases have been forwarded to U.S. Customs and Border Protection for further review.]

And then once we find [the families], we’ll have to figure out what their situation is. It could be that … some have been able to reunite. It could be that some of the parents are in Central America – I suspect a lot – and they felt it’s too dangerous for their kid to come back. It could be that some of the parents want their kids to come back but haven’t been able to get them back. …

The third bucket is when you asked about what’s going on now. Since the court’s injunction, the government has said they’ve separated roughly 400 people … and we suspect that’s an undercount. The government is taking the position that each of these 400 is consistent with the court’s order because all the court said is you can’t systematically separate for no reason – but you can still separate if there’s evidence in an individual case that the parent is a danger to the child.

And of course everyone agrees: You see a parent beating the child, right, you take the child away. But what we’re finding out is that they’re separating [families] because they alleged that the person might have been a member of a gang, or have a traffic violation, or some minor crime that doesn’t reflect at all on the parents’ ability to raise their kid. So we’ll be back in court. …

And the fourth thing is the post-reunification, how can we get help for these children. They are suffering immeasurably from the trauma of the separation, as are the parents, particularly the young parents. And so now one of the things we’re working on is how can we get medical help, pro bono.