U.S. Border Patrol/Flickr

U.S. Border Patrol agents conduct intake of illegal border crossers at the Central Processing Center in McAllen, Texas, on June 17, 2018.

The Trump administration was ordered by a federal judge in 2018 to stop separating most migrant children from their parents on the border. The public outcry over the issue was fierce, and the administration has said it’s not enforcing the policy anymore.

But, a new report from independent journalists Jude Joffe-Block and Valeria Fernandez shows families are still being separated. The court order, you see, does not apply to non-parents — grandparents, aunts, siblings and others who often step in to act as guardians but don’t have formal paperwork to show it.

Considering this — and the additional 1,500 children separated from their parents recently that was revealed in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union — the number of known cases like this is now more than 5,460.

Joffe-Block and Fernandez’s story appears in The Guardian and outlines this ongoing issue — through the lens of one woman who is in detention in Arizona now after being separated from her niece, who she had raised as her own. The Show spoke with them more about it recently.

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