A Nilu Chadwick recognizes some of the children’s names right away. Chadwick, a lawyer for Kids in Need of Defense, has spent the past five years poring over lists of families separated under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy whose cases have yet to be resolved. Some of the children’s names stand out because she crossed paths with them back in 2018, when she represented them at their immigration hearings after they were torn from their parents’ side at the southern border. Those names always remind her of what she witnessed that year. The eerie silence of the children’s shelters. The kids so young that they couldn’t even explain who they were or where they came from. The hearing she had to pause in order to soothe a client with a nursery rhyme. Then there are the names that have simply grown familiar through repetition: the children whose cases appeared on the lists years ago and remain open.

The process of reunifying families separated under “zero tolerance” began in June 2018, two months after the policy was officially implemented. The ACLU had filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of separated families, Ms. L. v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and during the litigation, a federal judge halted Trump’s policy and ordered its victims reunified within 30 days. Some of these reunifications were relatively straightforward. The government had records of around 2,800 separated families, and most of those parents and children were still in the U.S. — maybe they’d been sent to separate ICE facilities or the parents were in detention while their children had been placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. But for about 470 families, the parents had already been deported. When the Trump administration declined to track them down, Lee Gelernt, the head lawyer for the plaintiffs, stood up in court and said the ACLU would do it. A steering committee was put together comprising a team from the New York law firm Paul, Weiss and representatives from three NGOs, including Kids in Need of Defense and the organization Justice in Motion. “Little did I know what we were taking responsibility for,” Gelernt told me.

The first hurdle the committee faced was the total disorganization with which “zero tolerance” had been implemented. “There was no intention of reuniting families, and so they didn’t design the system to be able to keep track,” Nan Schivone, Justice in Motion’s legal director, told me. The agencies involved — Customs and Border Protection, which took families into custody; ICE, which oversaw their detainment; the ORR, which was responsible for the separated children — didn’t have a comprehensive system to share data with one another, nor did they always keep records linking parents with their children. If children were released from ORR custody into the care of family or friends, the government did limited follow-up. “We give you a luggage tag for your luggage,” said Gisela Voss, a former board member of Together & Free, which supports families seeking asylum. “We separated parents from their kids and didn’t give them, like, a number.”

It took two months, until August 2018, for the administration to provide the steering committee with the phone numbers of the deported parents; a quarter of the numbers were missing. The committee began its search, making calls and performing social-media investigations. Then, in January 2019, the HHS Office of Inspector General revealed that more families had been separated than the Trump administration had previously disclosed. Nine months later, the Justice Department finally produced those names. There were 1,500 of them, and the vast majority of the parents had been deported.

The steering-committee members began chipping away at this new batch of cases. They were searching for people who come from some of the most remote and unstable corners of the globe and whose lives were thrown into further upheaval by their migration, separation, and subsequent deportation. Often the committee only had the parent’s partial address, and this information quickly grew stale. Some parents had sold their homes or their land in order to finance their journeys north; others who had fled danger — extortion or gang violence — went into hiding upon their return. When there was a phone number, there was no guarantee that it was current, either. And because of the Trump administration’s hostility toward asylum claims, whenever the steering committee did locate a deported parent, the only available remedy was for their child to repatriate. Some families made the difficult choice to remain apart; they thought their children would be better off in the U.S.

Then, a month after President Biden took office in January 2021, he issued an executive order to establish a task force on family reunification. For the first time, children separated under “zero tolerance” were granted a clear and expedient process by which they could reunify with their parents in the U.S., rather than back in their home countries, and access three years of humanitarian parole here. Moreover, the steering committee finally had the government’s voluntary cooperation in locating victims. “I don’t know of any other time that the U.S. government has recognized a wrong in this way and put this many resources into it to try to correct it,” said Michelle Brané, who had been part of the steering committee and now leads the task force.

The Ms. L. lawsuit had stretched on during the Trump years, and the Biden administration quickly reached out to the ACLU to finally settle. While Biden’s executive order had started the process of widespread reunification in the U.S., a comprehensive settlement could formalize those procedures and provide redress in the form of medical and mental-health care, legal support, and housing assistance. The ACLU also sought to prohibit future family separations. It wanted to send a resounding message: Never again.

Today, the phrase kids in cages lives on as a shorthand for the barbarism and havoc of the Trump years, but the horrors of “zero tolerance” have since been overshadowed by other crises: wars, a pandemic, an insurrection, a new fight........

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