One of the first expectations of the incoming administration, Caron said, is scrubbing agencies to ensure there's no information or data that's been held back that could be helpful to identifying and locating families.
A recent court filing in an ongoing family separation case also revealed that the Trump administration would hand over information from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, an agency under the Justice Department that oversees the US immigration court system. That database will provide needed phone numbers and addresses to locate additional families.
But beyond assuring that all family details have been provided, groups stressed that a Biden administration should focus on rectifying the damage done, leaving the process of locating families up to the groups that have worked on the issue.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which has led litigation against the Trump administration over family separation, outlined five steps the incoming administration should consider taking when tackling the issue.
Those steps include allowing the parents and children who were separated and then deported to return to the United States, as well as giving some type of legal status to those families that were separated and creating a victims fund to help families with trauma and medical needs.
"Finally and importantly, while we of course welcome any help the Biden administration can give us to find the remaining families (now the parents of 628 children), that is not where we would like to see the new administration concentrate its efforts," said Lee Gelernt,an attorney at the ACLU. "I am confident that we will ultimately find the families, but only the government can reunite the families and provide them with legal status in the United States."
Gelernt said that through the litigation they've learned of nearly 5,500 separations since July 2017.
