The Trump administration has said all eligible small children separated from their families as a result of its “zero-tolerance” immigration policy have now been reunited with their parents.

But nearly half of the 103 children under the age of five remain separated from their families because of safety concerns, the deportation of their parents and other issues, the administration said.

“While most adults we are encountering are parents who are perfectly appropriate sponsors for their children, sadly not all are,” an official told reporters Thursday.

The administration was under a court mandate to reunify families separated between early May and 20 June, when Donald Trump signed an executive order that stopped his own policy of family separations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit on behalf of a woman who had been separated from her child, and US district court judge Dana Sabraw ordered all children reunited with their parents.

Fifty-seven children were reunited with their parents as of Thursday morning, administration officials said.



“Throughout the reunification process, our goal has been the wellbeing of the children and returning them to a safe environment,” according to a statement from the heads of the three agencies responsible for the process.

Sabraw’s deadline for reunification had already come and gone Tuesday night. In a response Thursday morning, Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project said: “If in fact 57 children have been reunited because of the lawsuit, we could not be more happy for those families. But make no mistake about it: the government missed the deadline even for these 57 children.”

The officials said 46 of the children were not eligible to be reunited with their parents; a dozen parents had already been deported and were being contacted by the administration. Nine were in custody of the US marshals service for other offenses. One of the children deemed ineligible was identified Tuesday as perhaps being a US citizen, along with their parent who officials have been unable to locate for over a year. Officials declined to provide more information on that case Thursday.

In 22 other cases, adults posed safety concerns, they said. Officials said 11 adults had serious criminal histories including child cruelty, murder or human smuggling. Seven were not determined to be a parent, one had a false birth certificate, one had allegedly abused the child. Another planned to house the child with an adult charged with sexually abusing a child.

The zero-tolerance policy calls for the criminal prosecution of anyone caught crossing the border illegally. Because parents can’t take their children to jail, they were separated. The move caused an international uproar. At least 2,300 children were separated from about 2,200 adults until the executive order was signed.

Part of the issue, administration officials said, is that systems were not set up to reunify parents with their children; they were set up to manage tens of thousands of minors who cross the border illegally without family. Health and human services manages their care, the US. homeland security has control over adults in immigration detention, and the justice department manages the immigration courts.

Earlier this week, government attorneys told Sabraw that the Trump administration would not meet the deadline for about 20 children under five because it needed more time to track down parents who have been deported or released into the US.

Sabraw indicated more time would be allowed only in specific cases where the government showed good reasons for a delay.

The administration defended its screening, saying it discovered parents with serious criminal histories, five adults whose DNA tests showed they were not parents of the children they claimed to have, and one case of credible child abuse.

The administration faces a second, bigger deadline – 26 July – to reunite more than 2,000 older children with their families. Immigration attorneys say they are seeing barriers to those reunifications from a backlog in the processing of fingerprinting of parents to families unable to afford the airfare to fly the child to them – which could run as high as $1,000.