“We’ve had very difficult conversations with the parents this week,” Lee Gelernt of the ACLU told a federal judge in San Diego. Gelernt told the court that he had spent time over the past week in Guatemala trying to locate parents of some of the roughly 300 children in U.S. care and found about two-thirds were refusing to have their child returned to them. Gelernt said parents who refused to be reunited tended to have older children who could be recruited by violent gangs if they returned home.
