The Ukrainian children were taken to Russia during the war.

The plan

The Holy See's plan to reunite the children followed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's explicit request for its help, when he met Pope Francis at the Vatican in May. Russia is said to be willing to engage in the process.

The Vatican official discussed the plan last Thursday after the Pope's peace envoy, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, returned to the Vatican from Washington.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said Zuppi met President Joe Biden last Tuesday, after earlier missions to Kyiv and Moscow.

In Moscow, he had met one of President Vladimir Putin's foreign policy advisers, Yuri Ushakov, and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's commissioner for children's rights.

A White House official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed a large part of Biden's discussion with Zuppi concerned the Vatican effort to reunite Ukrainian children.

Catholic Biden welcomes Vatican plan

Zuppi delivered a letter from Pope Francis to Biden, "emphasising the pope's sorrow for the suffering caused by the war," the Vatican says.

The White House official noted Biden, a Catholic, welcomed the Vatican's peace efforts.

The President and Zuppi discussed "the Holy See's efforts providing humanitarian aid to address the widespread suffering caused by Russia's continuing aggression in Ukraine, as well as the Vatican's advocacy for the return of forcibly deported Ukrainian children."

During the meeting, Biden assured Zuppi of "full readiness to support initiatives in the humanitarian field, particularly for children and the most fragile people, both to respond to this urgency and to foster pathways to peace."

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in late March for Putin and Lvova-Belova. They are accused of abducting children from Ukraine.

Russian officials deny any forced transfers of children. Some Ukrainian children are in foster care, they say.

Now what?

The Vatican's initiative is not unprecedented.

It organised Russia-Ukraine prisoner swaps by delivering lists of prisoners to be exchanged, though how many prisoners were exchanged is unclear.

However, the Vatican official says Russia has expressed a willingness to engage in a similar "mechanism" or process of exchanging lists involving the return of Ukrainian children.

Lvova-Belova's meeting with Zuppi in June is significant, the official says.

Whether Russia has put other conditions on the children's return - including numbers and when the operation might get under way - remains unknown.

Spreading the word

While he was in Washington, Zuppi described the Vatican reunification plan to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission.

Zuppi's delegation also attended the Senate Prayer Breakfast. During this, "Zuppi had the opportunity to brief the participants on the meetings he had during the various stages of his peace mission," the Vatican says.

Source

• AP News

Matching parents and children is not straightforward, however.

A California judge told US border authorities on 27 June they had 30 days to reunite the families. Less if children are under the age of five.

Families with under five year-olds have to be reunited within 14 days.

That means the government has until today to reunite about 100 children under the age of five with their parents. It has until July 26 to reunite hundreds of older children.

Christine Reis, Director of the Human Rights Institute of the University of St Thomas School of Law, says because the US border "zero tolerance" decision "happened very quickly ... there was not appropriate planning".

Reis says the three family detention centers in operation are not "equipped to handle even a small portion" of the immigrants who come in.

Reunification efforts are complicated as government records assigning "family identification numbers" to immigrant families were reportedly deleted.

Without the family identification numbers to connect them, immigrant parents and their children appear in federal computers as individuals with separate cases and no relation to one another.

When they were taken from their parents, the children were placed in the custody of the Health and Human Services department and flown to shelters across the country.

"That was the big problem. We weren't able to see that information," one of the officials told The Times.

The officials said the records weren't deleted deliberately to conceal the family ties, but because the customs agents thought it was more logical to track cases separately rather than as a family unit.

The Health and Human Services (HHS) department now has to work out which children were separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border, and which arrived in the country unaccompanied.

Federal employees are manually reviewing documents for each of the 11,800 individual immigrant children in HHS custody to see if anything in their files indicate they arrived at the border with their parents.

On Friday, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington called for an investigation into the Department of Homeland Security and HHS over the records, calling the deletions a violation of the Federal Records Act.

Source

• This Insider
• Vatican News
• Image: Truro Daily News

About 2,300 undocumented children were taken from their parents in recent weeks by US Border Control. That stopped last Wednesday when US President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending his administration's policy of separating the families of illegal immigrants at the border.

So far only about 500 children have been reunited with their families. Many of them have been moved thousands of miles from the border, while their parents are detained for immigration hearings. Some are very young, still babies.

Dozens of non-profit, religious and other companies and organisations have provided services to the children.

Many have been local mainstays of refugee services for years. One of these, Catholic Extension, has announced it has established a Family Reunification Fund. (Catholic Extension is the leading supporter of missionary work in poor and remote parts of the US.)

They say the fund is "a response to the human tragedy unfolding on the nation's southern border" with Mexico.

It will support ministries that provide direct outreach and advocacy for immigrant families who are "separated as a consequence of our broken immigration system.

"The fund will mainly benefit existing ministries on the southern US border with Mexico, specifically those that are actively sheltering, defending and caring for immigrants and their families," a spokesperson says.

Family separations at the border and policy debates over that policy as well as the nation's immigration system "have exposed the profound misery of those fleeing their countries and coming to the United States," the spokesperson continues.

The fund will help Catholic Extension increase its support to resource-strapped immigrant ministries "at this very critical moment when policy changes are creating even more hardship and uncertainty among immigrant families."

Source

• Crux Now
• Al Jazeera
• USA Today
• Image: The China Post