Separated familiesHow can the federal government reunify kids with deported parents? First step: Find them.

By Emma Platoff

Days after more than 1,500 “eligible” migrant children were reunited with the parents taken from them at the U.S.-Mexico border, the Trump administration has — by the order of a federal court — turned its attention to a much steeper challenge: reuniting hundreds of separated children with parents it has already deported.

Some 400 parents were sent back to their native countries without their children, making their kids the bulk of the group declared ineligible for reunification before a court-ordered deadline last week. And as Matthew Albence, executive associate director at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, put it, “we don’t keep track of individuals once they’ve been deported to foreign countries.”

Those parents are now scattered across the globe, many of them likely in new corners of their home countries, where they aim to escape the hazards that spurred them to seek refuge in the U.S. in the first place. Asked last week what steps they would take to reunite those families, federal officials demurred, saying they would leave it to the discretion of the federal judge who first ordered reunifications. It wasn’t clear whether those families would be reunited at all.

Now, that judge has spoken: The federal government will have to lay out plans this week for reuniting the hundreds of families now split by the U.S. border.

Step one: Find them.

“We are actively working to make contact with all of those parents, yes ma’am,” said Jonathan White, an administrator with the federal Department of Health and Human Services, in response to a question from U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, at an oversight hearing Tuesday. But White could not say how many of those parents have been reached.