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First lady Jill Biden’s chief of staff will be involved in monitoring the Biden administration’s effort to reunite children taken from their parents at the border under former President Donald Trump’s roundly condemned family separation policy, her spokesman said Wednesday.
President Joe Biden, who called the Trump family separation policy a “moral failing,” has vowed to form a task force to help reunite the more than 600 parents who remain separated from their children and whose whereabouts are unknown, more than two years after the policy was banned.
So far, Biden has signed a flurry of executive orders covering multiple topics, issues and goals, but the task force is not yet formed.
Once it is in operation, his wife, a college English professor, has tasked her top staffer, Julissa Reynoso, with keeping track of progress on family reunifications, a tricky task but also a move that would underscore the new administration’s high-profile attention to the families’ plight.Â
“As the first lady remarked on a ‘Charla’ with young Latinos earlier this week, her chief of staff, (former U.S. ambassador to Uruguay) Julissa Reynoso, will monitor the federal reunification effort given her background as a lawyer,” Jill Biden spokesman Michael LaRosa told USA TODAY Wednesday.
During the video chat with young Latinos on Monday, the first lady said Reynoso, who also holds the title of assistant to the president, will also serve as the co-chair of a Gender Policy Council in addition to working on racial equity issues and reuniting migrant children, according to a White House transcript.
“As an immigrant, a mother, a lawyer, and a public servant, she’s a reflection of the many brilliant Latinas and women of color who are working across our administration,” the first lady said.Â
The new first lady is already showing she intends to be an active FLOTUS, balancing her own first-lady agenda, her teaching job at a Northern Virginia community college and her efforts to help promote her husband’s lengthy agenda of crises to tackle.Â
Last week, the first lady met with teachers’ union heads to talk up Biden’s promise to open K-8 schools as soon as safely possible. This week she made three Zoom appearances before governors’ spouses, young Latinos and library officials, where she echoed the president’s call for national unity and promoted his $1.9 trillion pandemic relief proposal.
After a week on the job, Biden has already been more on display than former first lady Melania Trump, who delayed moving into the White House for five months, sometimes made appearances without announcing them, and would go weeks between appearances she did announce in advance.Â
As her husband’s time in office wound down, Trump failed to invite Biden for the traditional tea-and-tour of the White House – a snub and the first deliberate break in the 100-year-old first ladies’ transfer-of-power tradition in decades.
The Trump administration approved family separations in April 2018 as part of its “zero tolerance†policy to criminally prosecute all undocumented border crossers. Though family separations occurred under previous administrations, they became widespread practice under the Trump policy.
TV images of children locked in federal detention facility cages sparked outrage, and Trump ended the practice in June 2018. (Family separations continued for children who were determined to be in the custody of a harmful adult.)
On Tuesday, the Biden administration officially rescinded the “zero tolerance” program, removing the policy from the Justice Department’s guidance to federal prosecutors in border cases.Â
At the height of the uproar in June 2018, Melania Trump jetted to McAllen, Texas, on the border with Mexico for a surprise visit to see migrant children and their living conditions in a detention facility there.
But her mission was undermined when she donned a casual jacket emblazoned with the words “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” on the back, producing different headlines than the ones she might have intended.Â
Four months later, in an interview with ABC News during a trip to Africa, Trump said she was “blindsided” by the family separation policy and told her husband she found it “unacceptable” and “heartbreaking.”
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