Meghan McCain Condemns Trump Admin After Lawyers Can't Find 545 Migrant Kids' Parents

In the hours after lawyers reported in a court filing that they haven't been able to locate the parents of over 500 immigrant children pulled away from each other at the border, Meghan McCain condemned the Trump administration’s family separation policy in a short, but impassioned message on Twitter.

NBC News first reported on Tuesday that lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other pro-bono law firms appointed to locate parents of migrant children who had been separated at the border have been unable to track them down.

"We just reported tonight to the court in #aclu case that we still cannot find parents of 545 kids separated by Trump admin - some just babies when taken years ago. We will not stop till we find EVERY one," Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, wrote on Twitter.

According to court documents filed on Tuesday and shared by CNN, a "steering committee" appointed by the court believe that two-thirds of the parents they're unable to locate have been deported without their children.

McCain is well-known as a conservative commentator on The View and a proud Republican, but her condemnation of the child separation policy was in no way supportive of the Trump administration. Quite the opposite, in fact. "There’s a special place to burn in hell for the people who decided to implement this child separation policy....," she tweeted Tuesday.

The View host, who became a mom herself for the first time to daughter Liberty Sage in September, has long been a critic of the Trump administration’s child separation, particularly after listening to audio of children at the detention centers in 2018 calling out for their parents. "I don't really understand how you can't listen to that and not feel somewhat differently about this," she said on The View at the time, as USA Today reported.

In April 2018, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” immigration policy in an effort to deter migrants from crossing the U.S./Mexico border, which resulted in "immediate separation of parents traveling with children," according to Human Rights Watch. What was happening at the border led to global headlines and widespread outrage, but the Trump administration had actually been separating migrant children from their parents since 2017 as part of a “pilot program” along certain parts of the border, as NBC News reported.

According to the ACLU, more than 2,600 immigrant children were separated from their parents under the Trump administration's policies. In June 2018, Trump signed an executive order to end the cruel policy and a federal judge ordered that the children who were separated be reunited with their parents, according to Reuters. But unfortunately, for many families, that has not happened.