A California judge yesterday ordered U.S. border authorities to reunite separated families within 30 days, setting a hard deadline in a process that has so far yielded uncertainty about when children might again see their parents. If children are younger than 5, they must be reunited within 14 days of the order issued yesterday by U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego.

Sabraw, an appointee of President George W. Bush, also issued a nationwide injunction on future family separations, unless the parent is deemed unfit or doesn’t want to be with the child. It also requires the government to provide phone contact between parents and their children within 10 days.

More than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in recent weeks and placed in government-contracted shelters – hundreds of miles away, in some cases – under a now-abandoned policy toward families caught illegally entering the U.S.

The lawsuit in San Diego involves a 7-year-old girl separated from her Congolese mother and a 14-year-old boy separated from his Brazilian mother.

Amid an international outcry, President Donald J. Trump last week issued an executive order to stop the separation of families and said parents and children will instead be detained together. But so far, relatively few families have been reunited, and the Trump administration has disclosed almost no information on how the process will be carried out or how long it will take.

Officials yesterday wouldn’t say whether the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is still receiving children as a result of the child-separation policy. When pressed about the issue by reporters on a conference call, they didn’t answer the question.

Also Tuesday, 17 states sued the Trump administration to force it to reunite children and parents. The states, all led by Democratic attorneys general, joined Washington, D.C., in filing the lawsuit in federal court in Seattle, arguing they are being forced to shoulder increased child-welfare, education and social-services costs.

“The administration’s practice of separating families is cruel, plain and simple,” New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in a statement. “Every day, it seems like the administration is issuing new, contradictory policies and relying on new, contradictory justifications. But we can’t forget: The lives of real people hang in the balance.”

In a speech before the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Los Angeles, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administration for taking a hardline stand on illegal immigration and said the voters elected President Donald Trump to do just that. “This is the Trump era,” he said. “We are enforcing our laws again. We know whose side we are on – so does this group – and we’re on the side of police, and we’re on the side of the public safety of the American people.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the multi-state lawsuit.

Juan Sanchez, chief executive of the nation’s largest shelters for migrant children, said hours before the California judge’s ruling that he was “ready now” to start reuniting hundreds of babies and young kids with their families. Sanchez, of the nonprofit Southwest Key Programs, said his nonprofit had located many of the parents who have been arrested for trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border so – if the opportunity arose – they could move quickly to reunite the families. “We’re ready today,” said Sanchez, who had been fearful of a long, drawn-out process.

Sanchez earlier said parents’ cases would likely have to first make their way through the legal system. Only then could the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement give the go-ahead to put families back together. He said there appeared to be a lack of urgency on behalf of the government, and worried that the process could take months.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar told Congress yesterday that his department still has custody of 2,047 immigrant children separated from their parents at the border. That is only six fewer children than the number in HHS custody as of last Wednesday.