I haven’t blogged about the children separated from their parents at the border, because–really–what can I say? It is so horrific, so diametrically opposed to what rational people want to believe about our country, that it is overwhelming.
It was bad enough when the news of this inconceivable aspect of Trump’s “zero tolerance” first emerged; it was worse when we saw photos of children in cages and read reports of the “privatized” facilities charging taxpayers big bucks to warehouse bewildered, frightened children. But then the courts ordered that families be re-united, and we could tell ourselves that the damage would be limited. (Yes, some children would probably carry that trauma into their adult lives, but at least they would be back with their parents.)
But early this month, we woke to headlines that should–but probably won’t– shame every Trump voter. ABC News reported that “thousands” more children had been taken from their parents than previously reported.
President Donald Trump’s administration does not know how many migrant children were separated from their parents at the southern border in the year before the “zero-tolerance” policy launched, and is unlikely to figure it out, according to court papers filed Friday night.
Last month, an internal government report found that during the Trump administration, thousands more kids may have been separated from their parents at the border than was previously known and that a “steep increase” of separations began in the summer of 2017, almost a year before the “zero-tolerance” policy was announcedby then-Attorney General Jeff Sessionsin the spring of 2018.
The Trump administration said in a court filing that reuniting thousands of migrant children separated from their parents or guardians at the U.S.-Mexico border may not be “within the realm of the possible.”
The filing late Friday from Jallyn Sualog, deputy director of the department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, was an ordered response in an ACLU lawsuit challenging the government’s separation of thousands of children at the border since the summer of 2017. The estimate of “thousands” comes from the HHS Office of Inspector General’s January report and pertains to children separated before the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy came into effect in 2018.
Sualog said her office doesn’t have the resources to track down the children, whose numbers could be thousands more than the official estimate.
This administration is the perfect marriage of evil and incompetence.
I can’t even get my head around what those mothers and fathers must be feeling, let alone the terror experienced by small children suddenly bereft of their parents. I think back to when my own children were young and they were the absolute center of my life. (I’m still pretty fond of them.)
How can any parent fail to empathize with mothers and fathers frantic to protect their children from the daily threats posed by civil disorder? I would have gone to similar lengths to find a safe environment for my children.
The people who came with children to our southern border evidently believed what most Americans believed until Trump–that this nation of immigrants would greet them with justice and compassion and help them save their children. They couldn’t have foreseen what actually happened–that their children would be taken from them, that their whereabouts would be unaccounted for, and the country they’d pinned their hopes on wouldn’t care.
The richest country in the world “lacks the resources” to find the children they stole. The “can do” country didn’t bother to keep records.
It’s heartbreaking and inexcusable.
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