Central American consular officials in New York have been scrambling to provide assistance to the 350 children—including infants as young as 9 months old—who they just discovered were being sent to the city by child stealer Donald Trump's government. Children were already lost in the shuffle and were still coming into New York Wednesday night, even after Trump signed his supposed executive order to end family separation.
Consular officials were not notified that the children were coming and as of yet haven't be able to find them.
Consular offices are often involved in cases of unaccompanied migrant youth, especially when children want to return to their countries voluntarily. But this situation was "atypical," according to José Vicente Chinchilla, the consul general of El Salvador, because they did not even know children separated from their families were coming to New York, let alone how many.
"To be honest, I don’t have a number," he said on Wednesday, noting that the federal authorities had not responded to requests for information. "For the moment," Mr. Chinchilla said, "there has been no contact."
That was Wednesday. On Thursday "consular officials and others were shifting into crisis mode, beginning to search for children as young as 9 months old who did not appear to have been carefully tracked by the federal authorities."
The consul of Honduras, Lídice González, had sent a list of questions on Wednesday to a local representative of the resettlement agency: "Where are they? In what centers? What are their names? How old are they?" Ms. González said. "I sent her an email and marked it 'urgent.'"
"She said she was visiting the shelters," she said of the representative, whom she did not name. Ms. González said she had been promised a list.
They don't even know where the kids, where the babies, are right now. The resettlement agency had hundreds of children dumped on them without notice, without the ability to plan. If a parent lost her 9-month-old child, she'd go to prison. That's the least that should happen to Trump and his foot soldiers who have created this monstrosity.