The Trump administration started by taking migrant kids from their parents by force or by trickery, and now it’s shipped those kids all around the country to what the Washington Post describes as “cold, institutional settings with adults who are not permitted to touch them or with foster parents who do not speak Spanish but who hug them when they cry.” The details of their lives now are devastating. Separated from their parents, alone and afraid, and the description “prison-style” applies to way too many things they’re experiencing, starting with the cages and going on the head counts and yelling guards.
And still, the government doesn’t have meaningful plans to reunite the children with their parents, while Donald Trump is whining about the bad press he’s getting for his child-stealing policy and telling associates he regrets having signed the executive order that put the brakes on family separation. The Office of Refugee Resettlement’s hotline is “experiencing high call volume” (gee, you think?) and when one lawyer finally got through, the hotline staffer had nothing helpful to offer. Children too young to know their parents’ full names or spell their own are spread out over thousands of miles and dozens of facilities and the government that stole them has not kept track of how to reunite them. Now:
U.S. authorities are compiling mug shots of the children in detention. Immigration lawyers who have seen the pictures say some of them show children in tears.
Some of the children may not be in tears in their mug shots, but:
“The trauma for these children is significant,” said Brown, of Bethany Christian Services in Maryland. “You don’t always see the trauma. You don’t always see it in their faces. But you can see it in their physical reactions.”
Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions and Kirstjen Nielsen did that. They’re the monsters who stole these children from parents who’d carried them across countries and rivers to what was supposed to be safety, and left them with tear-stained faces and significant trauma. Trump, though, is more interested in attacking a restaurant for standing up, in its little way, for those kids than he is in doing anything to fix the disaster he created.