Facing a court-ordered deadline, the Trump administration is scrambling to reunite the parents and children it tore apart, but as usual the administration’s evil is being compounded by its incompetence. And as usual, it can be difficult to tell which problems stem from incompetence and which from evil. For instance, the Department of Health and Human Services created identification numbers to keep track of families that the administration had separated. But Customs and Border Protection deleted records linking parents and children because hey, the Trump administration had separated them so they no longer counted as families.
Officials cautioned that this was not a deliberate attempt to obfuscate, but a belief that it made more sense to track cases separately once a group of migrants was no longer in custody as a family unit, these sources said.
Uh-huh. “Well, once we ripped the child out of the parents’ arms, why would we want to know that they were related to each other?” But hey, at least it’s not that they intended to make it difficult to reunite the families, it’s just that they didn’t ever think they’d be trying to do it. HHS staff are now frantically trying to piece together records on nearly 3,000 children, 100 of them under five years of age.
The deadline for reuniting children under five with their parents is Tuesday, while the government has until July 26 to reunite older children. That, according to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, is “extreme.” In reference to kids who have in some cases been separated from their parents for months. By definition in reference to two, three, four year olds. Children who are difficult to reunite with their parents because they were “dropped off thousands of miles away from their parents and some were too young or scared to speak.”
And while it’s a good thing that the administration is finally trying to put back together the families it tore apart, let’s not forget that in many cases the plan is to imprison the children with their parents once they’re reunited.