More than 80 days past a federal judge’s reunification order, the children are still not with their parents. Wednesday, Oct. 17, marks 83 days since Judge Dana Sabraw ordered Trump administration officials to reunite the thousands of migrant children who were kidnapped from the arms of parents at the southern border, yet 66 kids continue to remain separated from their parents and under U.S. custody, according to numbers released this week by the administration.
One of these 66 children is aged 5 or under. Of the 66 kids, the parents of 50 have already been deported. Trump officials have struggled to reunite children with deported parents because of their own cruelty, after having torn apart families with no plan set in place on how to reunite them. Now, as 66 kids remain separated, Donald Trump is floating officially reviving family separation, both as an election strategy to rile up his base, and because White House aide and white supremacist Stephen Miller likes it.
But even kids who are being moved for reunification have been subjected to additional trauma. In one instance this month, officials returned a 4-year-old to her home country without first informing her parents. “When Karla, a pseudonym HuffPost is using to protect the child’s identity, arrived in Guatemala, no one came to pick her up at a reunification center near the airport.” Karla ended up spending yet another unnecessary night “in a government-run shelter.”
So who has paid a price for this cruelty? For scheming up this family separation policy, and then lying about it? For shelling out tens of millions of federal dollars to so-called “nonprofits” that have hired child molesters and abusers to run their “child shelters”? For using detained children as bait to deport immigrant relatives? For violating a federal judge’s order, a criminal action that would earn most Regular Joes a visit to the slammer? Not one high-level Trump official.
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