Trump administration officials claim that around 500 children have been reunited with their parents since those same officials began separating children and parents in May. That’s the good news. The bad news is that that’s around 500 of more than 2,300 and that each of those 500 children was already traumatized.
Amid conflicting signs about how the administration intends to go forward, longer term, with its policies of prosecuting asylum-seekers and taking their children:
Federal agencies were working to set up a centralized reunification process for the remaining separated children and their families at a detention center just over the border in Texas, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
But there, too, there are conflicting signals, with the story about whether and how officials will work to reunite the families they tore apart changing seemingly every few hours. And since the separations were processed without a plan for reunification—because Team Trump had no intention of returning the children to their parents—the process will be more difficult since parents and children have not been tracked together and linked consistently by identifying paperwork.
In short, it’s a giant mess, and even when Trump’s people claim they’re doing something in the same neighborhood as the right thing, they can’t be trusted either to try to do it or to do it competently. And at the center of the whole thing are huddled nearly 2,000 (if we can believe the claim that 500 have been returned) traumatized children and their desperate parents.