Government lawyers admitted Friday they don't know the whereabouts of 38 migrant parents who were forcibly separated from children under the age of 5 by U.S. officials. The admission came during a court proceeding in which the government lawyers asked a federal judge for an extension on a deadline by which the youngest migrant children were due to be reunified with their parents. NBC News writes:
In a status hearing with Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California, who ordered the reunification, government lawyers said U.S. Health and Human Services would only be able to reunify about half of approximately 100 children under the age of 5 by the court-ordered deadline of July 10.
Among the 38 parents, 19 had been deported and 19 had been released in the U.S. with no known location.
Government attorneys claimed in court that they needed more time to locate and vet each parent. Justice Department lawyer Sara Fabian explained, "The way [a family separation] is put in the system is not in some aggregable form, so we can’t just run it all."
That's what happens when you have zero plans to reunite families and rushed into implementing a cruel and inhumane policy without anticipating glitches on the back end. It is just unconscionable and someone should be held criminally responsible for what they did to these kids and their parents.
Sabraw signaled that he would allow a deadline extension if the government supplied the court with a master list of the youngest kids and the status of their parents by Monday.
Having that list would be a useful extraction for the courts since the government appears to be both incapable of reuniting these families in a timely fashion and yet unwilling to share their details.