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Right as Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that clearly intends to allow indefinite jailings of entire families, he boasted of his new initiative: "Ok, you're going to have a lot of happy people." Not to shock anyone here, but Trump lied. Or should we say, he made a false claim that significantly overestimated the worth of his own actions.
Tragically, this national nightmare is nowhere near over for a very long list of reasons. Think about it like Trump's original Muslim ban, which was truly remarkable for how poorly conceived and executed it was and—even after the administration reworked it two more times—remains tied up in litigation today.
Unfortunately, Trump's colossal family separation failure is going to take many many months—if not years—of cleanup even as the administration tries to implement a new policy that is minimally more humane at best and equally as under-resourced and ill-conceived as the first effort.
Let's touch on a just a few of the upcoming challenges:
1) When Attorney General Jeff Sessions and DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen began implementing their separation horrors, they put in place no mechanism whatsoever for tracking the separated children and reuniting them with their families. That contention was reaffirmed in the press call immediately following Trump’s EO signing.
The United States government now has thousands of orphaned children in its custody and absolutely no roadmap—let alone proper documentation—for reunifying these kids with their parents. Think about the jailed "tender age" kids—many of them can't even speak. How the hell is the government going to find their parents?
This will involve months and even years of agony for parents and children alike. And it's a f*cking outrage.
2) The administration's new policy is sure to end up in court, even Republican lawmakers are admitting it—as is the Justice Department.
In other words, in contravention of the 1997 Flores consent decree and a subsequent 9th Circuit ruling on it, the Trump administration will seek to indefinitely jail families for more than 20 days.
The pictures of thousands of people, including kids with eyes puffy from crying, aren't going anywhere.
3) The federal government will now be in a mad dash to set up “tent cities” across the U.S. to house these detained families. In fact, Trump's executive order instructs the Department of Defense to create space for keeping these families together, so the internment camps will likely be erected on federal military bases across the southern border.
The optics of this, not to mention the tragic human toll, are going to continue to be absolutely horrendous.
