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A report set to be released by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) inspector general confirms what we all knew from the start: the Trump administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy—which kidnapped thousands of migrant children from the arms of parents at the U.S/Mexico border—was cruel, deceptive to the American public, and botched from the very start.
Among the most horrific findings from the report, which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) locked up some kids in “chain-link holding pens”—cages—for longer than the 72 hours maximum allowed. “Lacking beds and showers”—as well as being notoriously cold—these are supposed to be temporary spaces before kids are transferred to Health and Human Services (HHS) custody.
But, the report says, at least 860 kids were held in them longer than the 72 hours allowed. One child was locked up for 12 days, while another was locked up for 25 days. This time limit is intended for the children’s protection, but the fact that our government has a time limit on how long children can be locked up in cages in the first place is an example of state-sanctioned brutality against migrant families.
“Jim Crumpacker, the DHS official who responded to the report, said the agency held children longer mainly because HHS shelter space was unavailable.” Maybe that’s because the administration was creating this overcrowding by implementing a policy ripping kids from their parents in order to place them under federal custody. In other instances, the report continues, immigration officials separated the very young from parents “in a way that courted disaster.”
“Border Patrol does not provide pre-verbal children with wrist bracelets or other means of identification, nor does Border Patrol fingerprint or photograph most children during processing to ensure that they can be easily linked with the proper file,” the report said. No wonder this criminal administration is having so much trouble reuniting hundreds of kids who remain separated. Or maybe it’s because the administration lied to us from the start?
“On June 23, three days after the executive order halting the separations, DHS announced it had developed a ‘central database’ with HHS containing location information for separated parents and minors that both departments could access to reunite families,” with Health and Human Services (HHS) Sec. Alex Azar telling a Senate committee soon after that “there is no reason why any parent would not know where their child is located. I could at the stroke of keystrokes … within seconds could find any child within our care for any parent.”
But "the inspector general found no evidence of such a database.” According to the report, “the OIG team asked several [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] employees, including those involved with DHS’ reunification efforts at ICE Headquarters, if they knew of such a database, and they did not. DHS has since acknowledged to the OIG that there is no ‘direct electronic interface’ between DHS and HHS tracking systems.”
Presidential lies are contagious, as The Washington Post has also noted. More recently, DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen was exposed for her blatant lies to the American public when she claimed in June that “we do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.” But according to a newly obtained memo, that was a lie, because she most likely signed off on the memo that implemented state-sanctioned kidnapping.
Due to the purposeful and criminal actions of Donald Trump, Kirstjen Nielsen, Alex Azar, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Stephen Miller, and countless underlings, nearly 200 kidnapped migrant children continue to remain separated from their parents, many because they’ve already been deported to their home countries. Having separated families without any plan set in place on how to reunite them, there’s a chance some children will never see their parents again. This has been a humanitarian disaster, but we didn’t need a report to tell us that.