Although the Trump administration is under court order to reunify immigrant children with their parents, their latest status report says that 2,187 of 2,551 children aged 5 and older are still in detention, separated from their parents. Kristina Davis reports in today’s San Diego Union-Tribune:
The government’s latest status report on the effort does not speculate on whether it will make the July 26 deadline, only saying that the new truncated process to match up families and clear parents for reunification “is proceeding.”
Will the Trump administration meet the court-ordered deadline? You bet it won’t. It wants to keep these children away from their parents, using tricks like asking parents to sign documents that they can’t read that give their rights away before getting their children back (maybe), and like refusing to give the ACLU information it needs to contact parents. Alice Ollstein reports in Talking Points Memo that the Trump administration:
plans to reunite just about 60 percent of the children between ages 5-17 that are in its custody. The rest — just over 900 — have been labeled ‘ineligible’ for reunification
These parents are “ineligible”, because immigrant-hostile Republicans say so. And they’re changing the rules to make more parents “ineligible”.
Republicans clearly are following Trump’s lead in not caring about these families. They would rather let children suffer in detention, isolated away from their parents, so long as that furthers Republicans’ political goals. It’s truly a moral stain on their party.