The Trump administration has claimed that it could take up to two years to sift through tens of thousands of government records to track down the potentially thousands of families that were separated at the southern border prior to the official implementation of the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy, government attorneys said in court filing last week.
More than 2,800 children were stolen from families under the April 2018 policy, but earlier this year a government watchdog report said that separations were happening long before that. It’s unknown how many were returned to their parents or sent to relatives or foster homes. While a federal judge has yet to rule whether he’ll order the administration to also reunite these families, he did say that the children were the government’s responsibility.
The government, however, has now complained “that identifying all possible children” among nearly 50,000 records “would take at least 12 months, and possibly up to 24 months.” Federal immigration officials, the Huffington Post reports, “didn’t start tracing separated families as a searchable data set before April of last year, according to the filing, so records are spotty.”
Apparently those kinds of details weren’t a worry for the administration when it was carrying out this humanitarian disaster. The policy then was punish families fleeing danger now, worry about all that other shit later. It’s astounding that an administration that’s hellbent on stealing billions to build a useless border wall or Space Force also claims it’s just too darn hard to pull together the resources to find the children they kidnapped.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued to reunite families last year and said it would assist in the reunification of these additional families, blasted the government’s complaints. "The administration refuses to treat the family separation crisis it created with urgency. We strongly oppose any plan that gives the government up to two years to find kids. The government swiftly gathered resources to tear families apart. It must do the same to fix the damage."
