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During the height of media attention on the family separation crisis last June, Trump officials were claiming that, sure, they could reunite thousands of parents and children cruelly ripped apart at the southern border, using a "central database.” That, emails obtained by NBC News show, was a lie. There was no such database, and the information they did have could reunite only 60 families out of the thousands. Sixty.
Publicly, NBC News reports, a Homeland Security fact sheet from that month claimed the administration had “a process established to ensure that family members know the location of their children," including "a central database which HHS and DHS can access and update." But the internal emails confirm the findings of an October 2018 report from the Homeland Security watchdog that “found no evidence of such a database.”
As was evident when the administration began scrambling to reunite the families it had ripped apart. "’[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful,’ a Health and Human Services official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 23, 2018,” NBC News reports. "We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children." That top ICE official, Matthew Albence, is now acting director of ICE. Because what better way to punish an official for cruel incompetence than to promote him?
”You know when we put this out tonight, a couple people said to me, ‘did we already know this?’” MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff told Chris Hayes on Wednesday. “Yes, we did know that there was never a system, the HHS and the DHS inspector general made that very clear, as have subsequent testimonies, but we’ve never seen the behind-the-scenes, basically scrambling to figure out how to literally fill a spreadsheet.”
“And why this is particularly troubling today,” Soboroff continued, “Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, has said in multiple interviews … that the intent was always to reunify all of these thousands of kids that were taken away from their parents. Well, if the intent was always to reunify, why do you have people that are supposed to be responsible for tracking and putting these children back together having absolutely no idea what’s going on?”
The administration wasn’t bothering to track babies and children, but they did track the Americans who last year protested family separation, more internal documents obtained by the American Immigration Council have revealed. LookingGlass, a private cybersecurity company, gathered information on the June rallies, including Facebook Event IDs and logistics such as time and location, to share with Homeland Security officials. Too bad none of that happened for these kidnapped children.
As many as 55 of these kids torn from families in this humanitarian disaster remain in U.S. custody, NBC News said, and when officials such as Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar testified to Congress that he “could at the stroke of keystrokes … within seconds could find any child within our care for any parent,” the fact that not even one top administration official could be shamed into resigning over this crime against humanity is a disgrace. People belong in jail over this. Family separation remains a crisis.