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The Trump administration has identified at least 1,712 additional children it may have been stolen from their families at the southern border, NBC News reports, and because officials are just part of the way through a court-mandated examination of tens of thousands of government records, that number could grow even larger.
Last January, the Health and Human Services watchdog said that in addition to the nearly 3,000 kids that were stolen under the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy, potentially thousands more were separated before it was officially implemented. The administration initially tried to wash its hands of these additional kids but a federal judge ruled otherwise, saying "It's important to recognize that we're talking about human beings. Every person needs to be accounted for."
Administration officials now have six months to examine their records to identify the exact number of stolen children in a list that will ultimately be turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union for possible reunification. But because officials are just partly through nearly 50,000 records, “other potentially separated migrant children could still be identified,” NBC News continues.
But while Judge Dana Sabraw gave the administration until Oct. 25 to sort through the records, he “indicated that could be adjusted if officials can make a case for it,” The Washington Post reported last month. It’s mind-boggling that any leniency might be shown to this callous and cruel administration, when a number of young children are still being reunited with their parents after nearly a year of separation.
Earlier this month, 7-year-old Angie was reunited with her dad Adelino 326 days after their forcible separation. “When they were separated,” CBS News reports, “she was asleep in his arms. He doesn't know if she even knew what happened.” He’s now struggling to figure out how to explain it all to her. “If I, at 40 years old, got the feeling like I was going crazy, the suffering at her tender age, her young mind, I can't even imagine,” he said.
Family separation remains a crisis. As MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff said, the family separation policy has been a "slow-motion, man-made national disaster and disgrace, credit to one person: Donald Trump. That slow-motion disaster is still playing out today, a year later." For this crime against humanity alone, he should have been removed from office.