New findings from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general confirm the NBC News report from Julia Ainlsey and Jacob Soboroff last year revealing that the Trump administration so badly botched court-ordered family reunifications in the summer of 2018 that some children were forced to wait in vans overnight to be reunited with their parents. In one child’s case, they were forced to wait nearly two days.
”All children waited a minimum of 10 hours at Port Isabel to be reunified,” the inspector general said. “At least 28 children were reunited within 15 hours, while 4 children waited more than 27 hours. The final 2 children were reunited with their parents on the morning of July 17, after waiting approximately 37 hours in one case, and approximately 40 hours in the other.” Forty goddamn hours.
These kids were left stranded in these vans due the administration’s incompetence, period. Following the judge’s reunification order that June, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) contractor holding these kids was all set to return them, driving to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Port Isabel Detention Center in Texas, where their parents were to meet them. But ICE was not ready, Ainlsey and Soboroff reported at the time, and the inspector general now confirms.
“DHS OIG confirmed that, as reported in the NBC News story, children brought to Port Isabel on July 15, 2018, waited extended periods—and in many cases overnight—to be reunited with their parents. On this first day of attempted mass reunifications, ICE was not prepared to promptly reunify all children who arrived at Port Isabel,” the report said.
“ICE and HHS had fundamentally different understandings about the timing and pace of reunifications, and ICE personnel at Port Isabel underestimated the resources necessary to promptly out process the parents of arriving children,” the report continued. “As a result, some children waited in vehicles at Port Isabel, while others waited in unused detention cells, though all children were in climate-controlled environments and had continuous access to food, water, and restrooms.”
That last part isn’t exactly a gold star or pat on the back for the federal government—that’s stuff you’re supposed to provide.
“Although it likely would have been more comfortable to wait for reunifications at nearby shelters or hotels,” the report continued, “the HHS operational lead told us he directed HHS’s transportation contractors to stay at ICE facilities until the reunifications were effected even if children had to sleep there. The HHS operational lead said his primary goal was to safely reunify families as quickly as possible, and he heard from HHS contractors that reunifications could be delayed if children left.”
Or maybe these children just shouldn’t have been kidnapped from their families at all in the first place, and should have been spared from the intentional trauma that government employees warned about but that superiors ignored, another government watchdog report found earlier this year.
In that report, the HHS inspector general “found no evidence that these three senior HHS officials took action to protect children’s interests in response to the information and concerns raised by ORR staff.” The report describes officials’ intentional negligence regarding what ultimately became the family separation crisis, including superiors scolding staffers for putting concerns in writing and others finding out the family separation policy not from the administration, but from the news.
The DHS inspector general investigation “was initiated after two congressional requests followed the NBC News report,” Ainsley and Soboroff reported. “Despite two notifications from HHS that children would be arriving,” House Homeland Security Committee chair Bennie Thompson wrote at the time, “ICE seemingly made no advance accommodations or preparations.”
