Nick Miroff, Amy Goldstein, and Maria Sacchetti report for the Washington Post:
‘Deleted’ families: What went wrong with Trump’s family-separation effort
Hundreds of migrant children remain in custody after the Trump Administration scrambled to reunite separated families under a court-imposed deadline.
When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunify migrant families separated at the border, the government’s cleanup crews faced an immediate problem.
They weren’t sure who the families were, let alone what to call them.
Customs and Border Protection databases had categories for “family units,” and “unaccompanied alien children” who arrive without parents. They did not have a distinct classification for more than 2,600 children who had been taken from their families and placed in government shelters.
So agents came up with a new term: “deleted family units.”
But when they sent that information to the refugee office at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was told to facilitate the reunifications, the office’s database did not have a column for families with that designation.
The crucial tool for fixing the problem was crippled. Caseworkers and government health officials had to sift by hand through the files of all the nearly 12,000 migrant children in HHS custody to figure out which ones had arrived with parents, where the adults were jailed and how to put the families back together.
Compounding failures to record, classify and keep track of migrant parents and children pulled apart by President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border crackdown were at the core of what is now widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles of his presidency. The rapid implementation and sudden reversal of the policy whiplashed multiple federal agencies, forcing the activation of an HHS command center ordinarily used to handle hurricanes and other catastrophes.
After his 30-day deadline to reunite the “deleted” families passed Thursday, U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw lambasted the government for its lack of preparation and coordination.
“There were three agencies, and each was like its own stovepipe. Each had its own boss, and they did not communicate,” Sabraw said Friday at a court hearing in San Diego. “What was lost in the process was the family. The parents didn’t know where the children were, and the children didn’t know where the parents were. And the government didn’t know either.”
This account of the separation plan’s implementation and sudden demise is based on court records as well as interviews with more than 20 current and former government officials, advocates and contractors, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to give candid views and diagnose mistakes.
Trump officials have insisted that they were not doing anything extraordinary and were simply upholding the law. The administration saw the separations as a powerful tool to deter illegal border crossings and did not anticipate the raw emotional backlash from separating thousands of families to prosecute the parents for crossing the border illegally…
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Read “the team’s” entire much, much more detailed article at the link! By the end you will be disgusted by this Administrtion’s intentional dehumanization, stunning incompetence, dishonesty, and lack of any sense whatsoever of responsible government or prudent use of taxpayer resources.
No wonder deficits are soaring while essential services are being cut. This Administration consistently and intentionally misuses our taxpayer dollars on counterproductive and totally misguided efforts such as this which have little or nothing whatsoever to do with legitimate law enforcement. And think of the monumental amounts of attorney and court time being wasted because of the Government’s lawless, racially motivated actions! What if these efforts and resources were it toward actually solving problems, rather than creating them?
The Administraton’s explanations don’t make sense. In court before Judge Sabraw, DOJ attorneys have always conceded that intentional separation of children from parents for deterrence purposes would be unconstitutional. They initially claimed that there was no such policy.
But, it’s clear that separating children from parents for deterrence was exactly what Sessions, Nielsen, and others in the Administration intended. Moreover, they had no intention of ever reuniting the children with families, which is why they didn’t bother to set up a system to keep track of them,
This seems like a very clear and intentional violation of our Constitution and lack of candor before a tribunal by Sessions, not to mention failure to fully and in good faith comply with the court’s order. That should lead to civil liability under Bivens or punishment for contempt of court, or both.
Also, seems that the DOJ lawyers who misrepresented the nature of the program their boss was running should be in line for disciplinary action from the District Court and from their respective state bars. One would only have had to watch a Sessions news clip (as many reporters did) to know that what they were telling the court was untrue or at least required some further explanation from Sessions.
Back to Eugene Robinson. Why are we putting families seeking the protection of the law in jail instead of dishonest, disingenuous scofflaws like Jeff Sessions? Maybe “Ol Gonzo” shouldn’t be up in front of the young neo-Nazis leading “lock her up” chants. What goes around comes around!
And, if I were Judge Sabraw, I might want to know why Sessions was out there leading nationalist chants rather than busting his tail to comply fully with the court’s order for reunification of families.
We need regime change! Vote the scofflaws and their enablers out of office in November! Vote only for candidates pledged to hold Jeff Sessions and the other scofflaws in this Administration accountable for their actions through meaningful oversight (of which there has been none since Trump took office).
PWS
07-28-18