Hundreds of kids times hundreds of adults is 10s of thousands people. Times hundreds of dollars per test is single-digit millions of dollars. Low double-digit millions at most.
The USA spent that uselessly every day that 45 went golfing.
That expense is no more an obstacle to fixing this tomorrow than you needing a penny for a gumball machine is an obstacle to you (or I) chewing gum.
Not that I’m upset with you for pointing this out. I’m just upset it isn’t fixed yet. And yes, it smells like somebody in ICE did this maliciously with full foreknowledge of the inevitable consequences.
Like I said: war criminal trials at the Hague is the ideal thing. The good half of the USA needs to show that it rejects the bad half and happily performs appropriate acts of contrition for their folly.
Post in the Coup Fallout thread described a DoJ lawyer who plotted to get Acting Atty General fired so he could take the job and pile the pressure on Georgia to find Trump the votes he wanted there. Just another person on the lonnnnng list of people Biden needs to fire:
Yes, but in addition to that: The administration of the president who shall not be named started off, right from Day 1, being astonishingly impulsive and hasty, rolling out EO’s and demanding they be implemented at the speed of quantum entanglement without any planning – witness the Muslim travel ban, the first implementation of which caused international chaos at airports throughout the world.
Quite in addition to the malice of the kids-in-cages disaster, there was the rushed and impulsive implementation, lacking in proper planning and documentation. By the time a lot of the dust had settled, nobody knew any more which kids had gone where, which parents had gone where, and which kids belonged to which parents, because the documentation was a shambles and/or didn’t correctly follow the kids around as they got shuffled from cage to cage or agency to agency.
Hence the scrambling of the unscrambleable egg that @LSLGuy mentions.
And how do you even find the prospective parents to test? Thus, my suggestion that we will need vast hordes of social workers walking door-to-door from one end of Central America to the other, asking every soul they meet if they are missing any kids. Along with my suggestions that only non-American organizations will be trusted.
I agree with several of the above posters – the kids in cages thing is a very worthy case to be brought to the Hague as Crimes Against Humanity. (I don’t think “war criminals” is the right description, as @LSLGuy put it. These are Crimes Against Humanity.)
And this isn’t on the scale of the Japanese Internment, I don’t think. It’s much bigger, I suspect (although I haven’t actually compared numbers.) And these are just babies and kids!
I have to feel that most of these parents want their children back and will meet any family reunion effort at least halfway. So I think it will be more a matter of announcing we have set up a means for parents to reclaim their children rather than having to go searching for these parents. I agree with your idea that this would probably be better handled thorough some neutral international agency with America staying in the background and covering the costs.
The testing will be to make sure that the people who show up to claim a child are the actual parents. Fingerprinting would have been a cheap and easy way to verify identities. But now we’re going to have to use DNA testing.
I agree with LSLGuy that this is not an overwhelming cost. Probably a few tens of millions (and we would have a moral obligation to pay it even if it was far higher). But it’s annoying because it’s an unnecessary cost and an unnecessary obstacle. Which I agree may have been deliberately placed either to spite the families or to spite the administration that followed the Trump administration.
That makes it sound too easy. So why isn’t this plan happening yet? Note, it’s not just because the Biden administration is just three days old. IIRC, some judges ordered the Trump administration to get their ass in gear on this, quite some time ago, and I don’t recall much ever happened. Was that just because of Trumpish foot-dragging?
I’ve had another thought: Maybe a lot of those parents are not trying to get their children back because they hope (or hoped) that by abandoning them this way, their children would have a better opportunity in the United States.
I tend to disagree. I think the main factor probably is that the Biden administration is only three days old. We can hope the Biden administration gets moving on this soon. But a program like this will take some setting up.
While the Trump administration may have been ordered to fix this problem, it probably devoted as minimal an effort to it as it could get away with.
I feel the possibility that the parents don’t want their children back is a remote one.
I’m not suggesting by any means that the parents don’t want their children back. I’m suggesting that they hope that their children might be able to have a much better life in the United States, even if they are effectively orphans.
It might(?) be some crime in the United States, but too much politics in the way. If The Hague gets involved, they can impose outsider justice as seen from a more international viewpoint.
A lot of those kids are so young, and have been in cages long enough, they might not even know their own parents anymore. And possibly the parents won’t even recognize their own kids.
We’re talking about some kids who were just infants and may now be a couple years old.
If two competing sets of parents, just cut the kids in half, as recommended in the Bible.
