Jonathan White, who leads the Health and Human Services Department’s efforts to reunite migrant children with their parents, said removing children from “sponsor” homes to rejoin their parents “would present grave child welfare concerns.” He said the government should focus on reuniting children currently in its custody, not those who have already been released to sponsors.
Hooooo-leeeeee shit.
“It would destabilize the permanency of their existing home environment, and could be traumatic to the children,” White said in a court filing late Friday, citing his years of experience working with unaccompanied migrant children and background as a social worker.
The administration outlined its position in a court-ordered response to a government watchdog report last month that found many more migrant children may have been split from their families than previously reported. The government didn’t adequately track separated children before a federal judge in San Diego ruled in June that children in its custody be reunited with their parents.
So basically, the Trump administrated traumatized these children by intentionally separating them from their families, then adopted them out, and now refuses to reunite them with their families on the ground that they don’t want to traumatize them.
If someone doesn’t end up against the wall for this shit then there is no justice.
Placing separated with kids is the priority but there are a lot of people without family members already in the US. I’d guess the “sponsors” wording implies those without family here.
In any case, the vast majority of the time, the sponsors are people who probably have some idea of how to reach the children’s parents, if the children themselves don’t. There’s no fucking excuse for the Feds to throw up their hands and say they shouldn’t even have to try.
Fuckers.
I need a new line of work. At least my firm isn’t on the border and hasn’t had any cases like this that I know of (not that everything else immigration-related these days isn’t totally fucking arbitrary and ridiculous).
This is the major disconnect for me. Why the statements about not being able to put children and parents in contact, and then the statements about it supposedly being bad to put children and parents in contact-----if the kids are currently with relatives?
As you say, those relatives would have some idea of how to get in touch with the parents.
Something is going on that has not been acknowledged. I’m doubting the statistics that say most of the kids are with relatives, to begin with—because if they are, the statements about ‘can’t reunite with parents’ or ‘shouldn’t reunite with parents’ make zero sense.
I suspect the only thing that’s going on is that the administration just doesn’t give a fuck about reuniting kids with parents because they simply don’t see either the kids or the parents as human beings and don’t give a fuck what happens to any of them. They didn’t want to be bothered to make a plan to keep track of the separated families in the first place, and now they give less than zero fucks about fixing this clusterfuck.
I think you’re asking for there to be some kind of humane logic where there simply isn’t any because the people who created and enacted this clusterfuck of a policy are completely inhumane. They should all go to prison.
Could be. Certainly it seems likely that they see those kids as being less-than-human.
That’s what leads me to fear that, far from being safe in the homes of relatives, some number of the kids were sold as, essentially, slaves. Or perhaps ‘awarded’ to right-wing families with no money changing hands. Some right-wingers can justify an awful lot when it comes to those they see as being sub-human.
Yes, I know that sounds CT. But given that the Trump Administration has given strong indications that they see the children as property with which they can do as they like, who would be surprised to learn that human trafficking has occurred?
I hope that qualified legal professionals are working on this and will get these people indicted and tried. If so, some will be convicted. They should serve their sentences in conditions analogous to those suffered by the children they victimized.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is suing. I don’t know that the suit includes criminal prosecution of the creators of the family separation policy, but I imagine any info unearthed during the suit would be mighty handy for that purpose later.
Agreed on that too, and if one had a few spare bucks and wanted to do something useful, one could do worse than donate to the SPLC, ACLU, and other nonprofits that are fighting this bullshit. We set up a monthly auto-donation to the ACLU in January 2017, as soon as it became apparent how bad shit was going to get.
Aren’t most of the kids with sponsors actually in regular phone contact with their parents (if the parent is waiting in Mexico or has been deported)? I’ll bet some sponsors could record the children crying and begging to be back with their folks.
I have no idea what the numbers are. I imagine quite a number of parents are themselves in immigration detention without reliable phone access, and another chunk are in remote villages in, say, the Guatemalan highlands with spotty communications access at best.
Whenever this administration does something heinous and tries to justify it by being even more heinous (“We’re not going to return these kids we kidnapped from their parents because their parents committed this illegal act! That’s not a good place for kids!”), they’re trying to cover up something even more heinous (“We also don’t know whose parents some of these kids should go to, because we kidnapped them as infants and we have no fucking clue whose kids they are”).