immigrant children
Immigrants
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This is only my opinion, and not the representation of Saintel Daily, LLC.

This week, the Trump administration completely missed the deadline to reunite parents with young children who were taken at the border.  Luckily for Trump and his administration, the federal judge who gave the order in the first place, also gave them an extension.  On June 27, U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of California Dana Sabraw ordered an injunction to stop the Trump administration from separating families at the border. He also ordered the government to reunite all children under five with their families within 14 days of the order. That, folks, was Monday.  In addition, children over five years of age were to be reunited within 30 days of the order.  That deadline is July 26.

According to the ACLU, the Trump administration was on track to reunite approximately half of the 102 migrant kids with their parents.  Why did the Trump administration miss this deadline? It’s being reported that they didn’t even keep detailed records so they aren’t able to match parents with their kids. How horrible is that?  First, these kids are literally ripped from their parents, and then the government doesn’t even keep track of them so that they can be returned at a future date?  Even if that was in their home country?  So what were they going to do?  Just release toddlers back into Mexico and wash their hands of it?

immigrant children

Yes, I will admit that I can get a little passionate when I write.  But in this case, I am extremely upset and even angry.  Why separate them in the first place?  Why not allow families to stay together?  I’m not saying that I’m in favor of detaining people, to begin with, but wouldn’t that have made more sense?  I guess I’m also a little bit angry with myself for thinking that the Trump administration would have the decency to treat these people as human beings.  But instead, they couldn’t even keep a paper trail of the people they were shoving into cages.

Here’s what the New York Times had to say about the records:

The family separations, part of an aggressive effort by the Trump administration to deter illegal immigration, have produced a chaotic scramble as officials now face political and judicial pressure to reunite families.

Records linking children to their parents have disappeared, and in some cases have been destroyed, according to two officials of the Department of Homeland Security, leaving the authorities struggling to identify connections between family members.

The effort is complicated by the fact that two federal agencies are involved in detaining and sheltering migrants, and they did not initially share records with each other. On Friday, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services, which shelters the children and must now undertake reunifications, sent out a plea to federal public health workers for help with an exhaustive manual search of records.

immigrant children

The records have been destroyed?  I highly doubt that one.  Authorities are struggling to identify connections between family members because the records never existed.  These people haven’t been in these camps for very long, so you can’t give the excuse that the records were destroyed.  I guarantee you that the government has a records retention policy, and there is no way that these records should have been destroyed, to begin with.  I mean, we live in a time where rules aren’t being followed, but I think you can see where I’m going with this.  The records didn’t exist in the first place.

Fortunately, the courts are pushing for these kids to be reunited with their parents.  And that’s what is important here.  While I’d like to say that it’s disappointing that the government isn’t complying with the order, the real tragedy is that this happened at all.  The real tragedy is tearing children away from their parents, and not knowing if they would ever get to see them again.  That’s the real tragedy, and it makes me sick to think that this is the world we live in now.