Trump White House: ACLU Should Be Responsible for Reuniting Families Separated at the Border
The administration asks for help fixing its own humanitarian crisis.
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Although the White House has purportedly ended its barbaric practice of forcibly separating immigrant families at the southern border, the clean-up of this xenophobic horror show is proceeding as efficiently as any massive logistical undertaking spearheaded by a federal agency. On Thursday, the administration asked a judge to task the ACLU with finding victims of this policy and proving their eligibility for relief—which, in this case, means "being reunited with the child that the government took away from them in the first place."
The delays stem in part from the fact that many of the parents whose children remain in custody—nearly 600 kids, according to NBC News—have already been deported to their country of origin, where U.S. authorities are having trouble tracking them down. DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, at last speaking publicly about a policy she once insisted did not exist, has been pleading her case of late by asserting that all deportees were given the option to take their children before the plane took off.
Kirstjen Nielsen, as usual, was not telling the truth. From Politico:
Homeland Security officials may have neglected to give a choice to as many as three-quarters of all migrant parents removed from the United States about leaving their children behind.
"Some forms were presented in English to parents who did not speak that language," the ACLU argued. "Some parents with limited or no literacy were not told what they were signing. … Parents who speak an indigenous language were at a particular disadvantage."
In some cases, the ACLU noted, parents said they signed forms they believed would lead to reunification, but instead waived that right.
After creating a humanitarian crisis and then exacerbating it via some combination of malevolence and incompetence, the Trump administration is asking the ACLU—which, to the best of my knowledge, has never taken a child from its parents in order to deter immigration to the United States—to fix it. It even contends that the ACLU should be responsible for "ascertain[ing] whether each possible class member wishes to be reunified with his or her child," and for obtaining "final, unequivocal, written confirmation" of each decision. The kidnappers are shrugging their shoulders and telling terrified parents to find their own kidnapped children, if they even want to see them again.
The government's attitude here is just another reminder that every wet-eyed White House official who swears that the last few months were a "low" point for them is full of shit. If this were some kind of terrible, good-faith mistake, the administration would be doing everything in its power to rectify it, to prove to the world that it of course understands the depravity inherent in separating toddlers from their parents, and would never do so on purpose. Instead, its lawyers are whining that a nonprofit organization should use its "considerable resources" to do the job for them. These people don't care about doing the right thing, and they don't regret anything they did. They're just mad they got caught.
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