The reason it is taking a long time to reunite these kids with their parents is that it was never the plan. https://t.co/Ld4KnPgfxo— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) July 6, 2018
Maya Angelou famously said, "When people show you who are they are, believe them." We need to keep that in mind because the news of child separation at the border is a few weeks old. There's a tendency to forget the mendacity and cruelty.
A timeline:
* The Trump administration, spearheaded by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and senior White House aide Stephen Miller (a former Sessions aide), implemented a policy of forced separation for all immigrants showing up at the southern border, including those seeking asylum, an internationally protected right.
* After being picked up by border patrol, children were forcibly separated from their parents because their parents were accused of, at worst, a misdemeanor crime. (Note: seeking asylum is not a crime. It is protected by treaty, ratified into the U.S. law by the Senate.) Children and parents were incarcerated in separate locations. In no other context does this happen in America.
* A federal judge ordered the government to reunite the families within a given time period. Note how the judge lays waste the Trump administration's actions:
The government readily keeps track of personal property of detainees in criminal and immigration proceedings. Money, important documents, and automobiles, to name a few, are routinely catalogued, stored, tracked and produced upon a detainees' release, at all levels—state and federal, citizen and alien. Yet, the government has no system in place to keep track of, provide effective communication with, and promptly produce alien children. The unfortunate reality is that under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property. Certainly, that cannot satisfy the requirements of due process.* After mass outcry, President Trump signed an executive order to reunite the families and jail the entire family together. By ordering to detain the families indefinitely, the government is violating a different court order.
The facts set forth before the Court portray reactive governance -- responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the Government's own making. They belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution.
* For the overwhelming amount of cases, reuniting families hasn't happened. The federal government hasn't tracked which children and parents are connected. From the NYT:
...In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process.
As a result, the parents and children appeared in federal computers to have no connection to one another.
“That was the big problem. We weren’t able to see that information,” said one of the officials, who is directly involved in the reunification process.
Yet, I've run across a couple of folks (in conversations or on Twitter/Facebook) claiming that the executive order solved the family separation issue. Two things to remember:
1. It did not. See above.
2. Assume for the sake of an argument that it did. Administration officials showed what they are willing to do. Namely, take children away from their parents.
I don't care what sort of policy end one wants to achieve. If part of the solution involves forcibly taking children away from their parents and not tracking where they go, then the people doing this are committing an evil act. The policy goal is irrelevant.
Think of this a different way: If I robbed a bank, but gave the money back, the FBI would not forgive and forget.
One other thing: there's a temptation to put the blame entirely on Trump. That's not quite right. It lets too many people abdicate responsibility. To implement a policy like this takes cooperation from people up and down the federal government hierarchy. Remember the actions Sessions, Miller, and the officers who did things like not even bathe toddlers:
14. Months. Old. https://t.co/Z3srt7KVco pic.twitter.com/uUgcxgbR0L— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 6, 2018
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Update (7/6/18, 4:35 p.m.)
Priorities https://t.co/POUiQFa9Vm— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) July 6, 2018
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Yesterday I wrote about how we have multiple views on pretty much every issue. That's true here, too. Even though, I've written quite a bit about immigration and my positions are clear, I can think of some criticisms and conflicting views.
The nature of these posts is they tend to be strident in one direction. It's worth noting that I believe proper enforcement is necessary. Having a humane and useful immigration system and also improving public safety shouldn't be competing interests.
In the spirit of bringing out nuance, I'll address some common criticisms of views like mine in the near future.
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