When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunify migrant families separated at the border, the government’s cleanup crews faced an immediate problem.They weren’t sure who the families were, let alone what to call them.
Customs and Border Protection databases had categories for “family units,” and “unaccompanied alien children” who arrive without parents. They did not have a distinct classification for more than 2,600 children who had been taken from their families and placed in government shelters.
So agents came up with a new term: “deleted family units.”
But when they sent that information to the refugee office at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was told to facilitate the reunifications, the office’s database did not have a column for families with that designation.
The crucial tool for fixing the problem was crippled. Caseworkers and government health officials had to sift by hand through the files of all the nearly 12,000 migrant children in HHS custody to figure out which ones had arrived with parents, where the adults were jailed and how to put the families back together.
Compounding failures to record, classify and keep track of migrant parents and children pulled apart by President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border crackdown were at the core of what is now widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles of his presidency. The rapid implementation and sudden reversal of the policy whiplashed multiple federal agencies, forcing the activation of an HHS command center ordinarily used to handle hurricanes and other catastrophes.
Read the whole thing here.
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2018.
Oubliette (French): a dungeon with an opening only at the top, from Middle French oublier to forget. — Merrian-Webster
This president and his administration had a problem. A problem that they had to address for personal and political reasons.
The previous administration started to work on a solution, but as recent history has shown anything the previous president touched has been systematically dismantled and destroyed.
So, project OUBLIETTE was launched, and children were seized and secreted off to places where they could be forgotten, not by design but by the accumulative incompetence of a dysfunctional and disjointed collection of agencies trying to please a despot in Washington, D.C.
No way that this was unintentional. They perhaps did not foresee having to reunite families, but that’s only because they fully intended to separate them permanently.
In any event, they intentionally devalued the lives of these children and parents to the point where they weren’t worth the simple bookkeeping exercise to keep track of them in the first place.
Often in government venality/maliciousness are mistaken for incompetence, but rarely does one dynamic occur without the other.
The Tchump administration is excelling at both.
The failed immigration policies of the previous administration encouraged economic migrants to bring their children to gain automatic entry. This has resulted in many border surges and waves of unaccompanied minors. No one seemed to mind it then, even though these children were abandoned and often fell prey to smugglers on the dangerous journey through Mexico.
While the new strategy intended to discourage this practice was poorly executed, something needs to be done to stop people using their children as tools to gain access to the U.S. as illegal immigrants.