What do wristbands, microchips, facial recognition software and fingerprints have in common? Each one of them could have been used to reduce lost children or even guarantee that children who were removed from their parents could ultimately be re-connected. Hell, if I had a dog who wandered 1,000 miles away, a microchip could put it back in my home. Too expensive? Well, except possibly for infants, facial recognition software or the fingerprint of one finger on a parent and child could serve the same purpose.
It would have been SO easy to prepare for the zero tolerance monstrosity by making sure that families could be reconnected, using technology. It wasn’t done for a number of reasons, I suspect:
--ICE and DHS are too busy bullying people and using technology to bully people, to actually use it to avoid breakup of families.
--Use of technology for good concedes that government can play a positive role, and we don’t want that, do we?
--The idiots running this for Trump were instructed to let it become a disaster for families, in order to please the base (including most white Evangelicals, as discussed elsewhere).
The sad thing for the families, and the stupid thing for Trumpites and Republicons, is that the ongoing displacement of children was entirely unnecessary. The latter will pay a large price they could have avoided paying. Fuckem.
The task now has several steps:
--Identify all of the children old enough to know their names, and give them a crack at finding their parents. This can whittle down the task considerably.
--Use DNA at the other extreme, even if costly. This will be needed for many infants and toddlers. I hope someone can sue to force this.
--Give parents a shot at finding their own children from a sharply reduced number.
And, get the courts to guarantee that every means to identify separated children is deployed. Sue everyone who doesn’t comply.