Under Judge Dana Sabraw’s order, the Trump administration must physically reunite all separated children under five years old with their parents by July 10, all children by July 26, and make sure families can communicate, by phone for example, by today, July 6. Listening to Health and Human Services (HHS) Sec. Alex Azar’s own words, connecting children with parents by phone should be, by far, the easiest task.
“There is no reason why any parent would not know where their child is located,” Azar told the Senate Finance Committee last month. “I could at the stroke of keystrokes … within seconds could find any child within our care for any parent.” But flash forward to the night before the first deadline:
… The Trump administration asked the California judge overseeing the case for an extension, claiming the tight timeline is putting them at risk of violating their “statutory obligations to ensure the safety of children before transferring them out of HHS custody.”
That’s because the Trump administration officially implemented this barbaric “zero tolerance” policy without any plan on when or how to reunite the thousands of kids it has torn from parents. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) staffers, “the division within HHS that oversees the care of unaccompanied children, have received no instructions on how to proceed,” while officials have said they’re “no longer providing the specific number of migrant children held in its custody resulting from the family separation policy.”
Maybe that’s because officials have no idea how many separated kids they have in their custody in the first place, as detained parents are saying they have no idea where their kids are. "When I was in the federal prison,” said Congress member Pramila Jayapal, who has visited with detained parents in Washington state, “I saw a slip of paper that a mother handed to me that had her name, her identification number, and then supposedly her kids, except she said, 'These are not my children.'”
These families should never have been separated in the first place, and now that Judge Sabraw’s first deadline approaches and the administration is unprepared as ever, remember who’s to blame for this humanitarian crisis. It’s not the brave parents who trekked north thousands of miles to save their and their children’s lives. It’s the people who created this disaster and ripped them up in the first place.