plaidadder:

Here’s one answer:

“Trump administration in chaotic scramble to reunify migrant families”

This New York Times piece includes a lot of information you can find elsewhere, but here’s what was startling to me:

“Records linking children to their parents have disappeared, and in some cases have been destroyed, according to two officials of the Department of Homeland Security, leaving the authorities struggling to identify connections between family members.”

You know, no matter how bad you think it is, it’s always going to turn out to be worse. I was assuming they just weren’t keeping good enough records at the separation point; and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that in a lot of cases they didn’t. But at least according to the Department of Homeland Security sources they talked to for this article, in a significant number of cases Health and Human Services/Office of Refugee Resettlement actually did keep records–and then Customs and Border Patrol erased them:

“In fact, the Health and Human Services agency charged with overseeing the care of migrant children, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, established such procedures, which included identification bracelets, the issuance of registration numbers and careful logs to keep the records of parents and children linked.

But those precautions were undermined in some cases by the other federal agency that has initial custody of apprehended migrants in the first 72 hours after they cross the border — Customs and Border Protection. 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.”

Why would CBP delete information about family groups? Oh don’t worry, says the article, they weren’t doing it ON PURPOSE:

“Officials cautioned that this was not a deliberate attempt to obfuscate, but a belief that it made more sense to track cases separately once a group of migrants was no longer in custody as a family unit, these sources said.”

I don’t see how tracking individuals separately PRECLUDES also hanging on to the information about how they’re related. I think there is a contingent of CBP people out there who decided that having their children irretrievably lost in the system would be part of these asylum seekers’ “punishment.” I cannot prove this; but that’s what I think. For THIS administration, we have to reverse the old saying, and assume that we cannot attribute to incompetence that which can be attributed to malice.

Yeah, well, it only makes sense to delete that information if you weren’t expecting any attempt at reunification.  Not only that, but we’ve got multiple reports that families at the border were being told that to expect that their children would be adopted by American families.

THE THREAT OF INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION FOR MIGRANT CHILDREN SEPARATED FROM THEIR FAMILIES 

Kathryn Joyce
July 1 2018, 9:37 a.m

 

To adoption reform advocates, who monitor unethical and abusive practices in child welfare, it looked like any number of adoption crises in the past, like the airlifts out of Haiti in the wake of its cataclysmic 2010 earthquake. Then, masses of unaccompanied children were suddenly labeled orphans and became the focus of a deafening campaign in the U.S. to rescue them through inter-country adoption, even as Haitian adults were being warned not to try to come themselves.

Fears of a new adoption rush in today’s border crisis weren’t groundless. There was reason to be concerned. The former head of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Barack Obama warned that some of the children who’d recently been separated would remain separated “permanently” and potentially be adopted. Reports surfaced of mothers who were told that their children would be adopted as an incentive to “behave.” On Tuesday night, the Daily Beast reported that the threat of adoption has become weaponized, as a Guatemalan mother detained by Customs and Border Protection earlier this month was allegedly presented with the ultimatum that if she didn’t abandon her asylum appeal, she would be jailed for a year and her daughter put up for adoption. And conservative figures deeply hostile to immigrant families, like Fox News provocateur Laura Ingraham, herself an adoptive mother, toggled between mocking the detention of children as akin to “summer camp” and calling to “make adoption easier for American couples who want to adopt these kids.” 

btw:  Fuck Laura Ingraham