Donald Trump and his administration have come under fire for their blatant mishandling of the thousands of families they separated thanks to the president’s disgusting “zero-tolerance” policy. And one would think that an administration with such a dire need to redeem itself would be doing all it can to fix it — but not the Trump administration. In fact, officials from the administration recently announced that it would be too hard for them to reunite the thousands of families, and they were therefore not going to even try.
The Trump administration filed a declaration as part of its lawsuit between the American Civil Liberties Union and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In the declaration, the Department of Health and Human Services stated that they had no idea of the exact number of kids who had been torn away from their parents. However, they felt it would be a “burden” to fix because they couldn’t track it. Lee Gelernt, a lawyer in the ACLU’s ongoing lawsuit against ICE, summed this up:
The Trump administration’s response is a shocking concession that it can’t easily find thousands of children it ripped from parents and doesn’t even think it’s worth the time to locate each of them. The administration also doesn’t dispute that separations are ongoing in significant numbers.”
Jallyn Sualog, deputy director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), explained this would be too hard for the government, that 100 ORR analysts would have to work full time for 7-15 months to “even begin reconciling” data on separated families. Sualog said, “In my judgment, ORR does not have the requisite staff for such a project.”
As you can imagine, immigration advocates are shocked by the irresponsibility of the Trump administration, which never took proper steps to track all the families it was tearing apart. Michelle Brané, the director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said:
They are saying they just don’t care. It’s shocking from a human rights perspective for a government to behave this way.”
Gelernt isn’t giving up, though. Later this month, he will appear in court before a federal judge in California to state that the families Trump separated should be reunited. In a statement, he blasted the Trump administration for not doing anything:
The [government] is saying it’s not legally required for them to [reunite families] and therefore they won’t do it. But why not do it because it’s the right thing to do?”
Featured image via screen capture
